‘NA’ in the headline? North American.
Why North American, when simply ‘American’ covers most of the bases in a discussion about loving your disadvantaged neighbours. Americans often don’t realize, though they may suspect, that their attitudes are often mirrored and even envied in Canadian attitudes and practice. If nothing else has recently twigged Americans to this Canadian fact, it was available via the televised sight of truck convoy protesters recently wandering around Ottawa in MAGA hats.
It’s probably fair to say Canadians have adopted at least a muted disdain of public housing tenants from our good neighbours to the south. So, moving on from these national mutual influence/admiration societies, let’s tackle the issue of loving poor folks who are easy to hate.
Why not hate them? Well, it’s in order to avoid being hoisted with your own petard (thank you, Shakespeare). Quick translation, being blown up by your own bomb1. (alternate possible meaning: forced to smell your own fart. Either way, it makes the point.)
North American middle classes have by and large picked up a useful ‘bomb’ for preventing moderately close contact with public housing tenants. It involves accepting the quasi-official characterization of public housing tenants as lazy, greedy, corrupt, criminal and dangerous neighbours. This underlying contempt fuels NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) battles to prevent the invasion of smelly ‘other’ folk.
There are all kinds of profitable advantages for governments and businesses to promote the moral and physical failure of public housing tenants (For example, the need to tear down public housing and build lucrative anything/everything else in its place). Buying this Koolaid is the bomb that blows up in middle class faces.
Learn to hate them, and you will learn to hate those who will, in a world of rising house prices and a shrinking middle class, undoubtedly become your neighbours — they will have live somewhere, after all, and sooner or later most likely near to you. Helped along by those who stand to gain the most from their propaganda, fear will inevitably grow from your hate. What a tragedy, to live your life in fear of those who, by and large, are just normal folks, inevitably with less money than you, but otherwise not so different.
How to begin loving your neighbours, avoiding the hate bomb? Learn about public housing tenants, hear their stories from the simplest to the most wild and wonderful. Here are a couple:
From BKReader: Step Inside Artist Kimberly M. Becoat’s ‘Hood Utopia;’ a Life in Public Housing, Reimagined
Oh dear! Did we sneak a little Australia into the mix? Shucks!
Footnotes
- For more see Interesting Literature: The Curious Meaning of the Phrase ‘Hoist with One’s Own Petard’
