OrilliaMatters welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter draws on the writer’s experiences with homelessness in various parts of the country.
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Let’s face it. The advent of publicly accessible internet around 1994 in conjunction with cellular technology altered people socially in a weird way we’re yet to describe.
It’s as though an invisible pollution of lethargic apathy began to blanket us all. Organic communication that built civilizations was overnight history and a strangely ominous abyss of good and bad possibilities that stared at us in the face.
Fast forward to a modest town like Orillia in 2022 and it is another almost assembly-line carbon copy of countless struggling national towns I’ve been through.
There are common local causes and uncommon national causes with the personal social causes of individuals all taking turns doing a number on the towns.
I was born in 1985 and had the privilege of enjoying an almost magical Rockwellesque town through the ’90s. It had undeniable character and colourful history.
You could pick up on its vibe when you crunched down the Atherley railroad tracks pre-1993, strolled a sparsely developed and peacefully eerie Couchiching Park or heard the primordial whisper on the moody winds and waves of Moose Beach or frequented some legendary local businesses, cafés, restaurants, etc.
Then big money happened as our unique casino drew energy from all over North America and the GTA. Quaint, little Orillia was not prepared socially or culturally. It shocked our local social nervous system and upset generational mild rhythms that were relatively innocent and harmless among the 9-5 and the down and out. It was a simpler world back then. People knew people. The whole tone of life on Earth was undeniably warmer and lighthearted.
In a single decade, chemical drug use was rampant. I was homeless here in just 2012 and the former 12-bed shelter had four two-week occupants.
Finding a cheap room was easy back then. Now the homeless are an invisible sea here and some of the alcoholic homeless I’ve met laugh at the futility of the very notion of getting housing when multiple disadvantages can no longer be accommodated for plausible and unjust reasons.
There are stipulations in housing deals these days that someone like myself, and many others, cannot abide by. (Personal “disadvantages,” let’s say.)
So, we have to adapt to this strange, new world of more challenges, all the while remembering that it’s wise to retain the vestiges of our unique local character and history.
With each town having their own “West Ridges” now under modern globalization, we have convenience, sure, but what else? A sublime sense of being a herd in the modern trend of mindless consumerism? A sea of strange faces and the sterilized, cubic sector to remind us of our autonomy, all the while individuated and with a colourless personality?
Unless we have some kind of community effort and financial local muscle, we will succumb to the post-internet nightmare and social ills.
Trends, markets and installed administration policies will bully us and culturally intimidate us into submission over and over again (as bullies always do if they can).
Consider marketable heritage that Halifax, for example, cashes in on decade after decade. True, theirs is a bit richer and more exciting, but ours is, too, if you really looked into local history as far back as you can. We do stand out and are unique.
Why not bolster that local magic? Let a tourist feel what it must’ve been like as an Indigenous village or what the rowdy 1880s (which had all the charming dysfunctional human innocence and drama that a Wyatt Earp rendition might, echoed in Leacock’s playful musings) might have been like.
Stop developing a culturally relevant and (once beautiful) shoreline and waterfront. Keep some of it natural. This isn’t an extended municipality of Toronto yet.
Make “old Orillia” more economically relevant and give it some practical utility like it once had.
If people wanted to live and operate exclusively in the charmless industrial West Ridges of Canada, one can move anywhere. Everywhere is uniform and leaves only calculating distance to the imagination.
The university property is attractive but there’s not a hint of history there. People feel like a herd now. They don’t feel like they’re part of a community. Modern life is pushed and yelled at down the hallways of stress and ever-increasing concerns. Shock tested into dull, ambivalent obedience. Like everybody else.
Listen: All Orillians can do is be psychologically up to par and learn to live with the growing homelessness, addiction and violent crime. Ignoring it will upset and provoke it more. If you don’t respond with genuine kindness and human warmth, the scenery and vibe will continue to sag and darken.
Remember that life is “we” and not just “me,” which is the golden cultural marketing illusion these days. Social division and inconsistency. Cognitive dissonance accelerating as it did in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. A culture steeped in fear, real but also imagined.
Orillia will surely require additional addictions and human and/or social service installations.
A medical detox in a discreet location accessible by local transportation. A recreation drop-in that accommodates the multifaceted disadvantaged and diverse populations. (C’mon, get hip, Orillia.)
An additional harm-reduction, low-barrier facility to meet the coming decades migrating disadvantaged in a quiet location within municipally acceptable boundaries. (It’s coming. Like it or not. Might as well be ahead of the game. That doesn’t go unnoticed.)
Being on the street in Orillia and living with its pulse, I see the times and all those common ills. I can’t help but think of Soviet Russia, when the struggling people rose up against their wealthy and cruel tsarist keepers. You can’t help but consider that history tends to repeat itself and that we’re rushing towards some equally but probably worse proposition.
If you want Orillia to shine in our modern age, people seeing “homeless people” as “people” instead would be a good start. Helping warmly as people once did. As soon as you mentally label us, countless adjectives, bias narratives and mechanical demonizing start, adding even more pain to the soul of human life.
Be the first small city in south-central Ontario to eliminate homelessness through consideration instead of deliberation. It will pay dividends not many years down the road.
Tyler James Dunlop
Orillia
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