Monday, November 21, 2022

A Room of My Own: Santa Claus Parade Tanka

in morning chill
the Santa Claus Parade kicks off
the Christmas season
around the corner lineups
crowded at a food bank


Added:

the manager's look
at these half-empty shelves ...
the food bank's doorbell rings

FYI: CBC News, Oct. 27: More Canadians are turning to food banks than ever before, new report says

The annual report from Food Banks Canada said there were nearly 1.5 million visits to food banks in March, 15 per cent more than the same month last year and 35 per cent more than in March 2019, prior to the pandemic.

Fixed-income groups like seniors and employed but low-income people such as students have been hit harder because their paycheques can't keep up with inflation, Beardsley said.

The report also said that around 500,000 food bank clients — about one-third — are children, who make up around 20 per cent of the country's total population.

"Behind each one of these numbers is a person who is struggling too much to get by" -- Kirstin Beardsley, the CEO of Food Banks Canada.


Added: written in response to Inaugural poet and activist Amanda Gorman's remark: The truth is, "one nation under guns."

At the End of the Day

Club Q mass shooting ...
the same headwind on the way
back home from a party 

neighbor's home remodelling:
the No Trespassing sign
with a rifle-scope motif

FYI: for further discussion of this senseless mass shooting, see The New Yorker, Nov. 22:  "The Meaning of the Colorado Springs Attack" by Masha Gessen

"The essential precondition for mass violence is not guns or hate but a culture of terror, a common imaginary that includes the possibility of a mass shooting. It may be most useful to think of a politics of terror. People—and states—carry out terror for the sake of terror. The senselessness is the point, even as our brains desperately seek to make logical connections and find explanations.

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