Micah Morphosis

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Walk a day in my shoes

October 19, 2006

“Hey hey! Ho ho! Poverty has got to go!” Various phrases on big white signs, some people in white, some in purple t-shirts, megaphones and impassioned souls surrounded me on Tuesday morning. The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty was the inspiration for the rally and the issues were homelessness and poverty in Nova Scotia. We marched around the Legislature in Downtown Halifax and placed a pile of old shoes on the doorstep to urge the government to walk a day in the shoes of the poor. It was satirecal as a man dressed in a business suit stuffed with cotton and a big Irving logo on his breast, made the state of our economy into an irony. But the undertones were that of a desire for justice, a need for recognition of the problems and a demand for real solutions.
I’ve been realizing how important, essential it is that we let our government know what bothers us, what makes us cringe when we walk down the street and see a woman panhandling in the crisp fall air. They don’t walk down the streets we walk down. They don’t live in our neighborhoods. They don’t look into the windows of a home that’s too small for one, let alone a family of three. The same goes for poverty worldwide. Our politicians have not lived in the middle of a crowded slum city. They have not seen the women who walk for miles for a bucket of water. When they go to buy their latte at StarBucks, they don’t think about the small farmer struggling to survive on the income that his one-crop, coffee bean farm provides.
I do think about these things. I have seen these things and it’s my job to make them think, let them see. That’s the only way things will change. You can’t expect someone to be passionate about something they’ve never experienced. I’ve lived under the poverty line my whole life, but poverty never really effected me until I stepped out of that plane and was thrust into the midst of it and experienced it on such a large scale. That’s when it became real. That was the moment that drove me to do something.
So, Rodney MacDonald, walk a day in my shoes. Stephen Harper, take my eyes for a day and see what I see.

Posted by Marygrace on October 19, 2006 09:41 AM