Letters: Auckland CBD, Viv Beck, Labour Day, and Rugby World Cup – Medical Marijuana Program Connection
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Corner of Queen St and Fort St in Auckland. Photo / Sylvie Whinray
Empathy for CBD’s underdogs
Viv Beck’s concern regarding Auckland’s unsafe streets is not a new topic and largely a result of decades of inactivity due to governmental lack of empathy and a societal indifference to the root causes that create individuals to be addicted to substance abuse, alcohol included. Homelessness, gang affiliation and public intimidation are also indirect by-products of our collective lack of empathy towards “the underdog”.
When I lived and worked in the Auckland CBD in the early 1990s, substance abuse and rough sleeping was already prevalent, albeit probably much less in your face, with homeless people sleeping under the Victoria Park motorway and in alleyways along arterial routes such as Albert St or under trees in parks like Myers Park and Albert Park.
For someone like Viv to push for stricter enforcements is a bit like using a saw to remove a tiny staple. Viv herself may not yet be living a life of hardship, but were she a bit more aware of how growing costs are pushing more and more people towards the periphery of poverty, she could probably help set up an innovative system, where urban poverty becomes a thing of the past, where wealth distribution does not largely go to overseas manufacturers and banking corporations, but simultaneously assists the impoverished underprivileged to find a way out of the gutter.
