1:44AM - he lives day by day, moment by moment, accepting whatever comes his way
https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/pennil
Лучшая история читанная за этот год! Идейный фриган двадцать лет не прикасается к баблу:
You would think that if someone has disavowed money—has completely stopped using it—that life for that person would become a non-stop scramble to survive. But Johnston doesn’t scramble. If he’s meant to eat on any given day, he will cross paths with something edible. People offer him food, or they don’t. He finds it in dumpsters, or he doesn’t. Under no circumstances would he buy groceries for himself, he says. And though he will accept gifts, he doesn’t beg. Good karma has enabled him to survive, he says. But survival isn’t what’s most important to him. What’s most important is living in a way that’s right and true. And if living right and true doesn’t end up sustaining his life, well then so be it. He’s not built for this world.
Johnston started catching on to what he calls “the truth”—there is no “his” truth or “a” truth—24 years ago, after the first of two life-altering epiphanies obliterated his self-image.
Prior to 1997, he had thought of himself as an “Average Joe.” Growing up poor in central Alberta, he suspected that he and his family were perhaps a little smarter than others—his mother’s generation claimed valedictorians—but he felt, overall, that his life was unremarkable. He lived with his mother and sister in the country, about ten kilometres southwest of Lacombe, and visited his father, a mailman, in the nearby town of Red Deer every second weekend. His mother worked as a cashier at her brother’s general store.
His last purchases—beer, cigarettes, pot—occurred 18 years ago, he says, on his 31st birthday. He claims he hasn’t spent any money since. It’s true, his friends have told me. No money at all.
David Shebib, who befriended Johnston after testing his integrity—he offered Johnston $20—has provided a room for him to sleep in at times in the various houses he’s rented over the years. He says Johnston refuses to even touch money. “People can’t give him money to give to me,” he says. “He won’t take an envelope from me with money in it to give to somebody else.”
Cliff MacLean, who met Johnston in 2003 while protesting the second Iraq war, says Johnston does touch money—but only to destroy it or render it unusable. “I’ve seen him throw toonies or loonies in the ocean,” he says.
Johnston also throws found change into gutters and garbage bins and cuts out serial numbers on bills. Before 2011, when banknotes were still made of paper instead of polymer, they were easier to destroy—he could just burn them.
He doesn’t seek out money for this purpose, he says. Rather, he handles it like an offensive picture littering the sidewalk or a swear word carved into a tree: “The idea is to not let kids see it.”
Еще и боролся против государственного притеснения бездомных, и добился отмены законов против бездомных в своем городе,
создав прецедент благодаря которому по всей Канаде немного поуспокоили anti-homeless фашню:
Johnston says the arrangement was possible only because they connected him to a lawyer who was able to help him get out of jail so he could end the hunger strike in good conscience. To get released, he agreed to not reoffend while the case played out.
In August of 2007, in an apparent move to end the case, the city repealed and replaced the Parks Regulation bylaw that prohibited loitering in public places. It then argued that the amended bylaw allowed for sleeping in parks and public spaces in some circumstances. But the bylaw still prohibited taking up “temporary abode overnight.” The definition of “abode” was incredibly broad and applied to any kind of erected shelter. “If you so much as hung a tarp over a string,” Boies Parker says, “then that was still prohibited.”
The broader questions at play remained the same, according to Boies Parker: absent enough indoor spaces to house everyone, what’s the city’s approach to unhoused people doing things outside that others do inside? Do we recognize that people without homes have no choice but to eat and sleep? Do we allow them space to do those things, or do we criminalize them?
After changing the bylaw, the city filed a Notice of Discontinuance. “My partner, Irene Faulkner, was just so outraged at that,” Boies Parker recalls. “She said, ‘We promised David that we would do it,’ and so we had to go to court and say, ‘No, the city can't walk away from this constitutional case.’”
In a sense, Boies Parker says, the ban on erecting shelter turned the case from being about the right to sleep to being about “the right to sleep and wake up because you haven’t frozen at night.”
The judge wouldn’t let the city off the hook, and the case went forward, with the city defending its bylaws as necessary to maintain and preserve the city’s parks and the BC Attorney General and BC Civil Liberties Association joining the litigation as interveners.
In an Oct. 14, 2008, ruling, Justice Carol Ross cited various causes of homelessness, including deinstitutionalization, federal withdrawal from social housing, rising housing costs, and changes to BC’s income assistance policies, and noted that the number of people experiencing homelessness in Victoria—more than 1,000 at the time—far exceeded the city’s available supply of shelter beds, which numbered 141 and rose to 326 during the city’s Extreme Weather Protocol.
People did have a right to protect themselves from the elements, the judge found. “[T]he prohibition in the Bylaws against the erection of temporary shelter in the form of tents, tarpaulins, cardboard boxes or other structures exposes the homeless to a risk of significant health problems or even death,” she wrote. “The prohibition constitutes a deprivation of the rights to life, liberty and security.” It was also “arbitrary and overbroad” and therefore “not consistent with the principles of fundamental justice.”
The BC Supreme Court later cited the ruling extensively when striking down bylaws prohibiting camping in public spaces in Abbotsford.
Невероятно офигенный чувак, теперь мечтаю его увидеть когда-нибудь!
Ссылка с Новостей Взломщика
peaceful