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Doesn't pity hookers
I am sick and tired of these anti-poverty groups and street workers, who are probably ex-junkies themselves, trying to make me cry over the fate of these poor sex workers invading our neighborhoods ["You and your local hooker," Aug. 9].
First of all, this is definitely not a case of rich vs. poor. What is considered rich? Someone clearing $400-500 a week? Anything under $350 a week is considered poor. Is a prostitute who spends $400-500 every few days on drugs considered poor? Hello!
When I moved onto the corner of Ontario and Dufresne last year, I had a bleeding heart too. Oh, these poor women having to work the streets, humiliating themselves to pay their rent and feed their kids... That Dickensian image was quickly replaced by disgust, rage and frustration when I understood the real picture. Pimps and/or drug dealers, who most of the time live in the neighborhood, send their "girlfriends" out on the street to make more money to buy more drugs, their eyes rolling back in their heads because they're stoned out of their minds, screaming and fighting. This happens in the morning or the afternoon, while hundreds of kids are going to school. And guess what? I'm not rich and I don't own a condo. Just like the hundreds of people from the neighborhood (mostly poor) who marched in front of my door last July to protest against prostitution and not, as was mentioned in your article, against the criminalization of poverty (they were only a small pocket of counter-demonstrating people). I doubt that a poor single mother living in the neighborhood would go on the street corner and show her tits in front of her neighbours unless she's fucked up on drugs!
--Daniel Demontigny
Angry mommy
Ms. Waters has made it her mandate in her "I, Single Mum" column to address nothing in particular and as little as possible (other than her own adorable navel). The July 26 column really was the topper ["Baby stalker"]. The lives of the young and hip are so hard, what with having to chose between motherhood (something some of us actually take seriously) and maintaining one's cynicism.
There is a difference between cynical and vacuous, a distinction which has been lost in Ms. Waters' column, all four episodes of which have annoyed me to no end. Ms. Waters' witty meditations on infanticide, Friday nights out and Saturday mornings with the paper manage to say nothing whatsoever that is revealing, either of the realities of single motherhood or of Ms. Waters herself. Why did she want to write this column? To describe what most people already know about mothering and say absolutely nothing else? Nothing about poverty, about discrimination, about loneliness, isolation, nothing about her values as a parent, nothing about hardship.
She talks of vacations in Maine at mummy and daddy's, and a baby who wants her constant attention while she's waiting to stick him in daycare so she can devote her time to more pop-cultural references and bottles of Guinness. Wow. Hey, Juliet: let's switch lives. I'll write something that real single mums can relate to, and you can try mothering without using terms like "quantity time."
--Sara
Pet wars
In reply to your "Pets for ransom" article [Aug. 2], I wanted to share a similar experience. A few years ago, my dog got hit by a car and both her front legs had full open fractures. At the pet clinic, I asked if I should have her euthanized and they laughed at me and told to take things one step at a time. They put temporary casts on her and told me that she had to go to a hospital for surgery, that she wouldn't be able to walk for six months and that it would cost $5,000. I realized, 10 minutes after leaving the clinic, that it would be better for the dog to be euthanized. When I called and told them this, the vet told me that it would cost $400 for what they'd already done. The next morning, they wouldn't let me see my dog unless I paid up. So I did, and they finally put an end to her suffering. To keep a pet from its owner or to keep a suffering animal alive until a bill is paid is inhumane. So, yes, it's true: they do keep pets as ransom.
--Guy Bouchard
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