The cruel, pointless belief that we can address a social crisis with enforcement

This is Michael, 32 and living with a brain injury since age 4.
He's been cycling through prison and homelessness for the
last 10 years, and longs to know his rights around bylaw seizures

In days gone by, I'd be out talking to people living homeless and hearing mostly about police. These days, it's all about City of Victoria bylaw enforcement.

The city's bylaw department and many new bylaw hires have been given expansive new powers to seize people's stuff. The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays out all the places where impoverished people aren't allowed to sit, stand or lie down, but it's the 2023 Property in Custody Bylaw that really gives the muscle.

I'd like to share some sections from these bylaws, in hopes that someone who understands civic law might have ideas on how to push back against them. It's hard to believe that they could possibly be legal given the grand misery they are causing to people, none of whom have the capacity or the knowledge to stand up against them. As noted by the young fellow pictured above, Michael, "maybe one per cent of the people out here know their rights. That doesn't leave people with enough courage to stand up to police or bylaw."

The Streets and Traffic Bylaw lays the groundwork with a number of sections prohibiting people from being on sidewalks, medians and boulevards in the downtown area between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. (Of course, people with money sipping a latte or having a hearty meal at a sidewalk cafe are exempted.)

Section 102 (1):

- A person must not place, or cause or permit to be placed or left, any of the following items so as to occupy, obstruct, or cause a nuisance on any part of a street, sidewalk or other public place: (i) (ii) any property or thing, or a sign, as defined in the Sign Bylaw.

- A person must not place or cause or permit to be placed on, above or in a street, sidewalk, or other public place waste matter of any description, including without limitation, litter, rubbish, garbage, offal, filth, or any noxious, offensive or unwholesome substance or matter;

102 (3)

The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a bylaw officer, or a police officer, may remove, seize, and impound or cause the removal, seizure or impoundment of any property or thing that unlawfully occupies, or has been unlawfully placed or left in, a street, sidewalk or public place, and such item will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw

103 (1)

Without limiting the generality of section 101, a person must not obstruct a sidewalk by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. of the same day if the sidewalk is located at any of the following locations: (a) (b) (2) in the area that is bounded by Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets; abutting or adjacent to those parts of Cook, Pembroke, Store, Wharf, Government, Superior and Southgate Streets that form the boundary of the area referred to in paragraph (a).

103A 

(2) A person must not place, construct, erect or cause or permit to be placed, constructed or erected any structure, tent, object or thing that encroaches on, obstructs, or otherwise occupies a boulevard or median without first obtaining written permission from the Director of Engineering.

(4) The Director of Engineering, a person authorized by the Director of Engineering, a Bylaw Officer, or a member of a police force, on behalf of the City may cause the removal, detention or impounding of any structure, tent, object or thing found on a boulevard or median in contravention of this section, and the portable sign will be dealt with in accordance with the Property in Custody Bylaw.

(5) Between sunset of one day and sunrise on the next day, a person must not: (a)  (b) occupy a median by squatting, kneeling, sitting, or lying down on it;  stand or walk on a median except while lawfully crossing a street.

So that's the bylaw that provides the foundation for enforcement. In 2023, the City brought in the Property in Custody Bylaw, which is the one that gives power to bylaw officers to seize people's goods if they're found anywhere in the no-go zones and hours defined by the Streets and Traffic bylaw.

In theory, seized goods that aren't deemed "rubbish" are to be held for 14 days (it used to be 30 days) in a mysterious location that the City won't disclose. Word on the street is that between the difficulty of the process to get something back, the lack of a proper chain of custody, and the distance that a person without a car is expected to travel to get their goods back from wherever they're held essentially means nobody gets anything back. 

Here's what is required to get something back. Please take a walk down 900-block Pandora and try to imagine who among the sad, sick people stranded out there could make this happen:

Claiming and Disposal of Retained Property

5 (1) (2) (3) (4) Within 14 days of the date of removal, seizure or impounding, owners of retained property may attend at the property return facility to claim and request the return of the retained property, after which the City will endeavor to return the retained property within 48 hours.

Any retained property that is not claimed pursuant to subsection (1) may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person. Permanent disposal of unclaimed retained property may be made to a landfill, recycling facility, or other waste disposal facility or, with the permission of the Director, to a registered charity. Notwithstanding subsection (1), the Director may provide any retained property to the police if they believe that such property may be stolen, may have been used in commission of a crime, or may be misplaced or lost.

6    (1) (2) (3) (4) For each removal, seizure or impounding of any property or thing under a City bylaw, the owner of that property or thing must pay the fee prescribed in Schedule A to the City.  Retained property which has been seized shall not be released without payment of the applicable fee. 

(The fee is waived for a first seizure in any given year, $50 for a second, $100 for a third.)

Notwithstanding subsections (1) and (2), no fee is payable for return of retained property to a person experiencing homelessness where in the opinion of the Director (of bylaw services, or authorized delegate) such item is a life-supporting item such as a tent, sleeping bag, medication, medical device, cell phone, personal identification, or waterproof or winter apparel.  

6 (5) 6 Persons claiming retained property must, as a condition of claiming such property, execute a compliance agreement in a form prescribed by the Director stating that the claiming party will not repeat the unlawful behaviour.

7 - Nothing in this Bylaw shall be construed to impose a private law duty of care on any City employee, agent of the City, or police officer with regard to the removal, seizure, impounding, return, disposal or donation of any property or thing pursuant to this Bylaw or any related statutory authority. No Liability 8 No City employee, agent of the City, or police officer shall be liable to any person or entity for the application of this Bylaw.

Perhaps more importantly than any of that, the definition of rubbish under the bylaw is so broad that it's likely most of the 10 tonnes (!) of stuff being seized every week by the city is immediately garbaged. Whether the person who actually owns it thinks that it's rubbish - well, that makes no difference. It's totally the bylaw officer's decision. 

4) Any property or thing that is removed, seized, or impounded may be immediately and permanently disposed of without notice or compensation to any person if it is rubbish, hazardous material, or a bulky item.

Definition of rubbish:

includes any item that, in the opinion of a City employee: appears to be of no resale value, or negligible resale value, is damaged or soiled to the extent that it appears it cannot reasonably be used for its intended purpose, was manufactured for single use, appears to contain an unidentifiable, noxious, or hazardous substance,  is perishable,  was manufactured for the purpose of packaging a product or thing, including food or beverage, or was part of a cart, bicycle, machine, or other similar item, including wiring and other small parts;

Definition of bulky item: 

includes large, heavy, unwieldy or irregularly shaped items, such as furniture, sheet plywood, lumber, heaters, fencing, structures, and includes a shelter, unless such shelter is lawfully temporarily placed, secured, erected, used or maintained by a person experiencing homelessness in accordance with Parks Regulation Bylaw;

Now let's say you're not one of those people who cares much for human rights for people living homeless, and you just want your damn streets to not look like such a mess. I do get that, because the truth of the current situation is that it's a lose-lose for all of us. 

But here's the rub: Enforcement only works if there's someplace for people to go. If you want to force people from building messy structures and keeping all their worldly possessions with them on the sidewalks of our downtown, then there needs to be some other place where they can relocate. 

I'm definitely seeing people relocating to try to escape the seizures, which are killing them (sometimes literally - I heard tell of a fellow who died of an asthma attack after he couldn't get into his taped-off tent to get his inhaler). But they're just relocating to other people's neighbourhoods. It's not like there's some magical housing where they can all disappear into if we just keep chasing them hard enough. 

So yeah, the seizures are cruel, almost certainly illegal if tested in a court of law, and completely pointless to boot. If the baton-carrying bylaw teams in their anti-stab vests are ever successful in clearing out the downtown core, that just means that pockets of visible homelessness are building up elsewhere. How is that a win for anyone?

What to do about it? It's absolutely essential to identify someplace where it's OK to be homeless. That doesn't mean accepting homelessness; a wealthy country like ours should never do that. But there is just nothing to be gained by this cruel and pointless pursuit of people who are barely surviving and now having to endure the added misery of running from bylaw twice a day, and the government-sanctioned theft of their possessions.

Some of the people living on our streets have been outside for years. It's going to take a lot more services, support and housing than we currently have to address the complexities of their highly individual situations. 

But there is no question that there is nowhere near enough low-income housing for the people who need it. If we don't want homelessness in the downtown core, OK, that can be arranged. But not without designating some other area where people without housing can exist in peace.

Shoving a few of them into "supportive housing" for a few weeks under prison-style rules won't do it. Nor will this insubstantial pipe dream of involuntary treatment, which not only lacks any kind of evidence base but has no plan that I'm aware of for housing people post-treatment, or the massive expansion in social supports that would be needed to ensure all the disabilities and traumas underneath people's substance use are addressed as part of their treatment. (And if we were actually committed to creating such a system, why wouldn't we just make it voluntary?)

Surely no one still believes that homelessness is a problem of wilful people determined to live "free and easy" on the street so they don't have to work for a living. If anyone still thinks that, I'd invite them to come walking with me one day and meet some of the people who are stuck out there. They break my heart with their stories of trying so hard, in many cases since they were children.

Or maybe just wait until a day not far down the line when bylaw chases people into your neighbourhood. Then you can ask them yourself. 

Word volley on the social crisis from the local newspaper, in order

Wal_172619 Pixabay

If words in a newspaper could solve the social crisis on our streets, we'd be on our way with the back-and-forths that have been happening in the Victoria Times Colonist since a Sept. 24 column by Les Leyne kicked things off. 

But things have gotten confusing on Facebook what with the ridiculous fight between Meta and the Canadian government that has left us unable to share newspaper links in Canada. So here's all four parts of the back-and-forth laid out in order - Les's piece, then my response, then a comment piece by retired nurse Barbara Wiggins, then my response to that.

Hope this helps for those trying to follow all of this. And while there are some differences in opinion throughout, it's really heartening to see the TC devoting all these column inches to this issue.

Les Leyne column in the Sept. 24 Times Colonist that started things off:

B.C. has slid into an attitude of “endless accommodation” of antisocial behaviour by desperately ill people on downtown streets, says the man at the epicentre of the epicentre of Victoria’s downtown decay.

Julian Daly, CEO of Our Place, the agency most directly involved in the drug-infused mental-health crisis most obvious on Pandora Avenue, told municipal leaders at the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention that the balance between compassion and enforcing expectations has been lost.

The ongoing “what to do” debate has flattened into an overly simple artificial choice between compassion and enforcement, he said, but both elements and a lot more are needed to make a difference.

One camp, which the B.C. government endorsed for years, focuses on empathizing with drug addicts. It stresses that addiction is a health problem, not a choice, and concentrates on the sufferers.

On the other side are people suffering the consequences of the disintegration of social order and losing patience.

But reducing it to that choice is a mistake, said Daly, who has spent his career caring for the marginalized.

“We’ve slid into what sometimes feels like endless accommodation of behaviours on our streets that … frighten people and make them feel unsafe, including other homeless people.

“In our desire to be compassionate, we have sometimes lost the balance for accountability.

“When ‘anything goes,’ it really does.”

Our Place is the largest provider of free meals on Vancouver Island, but Daly said “many people who desperately need our food … are simply too frightened to come into our building … because of what’s happening outside.”

Meanwhile, the charitable donations the organization relies on are dropping because of disgust at the situation outside their doors.

“Long-time generous donors have told me bluntly they’re no longer giving because they associate us with the disorder … They believe wrongly that we are somehow responsible …”

Daly said that while the desperately ill are being demonized by some, the compassion-first stand is also problematic.

The NDP’s disastrous decriminalization effort, which disintegrated as an official policy within months, was well-intentioned, Daly said, but had unintended consequences.

It gave people permission to use drugs openly and took away police leverage to discourage drug abuse.

“What was once hidden is now everywhere at the same time.”

The firmly established catch-and-release process in the judicial system has reduced police morale, Daly said.

Police want to maintain order, but when the legal system doesn’t impose consequences for criminal behaviour, they shy away from enforcement, and there is no fear of repercussion on the street.

“It may sound harsh to say, but sometimes well-meaning interventions can end up feeding the problem.”

Once-shocking scenes of misbehaviour have been normalized now and are a routine part of city life, Daly said.

People just walk on by, which fosters complacency.

The government spent millions buying motels for homeless people, and housed 800 of them in the region in recent years. But many of those still on the street today were in safe housing. They lost it because of their continued addiction and mental-health problems, he said.

An all-encompassing strategy of housing, treatment, recovery and enforcement is needed.

He said involuntary care is controversial, but has to be part of the solution. Leaving someone to die on the sidewalk — with their liberty intact — “is not compassion, it’s abandonment.”

“Sometimes the most compassionate thing we can do is intervene.”

After years of dithering, the NDP government took the first tentative steps toward secure involuntary care last year. It was telling that they had to hire an outside special advisor — psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Vigo — to chart the rationale for doing so.

Daly said the New Roads recovery programs are showing real results.

He urged more targeted enforcement by police. Not to criminalize addiction or poverty, but to attack predators within the street population who exploit homeless victims.

“Enforcement used wisely is not the enemy of compassion. It is a tool of protection.”

He also stressed the need for prevention, by way of immediate interventions before the cycle gets entrenched.

That means stepping in “when the first tent goes up” in order to start solving the crisis instead of just managing it.

It feels like the province has adjusted its stance over the past year or so, partly in the general direction that Daly advocates.

But the government drifted a long way from the balance he stressed is needed before the course correction came.


My response to Les Leyne’s column, which ran as a comment piece Sept. 27:

Everything about Les Leyne’s Sept 24 column filled me with rage, most especially Our Place CEO Julian Daly’s stunning misrepresentation of problems at the core of this social crisis burning in the hearts of our communities.

To take the tragic situation that is happening on our streets and blame it on our “anything goes” attitude and “endless accommodation” – I don’t even have words for the fury that evokes in me after decades of observing how this four-alarm social crisis came to be. We simply must quit listening to people speaking from the comfort of their nice, non-impoverished lives and get a grip on this tragic humanitarian crisis from the point of view of the people living it.

Medical triaging treats the sickest people first. Social triaging works in the opposite way – you must prove yourself to be sufficiently ready, worthy and stable enough to get help like housing and treatment. What that approach has created is a situation where the absolute sickest people are the ones left without care.

Imagine if cancer patients had to prove themselves “ready” to qualify for support. Still smoking? Not eating enough greens? Overweight? No care for you. Unable to fill out dozens of forms that you don’t even know exist while maintaining a polite, pro-social façade despite being racked with pain and anguish? Back of the line, buddy.

As if. But that’s what we’ve done here. We set up rules that only the healthiest of a sick population can possibly achieve, and blame the ones left behind for not trying hard enough. We dangle the promise of housing like a carrot to be had if someone can sufficiently demonstrate that they’re worthy of it. We tear apart encampments as if we expect the people living in them will vanish.

This is the criminalization of poverty and disability. We are sectioning people under the Mental Health Act as risks to themselves or others and then sending them, still sectioned, into the community to live homeless. We are walking all over people’s human rights, every single damn day.

This is not “endless accommodation” – this is brutal, socially sanctioned neglect of extremely ill human beings, who are viewed with something far from compassion.

None of this is about drugs. Any of us would be using drugs if left in this situation. The drugs are the top layer on people’s multi-layered problems, but they’re the symptom, not the cause.

Why does this deepening social crisis never respond to any of our actions? Think about that. They’re the wrong actions. The sickest people are being shut out of support. That’s not “endless accommodation,” that’s just stupid, inhumane policy that leaves the very visible flames of a four-alarm social crisis to burn unattended on our streets.


Next, retired nurse Barbara Wiggins responds to my piece with her own comment Oct. 9. She has a degree in health ­informatics from the University of Victoria:

I am pleased to see several letters and opinions recently on our urban crisis of addictions and social disorder.

It is worthwhile to revisit the theories that our policies are based on and determine if ­evidence supports those ­theories.

With any social policy, ­evaluating our efforts and ­determining whether we are making a difference, whether we could do better and whether our policies are creating new problems is imperative.

Jody Paterson wrote an impassioned commentary from which I inferred she believes that compassion is the ultimate guiding principle.

I believe that she and many others employed in this sector are both sincere and committed to their noble cause.

But there is a key element to her argument that needs to be examined.

She contends that in medical triage, the sickest are treated first, whereas in social triage, they are treated last. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Medical triage was established as a means of streaming the injured into similar groups in a mass-casualty event.

The first group is the walking wounded and those whose treatment can safely be delayed. Their treatment is delayed.

The second group is those who need immediate, usually intensive, intervention to survive. This group receives priority care.

The third group is those who are terminal — either dead on arrival, or whose condition is so dire that death is inevitable. This group gets little or no intensive treatment, as the efforts to revive them will be futile, and comfort measures may be the best that can be offered.

Furthermore, the efforts of caregivers are better spent on those outcomes that can be improved by medical interventions. This system, far from being heartless, is born of both compassion and logic.

I am not advocating a harsh “let them fend for themselves” approach.

But I will support the notion that some individuals are in the unfortunate overlap of brain injury, addiction, mental health disorders and criminality, who are not only not benefiting from our social programs, but who make it more difficult to provide effective service and care to those who have a chance of being helped.

Also, some of these individuals may victimize those clients for whom the programs were created.

Unfortunately, there is so little hard data or program evaluation to guide decision-makers one way or the other.

But it has become clear that we have an unmanageable, expensive, inefficient, illogical, heartless mishmash of programs.

Can we at least agree that the state of unresolved addiction is a hell we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy?

If we can agree on that, then perhaps we could all get off our ideological soapboxes and start planning and funding programs based on the likelihood of success in helping people transition back to a non-addicted life, where it is possible to have a healthy life with healthy social connections.

And we provide compassionate care to those for whom recovery is no longer part of their care plan, as long as their programs don’t increase the risk of harm to others.

And, for those who perpetually victimize the most vulnerable, we need to have the courage to incarcerate them using the prison system.

If this smacks of heartlessness, it is anything but.

Out here in the homes and neighbourhoods, we live with and witness the damage done by the addiction/social disorder crisis.

We witness our children, the children of our friends and the friends of our children fall victim to this mass casualty event. We see that not all approaches work for all people and that some are lost despite massive attempts to help.

We have a vested interest in this problem that goes way beyond our role as taxpayers. We have skin in this game.

One definition of madness is to endlessly repeat the same action and expect a different outcome. It is time for a fresh perspective.


And my Oct. 16 response to Barbara Wiggins'  piece. Last in the series, so far....:

Thank you to Barbara Wiggins for her informed commentary on Oct. 9, which clarified that medical triage actually has three groupings: Help these ones right away; these ones can wait a bit but must be prioritized for care; and the group that is essentially the walking dead, who need medical help the least because there’s no chance they’ll make it.

The social triage is similar but different: Easiest to help so pick them first; these ones next because at least they’ve got an advocate; and the final group, essentially the “dead man walking” group noted in the medical triage description. The people who the system decides are not worth helping.

But while this group takes care of itself neatly in the medical world — they just die — that’s not how it goes with social crisis.

The people deemed “hopeless” don’t die, they end up living hard, sick, poor, ­incredibly stigmatized lives in ways that are not only cruel, wrong and expensive, but that annoy the hell out of the neighbours, ­business owners, city councils and every colour of government.

Wiggins rightly points out that the hopeless group at least get comfort in medical triage. In the social triage, this group is treated as harshly as possible.

They live in dystopian ­conditions — chased from place to place, personal items freely taken from them, rounded up for forced injections and then released to the street.

A young man is shuffling his feet ­endlessly on Pandora right now, affected by a major side-effect of the psychiatric drug he has to be on and is helpless to ­challenge. More importantly, the people we’re talking about are only looked at as hopeless cases because they’ve been left for years without the support they need.

In medical triage terms, a lot of them would have been in the “priority care” group once, born into challenges and with ­disabilities, but they were left in line so long that now they’ve come to be thought of as beyond help.

They’re definitely not. But they also don’t fit in our boxes. We keep pushing them in and they keep falling back out.

That’s not an unsolvable ­problem. But it is if you continue to view the problem from the perspective of the people ­wanting it gone, not living it.

Can we be (Instagram) friends?

 

Bylaw sweep is on in Victoria and this man
has to run to get to his stuff before it's gone

A communications strategist living through a social crisis of unprecedented magnitude right here in her own province spends a lot of time mulling how to shift the conversation to the advantage of all the people living the crisis. 

So I'm testing something new on Instagram, #streetstoriesvictoria. If you're familiar with Humans of New York, my little test is taking the lead from that fine feature. My aim is to be a pair of eyes out there and tell some small stories - no opinions, no casting blame, just seeing. 

I've only just begun so currently have a mere seven posts, but stick with me and I'll get those numbers up fast. After 40 years of observing all the factors that have gotten us to this tragic place, I am seeing people - the public, policy makers, most definitely the politicians - getting things so wrong on so many fronts, and I think much of that is because people have somehow convinced themselves that those living hard lives on our streets are not human beings. I want to see if I can help with that. 

I don't expect that my little stories will be the magical fix to turn that around, but the first step on righting all that's wrong is to rehumanize people. Hope you'll come on over to #streetstoriesvictoria and have a look. 

Pump up the volume on the social crisis

Gerd Altmann, Pixabay

I wrote a letter to the editor to the Victoria Times Colonist that they ran Sept 27 as an opinion piece, which I then posted on Facebook, where it got major traction primarily among people who aren't my "followers." 

I'm saying all of that because it has led me to conclude that those of us who think like this about the social crisis burning on all of our communities' streets need to be way more out there in public spheres with our thoughts. There is more support than we might think, and governments that only ever hear from the highly active lock-em-up types need to know that. 

Let's take a leaf from the populist playbook and get loud at every opportunity. (Ideally by pointing out the reality rather than just shouting angrily at the "other side" that they're idiots, though I admit I came pretty close to doing that in this particular rant, didn't I?) I fear that some of us in this fight have concluded that it's hopeless to openly push back against the current dominant narrative around the social crisis, because nobody's listening. I think we're wrong about that. 

Here's the piece: 

Everything about Les Leyne’s Sept 24 column filled me with rage, most especially Our Place CEO Julian Daly’s stunning misrepresentation of problems at the core of this social crisis burning in the hearts of our communities.

To take the tragic situation that is happening on our streets and blame it on our “anything goes” attitude and “endless accommodation” – I don’t even have words for the fury that evokes in me after decades of observing how this four-alarm social crisis came to be. We simply must quit listening to people speaking from the comfort of their nice, non-impoverished lives and get a grip on this tragic humanitarian crisis from the point of view of the people living it.

Medical triaging treats the sickest people first. Social triaging works in the opposite way – you must prove yourself to be sufficiently ready, worthy and stable enough to get help like housing and treatment. What that approach has created is a situation where the absolute sickest people are the ones left without care.

Imagine if cancer patients had to prove themselves “ready” to qualify for support. Still smoking? Not eating enough greens? Overweight? No care for you. Unable to fill out dozens of forms that you don’t even know exist while maintaining a polite, pro-social façade despite being racked with pain and anguish? Back of the line, buddy.

As if. But that’s what we’ve done here. We set up rules that only the healthiest of a sick population can possibly achieve, and blame the ones left behind for not trying hard enough. We dangle the promise of housing like a carrot to be had if someone can sufficiently demonstrate that they’re worthy of it. We tear apart encampments as if we expect the people living in them will vanish.

This is the criminalization of poverty and disability. We are sectioning people under the Mental Health Act as risks to themselves or others and then sending them, still sectioned, into the community to live homeless. We are walking all over people’s human rights, every single damn day.

 This is not “endless accommodation” – this is brutal, socially sanctioned neglect of extremely ill human beings, who are viewed with something far from compassion.

None of this is about drugs. Any of us would be using drugs if left in this situation. The drugs are the top layer on people’s multi-layered problems, but they’re the symptom, not the cause.

Why does this deepening social crisis never respond to any of our actions? Think about that. They’re the wrong actions. The sickest people are being shut out of support. That’s not “endless accommodation,” that’s just stupid, inhumane policy that leaves the very visible flames of a four-alarm social crisis to burn unattended on our streets.

¡Basta ya!

I remember a time when I thought that online comment sections under news stories would encourage the sharing of fascinating insights and common wisdom, and that social media would be such a force for good in bringing us together in community around the world.

Who WAS that stupid woman? She’s long gone now, though I do miss her optimism. She didn’t yet know that human beings are really quite awful and unstable when grouped by the millions into dangerous tribes brimming with hate and given free licence to say the most awful things about each other.

I’ve done a lot of reading over the years to try to understand human beings. It has given me more understanding at a scholarly level, I suppose, but I’m still pretty baffled overall. We are wild animals dressed up in the thinnest veneers of civility. We achieve greatness, then we tear it all down.

The blame for our increasingly outrageous ways gets apportioned depending on your tribe, of course. It’s the alt-right. It’s the woke. It’s the trans people. It’s the gun lobby. It’s the immigrants. It’s the people who vote for idiots. It’s the people who don’t vote. It’s media. No, wait, it’s social media. It’s the intellectuals. It’s the uber-rich.

It’s all of the above and about a thousand more, each simplistic belief to be embraced or despised according to what your tribe decides is the right way to think.

And each of us in our hard-walled camps are absolutely certain that whatever our tribe says is right must be absolutely, fully right. If somebody says it isn’t, then they are clearly the enemy, and must be openly loathed. Lucky us, we can now hate freely from the safety of our own social media feeds, full of other hand-picked tribal members just like us who can reinforce that our hatred is justified, and shield us with indignant and shaming replies to anyone who tries to say otherwise.

Can’t we all just get along? Apparently not. This was the conclusion I was left with after seeing the violent life of Ugandan chimpanzees in the 2023 this-ain’t-your-momma’s-nature-doc Chimp Empire. Sure, they’re chimps, but with minimal difference between human and chimp DNA, it gave me pause. Their deeply tribal and warring natures ought to at least be a point of reflection for humans in these mad times.

More recently, I’ve been reading Robert Sapolsky’s super-sciencey tome Behave, which looks at human behaviours good and bad through a long, long lens that starts with the hormones and neuro-chemicals of the moment and goes all the way back through how the day was going, earlier life experiences, genetics, even ancient ancestral heritage. It talks a lot about which parts of the brain light up when this or that happens to us, and how those brain-level reactions can in turn shape longer-lasting changes in our behaviour.

What I saw in the findings was how very much alike we are to those chimps of Uganda. How we differ is that humans have (mostly) chosen to subdue the most anti-social of those behaviours in order to get along in a modern world that is neck-deep in law and policy requiring us to tame our wild chimpedness for the sake of civilizing principles like human rights, equity, and polite social engagement.

But when the social pact breaks down, as it certainly is right now, look out. Social media provides the means and feeds the flames, but the horrible behaviour is all ours. And it’s not just about the obvious stuff that’s clogging our news feeds and stripping away our civility, it’s more like a hate virus that’s spreading across all of us. It’s going to take us to a very dark place if we just keep piling all that hate up.

I’ve been told that podcaster Joe Rogan has talked about being similarly affected as I was by Chimp Empire. I felt non-plussed initially after hearing that, but now I feel almost cheered by it, thinking that he and I might actually have the basis for at least one enjoyable conversation together.

That’s where we’ve got to go if we’re ever going to end the hate-fest. We have to find things that we DO agree on, and talk about those things for a while. We have to get past the deep tribal lines we’re drawing around ourselves and remember that we’re a species that has to depend on each other for our survival. We don’t have to like each other, but we sure as hell have to figure out a way to co-exist.

If not, we’re headed for war. Every war throughout history starts just this way: Hatred; othering; elaborate justification for othering; lines hardening around who constitutes Us and who constitutes Them. And then comes a more frightening kind of hardening that prepares Us to do whatever it takes to get rid of Them.

I joked last week to one of my daughters that I was going to get a T-shirt made that said, “Everybody, shut the fuck up!” I wasn’t even really joking. We all think we’re on the side of right, but this much out-loud hatred can’t possibly lead anywhere good.

Whatever you believe about whatever hot-button issue has your back up these days, I ask you to consider whether you’ve ever been convinced to think differently because somebody threw hate in your face and shamed your thinking. It’s certainly never worked for me.

At the high-impact level of social media where we battle each other now, open displays of hatred are siren’s calls to those whose social veneers have worn thin. They are the drums of war. Each of us must make a conscious decision to not add to that deadly chorus, to muster every ounce of whatever makes us different from chimps and just…stop.

Take a deep breath and go engage with somebody surprising, someone you don’t usually talk with. Don’t ask them about Gaza, abortion, Trump, homelessness, trans rights, Charlie Kirk or climate change. Talk about stuff that nobody can hate – your summer vacation, your brother’s new business, your worry that your kids are never going to find jobs.

Or just stand beside them and breathe. Note that they’re breathing too. If that’s all you’ve got in common in that moment, good enough. We all just need some time to calm down.

Image: Elisa, Pixabay