On forced Evictions

The city came in recent days to drive our neighbours away from the park, from those downtrodden urban allotments. But not drive them away in any sense that involved the opening of new doors and the provision of real assistance. No this driving off was more fuel-efficient - the city merely pointing up and down Montreal St as if to suggest (but not definitively state) that food and lodging could be found in both directions. It was more like the beating of pheasants from hillside gorse.

And what if those being driven off couldn’t pay the asking price at the next stop, or suffer the indignity of curfew, or if some rule existed that might prohibit them from staying at all at said land of milk and honey? Well the city had at least been seen to suggest routes to greener grass, hadn’t they? And had posed in rehearsed ways intended to communicate empathy, but which as time passed would come to seem unfeeling, and then just plain callous, as well as shortsighted in the most wilful ways, and even (and especially) really quite appalling.