Did you ever wonder how many people die a year from bureaucracy?

Of course, the last thing politicians and bureaucrats want is anything that smacks of accountability for the human cost of their actions. And since the politicians and bureaucrats make the rules, you don’t die of bureaucracy but of ‘complications of diabetes’ even though the complications result from or are worsened by bureaucracy.

As we refuse to act effectively because of willful ignorance and being mundanely judgemental, people die needlessly.

The matter is on my mind as I once again suffered brushoff in trying to access the diabetic clinic at the hospital. Maybe ‘next week’?

The background is that mental illness consumed my life and dumped me onto the streets of Abbotsford homeless. The reality of homelessness is that there are numerous barriers, persistent barriers, to rejoining the ‘housed’ population, as if the task was not made difficult enough by the need to deal with the mental health issue that caused me to become homeless in the first place.

Being on disability means an income where, after paying my shelter costs for the month, $40 remains to cover all other costs. As a result I eat what is put in front of me at the various meals and the other, limited, food resources in the community. I can decline dessert, but unless I choose to starve – I eat what’s put in front of me.

Having no effective way to control what I eat, eating a diet to help manage my diabetes is not currently possible.

‘All you have to do is find a job.’ True, but while that statement is easy to make, in Reality finding a job is another minefield full of unanticipated barriers. The stigma of Mental Health puts you at an immediate disadvantage, even though having addressed my mental health challenges makes me more effective, more creative, better with people.

It turned out that 25 years of experience as a Chartered Accountant, executive, and businessman is a disadvantage. The more responsible and challenging the work you had been doing before, the bigger stigma as a barrier to employment becomes. And while I can reshape my resume and dumb it down, I have never been adept at being dumb in terms of the job under consideration.

Throw in being a senior and the physical limitations imposed by an aged and aging body.

Factor in the enormous barrier not having a phone because you cannot afford it given your income and the cost of being housed.

Not having a phone is a major barrier to successfully jumping through the hoops in dealing with a bureaucracy and leads to the need to check back ‘next week’ since they cannot phone me to come in as soon as the blood test results have been found. So I return next week to [hopefully] get a doctor’s referral and the test results faxed to the diabetes clinic and admission to the clinic’s inner sanctum.

There can’t be any question as to whether I am diabetic as I have been on diabetic medication for 2 years, with the occasional blood test done.

Assuming my diabetes does not again reduce the numbers of hours a day I can function effectively to 3 or 4; or puts my thinking into a fog; or triggers a mental health challenge; or triggers ‘what’s the use’, or my ADD transfers my attention to something else; I cannot control my diet; or whatever has sidetracked, put on hold, getting to the diabetes clinic in the past…….

I am hoping that being in the screw Calm get Mad mode that has me writing about this will serve as a focus to enable me to leap tall bureaucratic barriers……..

Anger has you holding onto whatever it was that angered you. Properly used anger can serve as a tool to keep focused, keep pushing until you deal with what has angered you.

In this case getting connected with the Diabetes clinic and managing my diabetes, rather than managed by my diabetes.

A system set up to handle normal is fine as long as it can handle the not-normal, particularly when the not-normal is growing.

I had hoped not to be corporeal at this point of existence, preferably via an ending making a spectacular obituary.

Being here I don’t intend to suffer Death by Bureaucracy.

Being CANADIAN, if it takes a revolution to change the politics, society, government and bureaucracy we have let infest Canada……. Viva la Révolution!