The images, I regret to say, are no longer rare visitors. They have taken up residence in our daily lives.

They are citizens — Edmontonians, our neighbours in every sense, except shelter. They own very little, and what little they do own has often been lost, taken, or bartered away in the hard economy of survival. Not always through wrongdoing. Often through necessity.

They look hungry. They look confused. They look worn down by the sheer labour of staying alive.

And increasingly — this is the part that stops you cold — they are in wheelchairs.

Not inside apartments. Not in supportive housing. Not in hospitals, where care is supposed to gather and hold.

No. They are on the streets. On the sidewalks. Parked, as it were, in full public view, as if daring us not to notice. Cardboard solicitations for money.

I began seeing homeless people in wheelchairs on Edmonton streets about three years ago. And I remember thinking — because thinking is unavoidable at moments like this — how does this happen here? In this city? In this country, that prides itself on decency?

At first, I told myself it must be temporary. A blip. A passing failure that would correct itself. But reality has a way of overruling comfort.

This was not passing. This was not accidental. This was structural.

An ambulance ride and a hospital stay for a person with disabilities living on the street can look like rescue. It can feel like relief. But more often than not, it is merely a pause in the trouble.

Because when the hospital doors swing open on discharge day, the hardest questions step forward.

How do you get home when there is no home?

Is there money for a cab?

Are you registered for accessible transit?

Is there someone — anyone — waiting on the other side?

When the answer is no, and too often it is, the road leads back where it began: to the street, only now with greater vulnerability and fewer margins for error.

And let us be clear: with an aging population, this will not diminish. It will grow. What now troubles us will, if unattended, become familiar — and familiarity, in such matters, is a moral failure.

Desperate circumstances do not call for applause lines or policy pamphlets. They call for people — people with imagination, compassion, experience, and the stubborn refusal to accept that this is as........

© Edmonton Sun