What Is Trauma? 16

I would like to see this become part of the conversation about trauma: social and economic inequality.  Of course this has been a fact of life for as long as we have had so-called civilization.  Haves and have-nots.  Rich and poor.  Hungry and well-fed.  Undereducated or illiterate and well-educated.  Employed, underemployed and unemployed.  The elite and the great unwashed.

Throughout the long and troubled history of our humanity, at least for the past ten thousand years or so, the beat goes on, and this syncopated and dysfunctional and discordant beat continues to go on. 

The highly-stratified societies of Medieval Spain and the Aztecs were of course highly hierarchical and unequal.  The predominance of death and cult and state-sanctioned murder of course helped keep people in their place as did the vast inequality of social status and resources.

We no longer permit human sacrifice nor the burning of witches and heretics.  We've even gotten rid of capital punishment!  We enjoy the privilege of social and liberal democracy.  One person, one vote.  We can even send angry emails to elected officials and not fear that we will disappear in the middle of the night.  Could it get better?

But wait, there's more.  We started out as a white man's (gender specific here) country with a smattering of surviving indigenous peoples and various persons of East Asian and South Asian and African descent.  Only the white men could vote or make politically binding decisions.  Everyone else was treated like, well, like something brown and rather foul-smelling.

Then things began to change.  First women (only white women) won the right to vote.  Then people of other races and finally our own First Nations People were allowed to help decide the course and future of this great land of ours.  Everybody could vote.  Universal suffrage.

The subtler and uglier forms of racial discrimination were finally being addressed.  Then the women's movement gained momentum for equal treatment, freedom of choice, the right to do as they pleased with their bodies, equal pay and respectful treatment from men.  Then came the rights of the disabled and eventually buses, buildings and sidewalks were being outfitted to accommodate wheelchairs, mobility scooters and people with walking difficulties.  The workplace began to make concessions for hiring and giving equal treatment to disabled workers.  Then came the struggle for gay rights, marriage and adoption equality, and finally respectful and fair treatment and inclusion for trans people.

People with mental illness are still struggling for their (our) piece of the pie.  People's attitudes and fears are often very slow to change and stigma remains a cold and oppressive shadow that squats over us still.

What more could we desire?  We live in Utopia!  Everybody is equal now.  No one needs to fear leaving their home and going outside and openly expressing who they are without fear of mistreatment, insult and discrimination.  That some people remain strongly conservative, racist, ablest, transphobic and homophobic is an already-given and they (we can only hope) are a dying breed.

I'm not done yet.  There is one little fly in the ointment.  Rather, one big fat fly.  It is called poverty.  This is the bitter and poisonous fruit of the kind of unrestrained global capitalism that our elected leaders, bereft of anything that resembles a moral compass, have sold themselves and our country to and by extension our own lives.  When NAFTA was ratified that opened a huge Pandora's Box and we have not yet recovered.  Read this from Leadnow's website:

We just got some shocking news: that Canada “will oppose any effort to change" the most toxic part of NAFTA: the investor-state dispute resolution system (ISDS).¹ It's a system that gives multinational corporations and wealthy investors special rights to sue Canada for passing laws or policies that might affect their future profits .²

Giant corporations use ISDS to challenge laws, regulations, or decisions they don't like — such as minimum wage hikes, environmental protections, and public health regulations. ^3-5  Because of ISDS rules in NAFTA, Canada is the most sued country in the Global North, and is currently facing over $2.6 billion in ISDS lawsuits  — which will be decided in secretive tribunals stacked with corporate lawyers, rather than in a Canadian court.⁶

Billionaire CEOs, the Chamber of Commerce, and an army of corporate lobbyists are desperate to entrench ISDS in a re-negotiated NAFTA because ISDS was designed, and works, for them — and it looks like Trudeau is caving. The head of the Business Council of Canada recently said he’s had “extensive opportunities” to meet with Canada’s top NAFTA negotiators are are “adamant” about keeping ISDS.⁷

But together we can push back. The Department of Foreign Affairs has set up a special inbox to collect public input on NAFTA as negotiatons continue.  If we flood it with demands to remove ISDS, decision-makers will feel the heat and know there will be a real political cost to keeping ISDS in NAFTA

Here's the link if you'd like to take action:

https://act.leadnow.ca/stop-isds/

Today I celebrated this cool breezy September Sunday walking on the newly upgraded Point Grey Road on Vancouver's tony West Side, a now quiet bike and pedestrian way lined with sumptuous waterfront homes worth tens of millions of dollars.  A lovely way to pass the time, costing the taxpayer but 12.5 million dollars.  there was a LED electric sign that said: "He pretends that he cares, but he doesn't.  A young couple with puzzled faces were looking at it.  I explained to them that it is likely a message to our mayor.  I explained to them that instead of making housing for the homeless the number one priority for his administration he has chosen to squander the money on such expensive vanity projects  They seemed to genuinely appreciate my input.

Later I did a little math.  The combined costs for this bike and pedestrian way, along with the purchase and development of the Arbutus Greenway, also situated in our city's priciest neighbourhoods,  Then I added the estimated cost for upgrading the Burrard Bridge.  The entire cipher?  About $160,000,000.

I think it can safely be said that the mayor's vanity projects have been built on the backs of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens: the homeless.  Four hundred homeless adults in Vancouver could be in housing now had those funds been rediverted to building more social housing.  My suspicion is that had our illustrious (and fabulously wealthy) mayor suspended all his vanity projects and focussed entirely on remedying our greatest human rights debacle since the Chinese Head Tax and Asian Exclusion Act, we would be already well ahead in solving our homelessness crisis.

The current housing projects underway have been subjected to mixed reviews.  The mixed market and social housing buildings provide the most pathetic spectacle.  In all those buildings there are segregated doors and facilities for the poor and the well-heeled tenants.  It's called the poor door.  This is apartheid.  Nothing more and nothing less.

It is considered proper and legitimate to poor bash and to discriminate against people solely because they are poor.  We are the new niggers.  The new faggots.  Only we are called "bums."

We are human beings and we deserve far better than what we are getting.  If you're not angry yet then you have not been paying attention!  Get angry, get good and angry and start taking action.

It doesn't take a genius to guess the role this kind of inequality and social discrimination plays in causing and perpetuating trauma, individual and collective.  If we want to deal effectively with helping people, ourselves included, to recover from trauma and it's effects, then perhaps we could start on the way we treat our most vulnerable.