Living With Trauma: The Healers, 34

I'm sick of this. We're all getting sick of this. Those appallingly shallow and lying politicians who say that our economy has never been better or more robust, employment figures have never looked so good, and many of us are either homeless or living from paycheque to paycheque. They are so slow to address these real urgencies while wasting time kissing the asses of their corporate offshore bosses. And the rest of us are stupid enough to keep electing those clowns into power without considering that whatever we have of a democracy has already been sold up the river and us with it. But we still have to work together, even if the process is odious. We still have to make nice with our awful politicians because they are holding the purse strings. And we still have to dialogue, respectfully, of course. But I don't know how much longer a lot of us are going to wait. Revolutions and mass uprisings take place when national leaders remain deaf and impervious to the cries and suffering of the people who put them in power. For a long time it didn't seem like an issue. The vast majority did okay, more or less middle class, and those who ended up on the margins were of scant number and hardly noticed and it was oh so easy to blame the victim for her misfortune. But then, in the eighties, our governments shifted sharply to the right, and economies were restructured. Governments kept clawing back at social services and programs, at the behest of the multinational bankers and corporate CEO's. Secure union positions were obliterated and gave way to precarious and low-paid contract work. The disappearing social safety net inaugurated an epoch of homelessness, now of biblical proportions. Attracting offshore developers turned land and real estate into bargaining chips and owning a house went from having a home to having equity and investment. The new gold. Naturally, housing costs skyrocketed and now our own city is gradually hollowing out as people on modest and moderate incomes relocate to less costly suburbs, cities, towns or provinces. The only poor who can still live in this city are people like me, who have the good fortune of living in government-subsidized social housing. Poverty ghettos. This is the new apartheid, boys and girls. I have written already about the poor doors in mixed market and social housing developments. The ones paying the full bucks get all the goodies and their poor neighbours have to come and exit through the servants' door. Low and frozen wages is another issue, along with the strident whining of the business community that they cannot afford to pay a living wage to their minimum wage staff. In which case, either give a little more generously from your profit margin or close your business and move! The rest of us shouldn't have to suffer from a crap quality of life due to your greed and selfishness! So, this is our Canadian paradise, and neither Prime Minister Junior on the federal level, nor the premier of this province, nor Mayor Moonbeam here in Vancouver are doing enough to address the need for change. There is also the problem of the NIMBYs in reasonably well-off neighbourhoods resisting social housing developments in their communities because of their own uninformed fear and selfishness. If this city is to become livable again then there is a lot more that we are going to have to do. As a community. First, we have to rediscover community. This city is notoriously lonely, cold, shallow and unwelcoming. We have to see the healing of our wounded and broken humanity as something we need to address here, where we are. Yes, individually we are all to some degree or other wounded and broken, some more visibly than others. But if we are to really begin to heal and to find healing then we are going to have to pull together. There is going to be a lot of opposition, because our cities are populated by selfish and greedy individuals, often from ignorance, some are just sociopathic assholes. Some of them are politicians and CEO's. And obscenely wealthy. Regardless of how much we disagree, regardless of how some of us loathe and hate each other, we have to find ways of communicating and working together. This could be even more difficult than doing diplomacy with North Korea, but we have to start somewhere. Comments please, Gentle Reader?