Living With Trauma: The Healers, 37

We are now living in a world where people are treated like economic units. This is how they are raising their children, enrolling and registering them in educational programs and activities from the age of day care until they are ready for university. This is not to help their children grow into complete and fulfilled persons, but to make them competitive in the marketplace. Parents are desperate that their progeny not end up in the gutter, in low barrier shelters, or in low paying jobs, or all of the above, as global capitalism has unleashed on all of us an unrestrained monster of greed and competition. Parents are desperate that their children not be left behind. In order to make their kids competitive they don't seem to realize how they are destroying them. Fortunately there is a growing trend towards dolphin parenting, and free range kids, where children are given more freedom to grow and explore with minimal parental interference, but it might take an entire generation of this before the damage is reversed. In the meantime, all over the public sphere, we see the young casualties of this hyper parental angst. Young people are so stressed with getting into the right universities and the right educational programs and the right training and the right everything that will land them decently paid employment that still won't leave them with enough discretional income for a down payment on a house. So, in order to cope, everyone hunkers down and does whatever they can to staunch the angst: they turn into gym rats or they become otherwise obsessed with fitness, since they do want to live forever and make themselves as beautiful and studly as possible since everyone else is too shallow to take an interest in them that isn't somehow based in sexual attraction. They remain fixated on their phones and other tech toys, never parting their eyes from the little plastic screen, be they behind a steering wheel or in a passenger seat, on the sidewalk, the crosswalk, in the supermarket checkout, in the coffee shop, on the bus, or on the toilet. Their souls have become so shrunken by fear and heightened anxiety that this has become for many their little plastic window of escape or refuge. Or they get dogs, because people don't make reliable friends, being too intelligent and too difficult to control, and so in already overcrowded cities they unleash their barking shit-machines in public parks and other spaces, monopolizing them and often making the commons unsafe for others. This is really too much for us to handle. The World Wide Web with all our lovely tech toys and the brutal taskmasters of capitalism have really made the world a scary, nasty, and lonely place. It is hard to make friends, to keep friends and to build a sense of real community, in this city and elsewhere. But we are still going to try, because even though we are being treated like little more than economic units, we know that we are more than this and that we are better than this. I have hope for the future and I believe that our natural desire to connect meaningfully with others and with life itself is going to overcome this nightmare of corporate greed that threatens to disinherit us, and I believe in this current crop of young people who are now moving forward and coming into their own, the so-called Millennials. Even talking and being friendly with a stranger on the bus or on the sidewalk is a revolutionary act. It has nothing to do with money or economics and everything to do with fraternal love and solidarity: like the retired gentleman I say hi to and chat with on my way to work every Monday; like the pleasant and interesting older couples in one of my favourite cafes who like to stop and chat; like the young woman on the bus today who insisted on giving me her seat after I gave up my seat to a woman with difficulties. And the young woman and I got into the most interesting conversation about computers, phones, and her aging dad. These are small steps, but the more we take them, and the more people who take these steps to reach across the divide, to befriend one another, the faster we are going to bring down this cold, monstrous hating global greed that has already folded its python coils around our planet and us who inhabit it.