Living With Trauma: The Healers, 45

I am going to paint is some broad strokes of black and white here, Gentle Reader. Even broader and more contrasting strokes than you are used to seeing on these pages. Jet, midnight, raven's wing black, and the purest, snowiest, never been trod on, never been driven on and never been peed on tones of white. I was reading in this weekend's Globe and Mail about the untimely deaths of billionaire couple, Barry and Honey Sherman. They were billionaires, which is to say, not merely members of the privileged one percent, but of the hyper-privileged, and obscenely entitled .01 percent. They made their billions in pharmaceuticals, a Jewish couple famous for their philanthropy. They were friends of the prime minister, and their memorial service was attended by six thousand, among them members of the Canadian political and financial elite. Hearing about their deaths on the radio one would imagine they were wealthy saints, Mother Teresa with Louis Vuitton. The Globe and Mail featured a two page spread about them. I don't feel much the wiser about Honey Sherman, except that, seeing her photo and how preternaturally young she must have looked at seventy, she surely collected Air Miles from her cosmetic surgeon. Barry came across as looking particularly bad. A rapacious, ambitious, merciless competitor, who cared not a straw who he hurt or damaged in order to get ahead in the game. He would foreclose on the mortgages of his cousins if they weren't able to pay what they owed him. He would have his private detectives go through the garbage cans of the competition to find evidence that they were spying and stealing his ideas. With all the tax shelters and loopholes to keep their billions up as high as they could stack them, they did give back, in philanthropic donations, millions to causes they approved of. Had they paid their fair share of taxes, then I would imagine that their funds would have been funnelled into the general revenue and, the corrupt and bureaucratic monster of Canada Revenue be damned, there might have been a greater likelihood of more money going to where it is most needed for the public good. I don't know what to mention here about Big Pharma, except, seeing now the (almost) human face of one of the big corporations, then is it any wonder...? Just a few pages away in that same edition of the Globe and Mail I also chanced to read about a young man being publicly feted for bravery and heroism for having rescued a man who fell in front of a commuter train in Edmonton. He was given only half a page. The article went on to explore the not really news about how poor and low incomed people tend to be much more empathetic, kind and compassionate than the wealthy. Except the wealthy, when they die, and also while still alive, are admired and praised and treated like little gods. The rest of us get nothing. I do know that if I ever find myself falling in front of the Sky Train and there is someone standing nearby, that that person had better not be a billionaire.