Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 27

Here are some of my mother's immortal words to me: "It's all about survival. Don't let anyone shit on you." Um...Thanks Mom. She didn't mince words, that's for sure. Well, I suppose she was right, given her own perspective and experience of life: A farmer's daughter of German-Russian immigrants who was born in the first year of the Great Depression, grew up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, then there was the Second World War, then three years after it ended she moved to Vancouver where a couple of years later she met, became pregnant by, then married my dad, an auto mechanic with a primary school education (I think he did make it to grade nine). They worked hard, struggled, saved, my brother was born just four months later, then in another three years I came along. They bought a house on an acre in Richmond. Dad was a drinker, cheated, we upgraded to a three bedroom split-level house in a nice subdivision, they fought, divorced, Mom got mixed up in what they call the wrong crowd, found her a fat studly Romeo with an impressively long criminal record, who almost killed her a year later, and then, just a few short years after, and I had already been living on my own since eighteen, Mom in her wisdom, gave me those words of wisdom: "It's all about survival, kiddo. Don't let anyone shit on you." Yes. I have always heeded her advice. She is my mother. I am also aware of how incomplete her perspective is. She is my mother. Those are words that almost everyone seems to live by. No wonder we are living in such a bleak, unpromising dystopia. I mean, the First World politicians in Ottawa and the equally First World eggheads from the CBC and Globe and Mail, can tweet and twitter and titter to their little bourgeois hearts' content about what an equal, prosperous, inclusive and land of plenty and milk and honey is our True North Strong And Free, O Canada, and they are still not getting the point. This country is a Darwinist cesspit. Then why don't you move, you might want to sneer. My reply? This is still one of the better cesspits. We have decent sewage treatment in this country! Don't let anyone fool you otherwise. Hence, Mom's immortal words. And you know something, Gentle Reader? I still refuse to swallow this. I know how difficult it is to try to live by higher standards than the going rate, but I am a Christian. I have declared and dedicated my life to God. I am on public display as an open Christian I have to live up to my words or eat and choke on them, and I am obligated to show in my own life and values and manner of communication that there is really more to life than this desperate and vicious struggle of compete, survive and natural selection. I know this from the eyes of the many strangers I say hi to on my walks every day. I know this from the random acts of kindness I often see coming from complete strangers. I know this from the beauty that surrounds me and fills me every day. I know this, because it is true and worth knowing and worth living out into its full and living incarnation.