Surviving The Fall, 48

Here is something that really sticks in my craw, Gentle Reader. It is the blatant discrimination in our society against those who work hard as caregivers all their lives, and then are shunted into situations of marginalization, poverty and want. This happens over and over. I get angry and nauseous when I hear judgmental successful immigrants when they crow on about how lazy we are if we don't make it the way they did. If within five years our children aren't in university and we don't already have the mortgage half paid on our lovely monster home. Please don't ask me why it happens that way, but too often it does. And of course we never hear about the immigrants who do not make it, the more than half that return within a year to their native country because they cannot handle the pressure of living and resettling in Canada, or those for whom the cultural shock and the unexpected poverty and sudden crises end up plunging them in their own downward spiral into mental illness, poverty, or homelessness. It is those who made it, regardless of how much help and support they have had from others, who seem to believe that they did it all on their own, all by their dear sweet little selves; and the rest of us are just lazy. And our government, because of the PR cred, simply praises and glorifies those successful immigrants while continually forgetting about the many who don't make it, and while also continuing to neglect and ignore their own homegrown poor. Oh, that's right, it's our own fault, silly me! We didn't work hard enough. We get what we deserve. Just like that fat, obnoxious American woman on the bus who mentioned, when I told her about the growing crisis of homelessness in Vancouver, that we all make our choices. And those same people, despite their ability to succeed financially and materially, in human values and emotional intelligence, are themselves usually monumentally stupid. But this is what happens when greed, materialism and consumerism trump real human values in our effort to build a just and humane society. Winner takes all. And for those of you who are already sicking on me the Politically Correct Thought Police for being anti-immigrant, I will ask you please to reread what I have just written, my little mouth breathers, and you will find that I am not at all anti-immigrant. I am anti-selfishness and anti-stupidity and I don't care whether that's coming from a homegrown tenth generation Canadian, or the guy who just got off the plane from Manila. When you descend to being mean-spirited stupid and nasty, especially to vulnerable populations, then you are going to be fair game on this blog. I will spare you no quarter, show no mercy, I am taking no prisoners! One of the many little insults I have to cope with in y job, is the fact that the mental health teams that contract my services give us peer support workers the most difficult and challenging clients to work with, unsupported, out in the community, and they still expect us to believe that fourteen dollars an hour is a living wage! Sure, we've just been granted a whopping two dollar raise, but only because the government was already raising the minimum wage, and this put a gun to my employers' head. But this mentality is so pervasive, and so like the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, that I just simply want at times like this to vomit all over my keyboard, but I do want to get this written so I will hold my stomach. In the meantime, dearies, let me give you this little koan to think about: what does one make of a nation, society, a culture where someone will spend their entire adult lives taking care of sick, traumatized and homeless and unwanted people, as I have. In my twenties and thirties as a home support worker, I gave support and comfort to the dying and their families and friends, cleaned up their messes, made sure they were eating properly, attended to their personal care, and offered ongoing support and friendship while connecting them to other relevant care and support, all for a scandalously low wage, and then several years more in street ministry, befriending and comforting the unwanted who were dying from AIDS and other causes, befriending survivors of child abuse of all genders stranded in the survival sex trade and connecting them with relevant help and services where possible, and now, in mental health support services, mentoring and supporting others, some profoundly ill and challenged, towards improving their quality of life and finding some sense of meaning in their lives, keeping them out of hospital, and from spiralling downward into suicidal ideation, All these things I did for low wages, or for nothing. All these kinds of work, whether paid or not, I did for love. I did not go into other vocational training or post-secondary education for the simple reason that those things were unaffordable and unavailable to me, because I lacked even the most basic family support to help sustain me while not earning income in order to study, not to mention coping with high tuition, nor having the emotional strength to balance night classes with daytime work, especially in the stressful work I have been doing. Where is my reward? Why am I expected to shut up and put up with government subsidized housing for the rest of my life in an unsafe neighbourhood? Why can other people completely Hoover out of existence any sense of compassion, empathy or social conscience in order to make shitloads of money in industries of greed, and they get to have lovely homes in beautiful neighbourhoods and the privilege of retiring well and in comfort. I am not complaining, I have done better than many others in my situation, but we are not valued and we are doing work that is of infinitely higher value than those swine who work in banks or for corporations. We deserve better than this, and our way of thinking and our values of greed and selfishness have to be challenged and undermined. We have to start embracing true human values if we don't want to push our species and many others past the threshold of extinction.