Collective Trauma: The Fallout 12

If you have ever been poor enough in this country to need to get, to apply for, and to get on welfare, then you will know exactly what I'm talking about when I mention that our whole system of government is but a smiley face descendent of our human species' legacy of fear, greed, violence and hate. No one feels quite so hated and rejected as those who find themselves poor in a rich country. You are immediately blamed for your poverty. You are judged: as lazy, not working hard enough, stupid, mentally ill, anti-social, a complete loser. Those who have made it, no matter what kind of help and supports they enjoyed from others: family, spouses, friends, professional organizations, scholarships, government-sponsored programs, and simple good luck and open doors, will brag that they did it all by their sweet little lonesome without any help from anyone, and successful immigrants are particularly obnoxious braggarts when it comes to this. It is all about competing, competing well, and if you don't have what it takes, then who is going to care a rat's derriere about you? I know this from my own experience on welfare. My inability to find enough work to keep me afloat left me with no option but to quit my job. Knowing that would make it very difficult for me to get assistance, I tried to hustle with selling my art and house-cleaning, but very little gelled for me during that era. Within a year I was homeless, and within another year I was on social assistance. They treat us at best like unconvicted persons, at worst like criminals out to defraud the system. From the very beginning it is a humiliating and degrading process and you are penalized with wait times, delays, and they have to see every single document that will prove that you have no savings, no job prospects and nothing for next month's rent. And all this time it will be assumed that really you don't deserve help and you are made to feel like pond scum for being in need in the first place. And if the paltry assistance check that they give you of $710 doesn't even cover your rent and you are out on the street no one is going to care. And you will have to live with that stigma for the rest of your life because people in this country hate people on welfare, they hate the poor, they hate so-called losers, because they are themselves deeply afraid that it could also happen to them and simply no one is going to name that elephant no matter how high its feces pile up in the living room. So, instead, those who are already hurt and vulnerable get scapegoated and the stigma is likely to keep them down and vulnerable to mental illness and addictions for the rest of their shortened lives. If you are a white male and on welfare, or worse, if you have no resource left but to beg on the streets because you have been turned down for welfare and you have too much honour to steal or sell your body for sex, then you are going to be particularly harshly judged. After all, being white gives you privilege, doesn't it? Being male gives you power and status, no? and because we are too unimaginative, too intellectually lazy, and simply too stuck in our judgements and prejudices, we write them off as lazy parasites, not considering that they are likely, victims of bad luck, bad treatment from abusive bosses, survivors of childhood sexual abuse, brain injury, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety, trauma, addictions, or their spouse or partner has kicked them out on the street, that they simply cannot move forward without help. Because we are still stuck in our own collective survival trauma, made all the worse by brutal global capitalism, we are living at a severe compassion deficit. We need to be more than just a land of opportunity. We need to become a people of compassion, and we are not a people of compassion. We judge and kick those who are already down, unless they fit neatly prescribed categories of persons worthy of our empathy, and those categories are few and very narrow. During my year working at Lookout in their homeless shelters I found it interesting that the majority of our clients passing through our doors were white males. Next were aboriginals of all genders, some forty percent of the shelter population, and a very high statistic given that aboriginals make up three percent of the general population. There were very few Asian or Indo Canadians, no Jewish Canadians and very few Latinos. Which for me begs the question, why do people from other racially profiled and mistreated populations still tend to do well and thrive here, while white people and, worse, aboriginals, don't. I imagine the reasons are very complex but I still wonder what we need to learn from our Asian, Latino, Jewish and Indo-Canadian brethren. I imagine that it could have something to do with how we raise our children, of how loved and valued they feel by their parents. My father hated me, my mother divorced his ass when I was thirteen and everything spiralled downward from there. My older brother did okay, I didn't. My father loved and helped my older brother. His nickname for me (my father) when he wasn't sexually molesting me? Elephant Belly. Among other terms of endearment. Mom was too busy trying to get by on her considerable sex appeal to be much of a parent, I'm afraid, by the way. I'm sure that it hasn't been a lot better in many other white Canadian families. A lot of them just don't know how to parent. I saw this one day, some thirty years ago in a grocery lineup. A very harried looking working class white mom in the next lineup was almost yelling at her little girl to stop asking her to buy candy for her. It turned into quite an unpleasant spectacle as white trash mommy kept butting heads like that with her little girl. Just in front of me an Asian man, Chinese I think, was holding his little boy in his arms. The little boy pointed to a roll of candies. His daddy picked it up, unwrapped it, and gave his smiling pride and joy a candy to suck on. Both were smiling. Both were beaming. End of story. No comments, please.