Collective trauma: The Fallout 24

This is one of the most egregious manifestations of our Collective Trauma as humans: income inequality. The poor we have always had with us, and always will. And also the obscenely wealthy. I am thinking today of George Macdonald, the Scottish theologian and adult and children's fantasy writer of the nineteenth century and his novel "Lilith". the story is about a young heir to his father's estate who finds his way to another realm through a mirror in his attic. This is like an allegory of Purgatory and he discovers the place where all dead souls go to sleep and is befriended by the people who care for the dead. He ends up wandering through this realm where he discovers a community of small children, whom he calls the Lovers. They live on sweet small fruits that they harvest from bushes. There is also a grove of trees that grow large bitter apples. If a child eats one of those apples he becomes big and stupid and fat, and very selfish and mean. He becomes part of the community of the other Bags, who pride themselves on becoming fat and wealthy. It is later revealed that the children have all been rescued from the cruel and evil she-demon, Lilith, from the city of Bulika, where being poor is considered a crime and the poor are driven out or exterminated. This does provide us with an interesting metaphor of how the poor are generally treated even in enlightened and progressive Canada. I've actually had the dubious pleasure of knowing people rather like the Bags or the citizens of Bulika. One particularly nasty young woman stands out in my mind. She was the twenty-two year old daughter of a wealthy woman in the church I was then attending who invited some of us to her lovely West Side home for Christmas dinner. This lady was a lovely person who did tons of volunteer work and charity donations to the poor and homeless, so it is a mystery to me how she could wind up with such a tragic offspring, and you know what they say, the fruit doesn't rot far from the tree, or something like that. The daughter herself, looked like my image of one of the Bags. She was obese with a very blank, rather stupid expression but for her squinty and conniving eyes. When she heard that I was then working in a homeless shelter she began weighing into her bitter invective against the poor and homeless, that they were all lazy parasites who didn't deserve anything and all the other lies and horrible stereotypes that we are already too familiar with. I never saw this poor excuse for a human again, except once on South Granville. I'm sure that was her towering above the traffic in her black SUV, stuffing her pie-hole with chips. I haven't seen her since, and I hope I never do. This inequality is the bitter fruit of a human species so preoccupied in its own advancement and individual power and pleasures, that it is a cruel task to try to get any sense of community with us. Add to this the other side of our nature: our incurable need for one another, to belong and to participate and you have some real conflict and neurosis brewing. We want to be successful and powerful individuals in complete control of our lives and destinies. We cannot live without one another. No matter how hard we try to split from the collective, our instinctive and primal longings to belong and to be part of a greater whole will always win out in the end. The human ego is rather a vile and nasty piece of work, though, isn't it, Gentle Reader? And now we have a coalition of antipoverty groups mobbing Prime Minister Junior to get off his pretty heiny and start doing something about entrenching the rights of people for housing in this country. We want housing to be declared a human right in Canada, just as it is a human right in many other developed nations, and just as this is an internationally UN ratified human right. Junior has refused, so far, to consider ratifying housing as a constitutional human right in this country. His excuse? He is afraid of the lawsuits coming from those who should have been housed and weren't. Prime Minister Chicken Shit. Like all pretty boys, Justin Trudeau is a coward. This is the fallout of our greedy and viciously competitive society. This is the end-result, not of a dog-eat-dog world, but buying into that perception that it is a dog-eat-dog world. This is a projection of trauma. Our species has survived a very rough beginning and the trauma of surviving and thriving against all odds is encoded into our genes, but this has also turned what could have potentially been one of the most noble and beautiful creations of God into one of the most vile and rapacious. We are also by far the most intelligent species. Pretty scary, eh?