Waking The Dead 8

Sometimes on weekends I listen to a morning radio program on the CBC called North by Northwest. I have nicknamed this program "The Twee Hour" because the host and the content are very twee indeed. I imagine that this is going to be the perfect soporific of classical and folk music and commentaries about the arts and gardening and charity work, and gourmet food and lovely restaurants, and travel, and music and literature and it is just a little bit cultured and so sweet and nice and cheerful and well-mannered and oh so very twee! I sometimes get rather annoyed with the host because they often seem to pretend that poor and homeless and low-income people don't even exist, and that everyone in Vancouver earns more than a living wage and that all those who are retired own their own lovely little (and big) homes, and isn`t the world a lovely and rose and rainbow tinted place for all the privileged folk that abound. I also get particularly annoyed with their segments and interviews about beer, wine and spirits. The CBC has become notorious for pushing booze on Canadians, I think largely because they get a lot of advertising revenue from Big Liquor, and this is also so socially irresponsible, as I just wrote this morning in an email to the host of said program. She never responds, by the way, and that's probably because I'm always right and she doesn't want to admit it. Our culture of alcoholism is problematic on so many fronts and levels, but succinctly, Gentle Reader, it is such a socially acceptable, and encouraged and endorsed addiction, that almost no one wants to name this elephant in the room, no matter how high its piles of shit are festering over the hardwood and broadloom. people love their booze, it seems, every bit as much as they love their cars, and no matter the public health warnings, everyone wants the right to get stinking shitface drunk, or at least acceptably sozzled to their little hearts' content, hang the consequences and my oh my but who is going to flush this toilet we are all soaking in while pretending to be a big beautiful hot tub? So it goes, with what I believe to be our number one obstacle to most of us ever becoming fully human: nobody wants to face their pain. We are all born in painful and limited circumstances, even the most privileged and advantaged among us, because regardless of how much our parents try to shelter us from ugly reality and raise us to be perfect little liberals or capitalists or both, we are all little more than the damaged offspring of damaged parents who are themselves the progeny of damaged parents, and the beat goes on. And this is equally so, rich or poor, cultured or uneducated, and the only reason why the privileged produce way fewer jailbirds than their less fortunate brethren is for one simple reason: the protections of privilege, and they are many. We don't want to wake up. We don't want to face reality, and we certainly don't want to face ourselves as the damaged, wounded and half-formed little lumps of biomass that we are. Whether with alcohol, illegal drugs, medications, smartphones, Netflix, porn, or pick any one, we are constantly on the lam from ourselves and sooner or later, even if this doesn't come till we're arriving in front of the judgement seat of God, we are going to have to reckon with the small, weak, half-formed and wounded little beggars that we are, yet still with the power of doing great damage to one another and to this earth that nurtures and sustains us.