Life as Performance Art 39

For those of you who want to know why I am counting the days before I get my full pension, I have one explanation: as a contracted worker, I have absolutely no job security, which simply adds insult onto the low wage (14 dollars an hour and maybe a raise to 15 next year) that I'm already stuck with. Yes, I am grateful that I have a job, and at least I live in social housing so I can pay my rent, eat and save money, etc. But there are still no guarantees. One of my supervisors has just gone off for three weeks vacation, slowing down the process of my taking on new clients. My supervisors in the other two sites where I work, I am still waiting to hear from them about new clients. Quite simply, if I don't get clients, I don't get paid. If I don't get paid, I don't eat. Simple. So, in less than two years, I will be free from this clinging anxiety about money because by then, when I am sixty-five, I will have a guaranteed income. I have been living with this anxiety all of my working life, and this is the crappy hand that gets dealt to a lot of low income contract workers. Having been homeless for the better part of one year has also done its share to help making me nervous about my financial situation. I simply don't want to go there again, and with housing being so tight and expensive in this city, and homelessness still a crisis, I am often even more nervous than before. The priest in my church doesn't have a clue what this is like, for the simple reason that she has always enjoyed privilege, and I think this is why I get particularly annoyed when she and other privileged and well-incomed white folk simply assume that me, being a Caucasian male, am also going to enjoy the same privilege that she and others take for granted. But I have never lived inside their little bourgois bubble, and I certainly don't envy them for it. During her sermon on Sunday she referred to herself as a settler living in this country. More politically correct nonsense brought on by the wholesale guilt the Anglican Church of Canada has bought into for all its righteous grandstanding and public breast-beating about the way they treated indigenous peoples. I suppose I would be more on board if it didn't seem like such a hair-shirted show. But really, I am not a settler. I was born in this country. My parents were not settlers. They were born in this country. My maternal grandparents were not settlers. They were born in this country. My paternal grandparents were brought here as children, making them de facto settlers, I would imagine. Does that make my living here every bit as legitimate as it does for First Nations People? I really don't know. None of us has much control over where we were born, so neither should we be held accountable. As a white person do I owe indigenous people anything? Well, I owe them respect. They were here first, and like it or not, regardless of my relationship to them, they have been horribly and brutally treated and traumatized by white people. Am I part of this? No. I didn't treat them this way, neither have I ever benefited from so-called white privilege, which does seem to be a fact of life for some (usually the ones with money and social advantages), but not for all Caucasians. I have always been poor. And marginalized. So, I feel actually more on board with aboriginals than with other white folk. But no one is going to believe me because of my skin colour, which is to say that there is still racism in Canada, and some of it is also directed towards white folk, if they happen to be poor and not very successful, I mean. But neither do I feel comfortable living in Canada, for all its advantages and stability. I have always felt like a squatter here, not because I'm a settler (which I am not) nor because my grandparents or great grandparents might be termed as settlers. But maybe it's because Canada for me, is little more than a polite and beautiful fiction, cobbled together by arrogant European males who thought it their duty to suppress and wipe from the history sheets any trace of the indigenous presence and history that is the real Canada. Maybe I won't call myself a settler, but this is primarily because I categorically reject anyone's attempt to define who I am according to their terms or labelling, and not for a lack of respect for the first people who lived in this land. In another 657 days, I can stop worrying. I will then be eligible for full pension. Will I continue to work? Part-time, maybe, but at least I will no longer have to live with anxiety about pay and survival.