Life As Performance Art 105

Most Canadians, who have never been poor or had to rely on social assistance in their lives, really get poverty. They usually do not have relatives or friends who are poor, and certainly not coworkers. They go on living in their middle class bubble, full of their middle class frustrations, vexed by middle class neuroses while also enjoying and taking for granted middle class pleasures and privilege. To them, and the Anglican Church is almost exclusively made up of this class of human, people like me either don't exist or aren't supposed to exist. Or we exist as recipients of their charity. But never friendship. This is Canada, they muse, the land of opportunity, flowing with milk and honey. You work hard, you get ahead, you go from entry level, low paying work into something better, you go to university, vocational training, you get ahead. You get married, buy a house, raise a family, and everything will be hunkey dorey. Only if you fail to play by these simple rules of hard work and diligence will you fail and then you will have only yourself to blame. You didn't work hard enough. If only it were that simple. A friend of mine even recently tried to give me the pull yourself up by your bootstraps horse shit, which is exactly what it is. Nice if you have a pair of boots. And if you don't? He was not able to reply. I have been poor all my life. Mostly, I have worked at low paid jobs, just keeping things together, until government cutbacks and other changes beyond my control made secure and reliable work all the more difficult to come by. I was not able to finish my postsecondary education for the simple reason that I did not have the bank of Mom and Dad to rely on. My mother herself was just getting by and my father was incredibly selfish (they divorced when I was thirteen). Living at home was not an option, not after high school. It was sink or swim. Neither could I juggle work and college. Too stressful, and when I finally had to leave in order to work full time and pay the rent every month, I was so hounded by collection agencies to pay back my modest government student loan, that it became traumatizing. I only managed to pay them off twelve years later, when for a little while I was flush with money. I am not the only Canadian who has been derailed by these kinds of roadblocks. But we are not supposed to exist. We are not granted help with the most basic necessities, such as dental coverage, for example, because we do not fit the myth of Canadian upward mobility. We are a stain on the national reputation. We expose and esplode as bullshit the national myth. They don't like people like us. So, they just hope that we stay quiet, and will just quietly die on the margins and do nothing to further embarrass them. But some of us, like me, are not going to go out quietly. I have come out relatively okay. I am in government subsidized housing and work at emotionally rewarding if poorly remunerated work. In many ways I am stranded by my situation, and I have had to live and act creatively in order to extract the most from it. Not easy. I don't think that anyone in my church really knows what it is like having to live constantly and permanently on a tight budget. They all seem very much blinded by their privilege and it seems almost impossible to wake them up about it. I'm not even sure if it's worth the effort. But I am not going quietly. I am going to continue to be in their face until they either start to question and challenge their privilege, or until they throw me out of their church. Right now, all bets are off.