We're valued for our usefulness. Our productivity. Our utility. It is laced throughout the language we use in describing and assessing one another. Especially conservatives wax on boring ad nauseum about hard-working Canadians. And of course, they especially love hard-working Canadians who by all appearances have become affluent, or at least materially comfortable resulting from the sweat of their brow, or perhaps more from their craft and cunning. No one really mentions how being born into a family of prestige, or at least stability and relative wealth and social and professional connections can help ease one's ride to success.
Of course, no one ever mentions those of us who have worked hard all our lives and still remain stranded in low-paying and soul-destroying work, and coping with the chronic uncertainty of housing instability, or have actually become homeless. Somehow, we get branded as lazy, as parasites on the system, no matter how hard we keep working to survive and at least maintain some sense of dignity. Of course, if we're aboriginal or black, we are given a pass, and everything about our misfortune can be blamed on racialization and colonization.
If you are white and poor, you are considered lazy. Not even the egghead academics at CBC, all who come from families of privilege, and haven't the remotest clue of how a lot of us live, are going to dare acknowledge that maybe a lot of us are poor because there are still some major flaws in our system, that maybe Canada isn't really the cold northern paradise that we purport ourselves to be.
But they never talk about us. We do not serve their propaganda purposes, and CBC, being the government (taxpayer) funded broadcasting corporation, is still above everything else, a Canadian propaganda machine. They cling, like Gollum to his Precious, to the national myths of Canada, and if we do not fit the myth, if our lives have somehow been harmed or damaged by aspects of the myth, then too bad for us. They are never going to mention us on their airwaves. We do not exist, except perhaps as the other: homeless, mentally ill, addicted, but that is such hypocritical phrasing.
I have been homeless, and now I live in social housing. I have never had any addictions. And I have managed to overturn a bogus PTSD diagnosis and actually get on with my life. Am I rich yet, which is of course the way most Canadians tend to mark success? No. Do I want to be rich? Why, when I already have everything that I already need? But even this kind of thinking, which is anti-consumer, and not in the least bit acquisitive or covetous, is so thoroughly un-Canadian, and for even questioning it I am going to be held in suspicion.
Well, for your information, my Ducks, I have worked bloody hard all my life. It is not my fault that there are so many cracks in the system I could fall through, that I was never able to get a university degree, nor persuade any employer to pay me at least a living wage. I did everything I could, everything I was supposed to and this is what I get. Nothing. There are a lot of people like me. And also like me, we have dedicated, and still dedicate our lives and energy to helping and advocating for others, in my case, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted. But we don't get paid very generously for our labours. Sometimes we don't get paid at all, and when we are old, we have only scant government pensions to live on, and if someone is not as fortunate as me to live in BC Housing, then too bad.
So, where is our reward?
How are we being valued?
Where is the love? I'm certainly not feeling it, and those of us who take the trouble to love and care for others seldom are compensated in a way that dignifies and honours how we have dedicated our lives to compensate for the toxic human fallout of the selfishness of the rest of you!
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