I’m probably going to the hospital. Want to not go to the one nearest me because, well, anyone who knows my story could guess but…it’s the exact same emergency room that my loved one spent her last hours in.
Is this about me? Yes and no. It’s like being swept into the sea and experiencing something dreadful along with everyone else on board the White Star Line ship, the RMS Titanic. I know no more than anyone else, but I’m aware of how awful it became.
I hurt my back three days ago trying to move some furniture, including throwing out some heavy stuff. Last night at work, and three days after the event, a single sneeze made me almost drop to my knees in pain.
Now, 15 years ago, I’d just go to a walk-in clinic. A frozen yogurt machine took my fingernail off at work, and my parents drove me to the one in Oak Bay. In one hour I was out the door, headed home.
That’s the stuff of fantasy now.
My dad and grandfather did one job out of high-school that they would retire on with the house, the wife, the 2/3 kids. That’s fantasy too.
I lived off one 40 hour a week minimum wage job for ages from the early 90s to around 2010. Fantasy again. Folks who live on disability incomes talk about having a pension that was enough to be ok. All fantasy.
Economic uncertainty and the neoliberal destruction of every single commons, every thing standing between people and the ravages of the market doesn’t excuse every horrible thing but it gives people a much stronger predilection to listen to those populist voices. It gives a good reason and the incentives to those who have over simplified reasons to how it all went wrong, to point at migrants, low income workers, people being suddenly and inexplicably “lazy”.
Meanwhile, we have, and it wasn’t just Professor Guy Standing, who has hinted this way…financialization more than taking over our economy. Professor Standing is sort of a hero in the movement for basic income but as he explained, as we entered the 2000s it became a “Faustian Bargain” of cheap credit. I noticed how I never was considered for a credit card and suddenly, like many others, was. You have employers running businesses on lines of credit. You have other examples of easing of stress tests which normally would say no. But they said no when people had more standard options for getting by. That’s why 2008 was so bad. Everything was a house of cards built on other houses of cards. When one shock occurs its like a card removed. Boom.
Like I’ve said, probably anyways, before… it’s like punching a hole in one end of a boat, running to the other end and saying, “Well, I’m fine.” Not really. Like our healthcare system, so much of it is negatively affected by every thing around you whether you drive a Ferrari or a used bicycle.
Someone on Facebook recently was talking about street level parking (I have to consider this as my wait time could easily overtake 8 hours). They showed a picture of the big parking lot we had in Victoria before the building of the Victoria Conference Center. The claim is that this would bring back better activity. Only one problem…the same financialization and commodification I mentioned before. Over at Value Village you see this in spades. A once free public parking area is now essentially cut into 1/3 paid parking, 2/3 reserved. Couple this with people with less time through working more, “traffic calming” of closing off roads permanently, the squeeze of bike lanes that help some and not all and the ability for working people to feel frustration should not be completely bewildering. I explained this in my blog Climate Action is like a runaway Dentist. Progressive ideas are great but only if everyone actually is better off and if people start feeling like things are getting easier and simpler. That hasn’t happened. People feel more under fire and they are looking for the cause.
Blowing it off or saying “they’re uneducated” isn’t going to help. It’s like Clinton using the phrase “deplorables”. It’s no wonder that the wealthy wife of the president who “ended welfare as they knew it” ended up with working class people proudly calling themselves that. Less than eight years prior, they saw their housing annihilated.
We need a politics of hope. We need to bring in not just basic income but other displays of the government trying to work with its people and not in judge and jury of them…certainly not ignoring and blocking them! When your system is based on suspicion, confrontation and tests to find out if people are the good ones or the bad ones it sets a government already not trusted by its people against the same people!
We need to build trust and we can start somewhere. We right now provide zero trust unconditionally and universally as a right.
We can change that.
Thanks for reading!
Tom
Tom the BI Vic BC Guy 