When There is no Gratitude
"If you've come to this world to hear the words 'Thank You', you've come to the wrong world," said Billy Taylor, a Cree First Nations person.
Taylor and his people had fought battles - most of them peacefully - against the giant public utility firm called Hydro Quebec. From the 1960's on, Hydro Quebec built huge dams on traditional Cree land in northern Quebec. The Cree foiled some of Hydro's plans. But only some. Taylor led part of the Cree fightback. If he failed sometimes I'm sure some of the Cree nation put him down. Then he must have realized that some people don't thank you, or show little gratitude for your past efforts.
A few weeks ago one poor person on Vancouver's downtown eastside, put down Jean Swanson, a veteran anti-poverty activist."Jean Swanson's a poverty pimp," he said. In short, Swanson made money on the backs of poor people. This is totally untrue. Swanson has spent 40 years on the downtown eastside, a low income place that is now morphing into yet another place of upscale condominiums.
Swanson lives in a modest housing co-op apartment on Vancouver's northeast area. She has, I'm sure, saved some money. Yet she's far from rich and surely made no fortune from her anti-poverty work.
In the early 1990's, a group of poor people, led by a convicted bank robber, put out a paper that accused Jean Swanson of being a poverty pimp. This group of people have long vanished. Yet poor people, like richer folk,often show no gratitude to people who tried to help them.
Some bus drivers are no different from some poor people. "Gratitude," is defined by 'Webster's Dictionary' as "Thankfulness'. Yet not all people or unionized workers thank or vote for people that help them.
The 3,000 members who make up the bus drivers and mechanics in Metro Vancouver owe their jobs and their slightly above average wages to the long ago NDP government of Dave Barrett. Jim Lorimer, who was Barrett's Minister of Municipal Affairs, ordered close to 100 new buses for Metro Vancouver, not long after he took on the cabinet post. Lorimer set the stage for a true public transportation system in Metro Vancouver.
Before this some trolleys and a few busus trundled City of vancouver streets. A scattering of buses every hour or so servced the growing suburbs that ringed Vancouver. But that was it. "You sure don't have too many buses here," a visitor from Montreal said in the spring of 1972.
Jim Lorimer changed all that. He hired public transit experts to plan new bus lines. When he ordered new buses he also hired new bus drivers and mechanics to drive and repair them.So more people found jobs in transit.
Soon new buses shot back and forth between Vancouver and suburbs like Burnaby, Richmond, New Westminster and other places,. Though Dave Barrett's government lasted a bare three years and three months in power, Lorimer's planners set the stage for transit systems and buses in smaller towns and cities across B.C.
In 1975, for example, the north Okanagan city of Vernon had no publicly-run buses. But by the late 1980's it did. Buses soon ran up and down the streets of Fraser valley cities of Abbotsford, Chilliwack and other places. So Dave Barrett's short-lived government laid the groundwork for a modern bus system. Yet this means nothing to so many bus drivers to-day.
Over 40 years after the time Dave Barrett was premier of B.C. a man I'll call Frank, drove buses all across Metro Vancouver. A big, chunky man, Frank lives in a big suburban home. He owns
two cars, numerous electronic appliances and has taken many holidays in Europe and elsewhere.
He couldn't have done all this as a worker if Dave Barrett's government hadn't come along. Yet Frank has never voted NDP and never will. "I don't believe in socialism," he said in 2013. "No way. I'm a free enterprise man all the way."
Ron comes from the sunny Okanagan. In the B.C. election of 2013 he voted for the Liberals too. And so did other drivers like Ujjal, Hank, Sara, Jean and many other bus drivers. (The are not their real names).
Many of these people know little or nothing about the N.D.P.'s creation of a modern bus system. Yet I think that even if they did, they would still vote for the right wing Liberal party. They surely won't vote N.D.P.
"I'd say about half the bus drivers voted Liberal in 2013," says a man I'll call Merinder. Another big husky driver, this man has never voted for the N.D.P.
So good deeds in politics don't always lead to people voting for your party. The N.D.P. in B.C. found that out in 2013 and earlier than that. There's often no gratitude in politics.
(end of Part One)
Wednesday 31 December 2014
Monday 29 December 2014
Another Mind-Body Book
'When The Body Says No' by Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D., Vintage Canada, 2004. 306pp.
Gabor Mate, a doctor of medicine, has carved out another career as a writer. His book 'When The Body Says No' urges people to see the mind-body illness connection in a new
way.
"Repression of anger increases the risk of cancer," writes the Vancouver-based doctor. "It magnifies exposure to psychological stress." And psychological stress, Mate points out, lies behind many other illnesses too, like sclerdoma, multiple sclerosis or M.S., amytrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease as it's called, and types of cancer.
Here the doctor is leaning on the ideas of Dr. Hans Selye, who Mate co-dedicates the book to. 50 years ago Selye pioneered the ideas that stress lies behind many illnesses. The book forced me once again to look back at my own childhood and adolescence. For 'When The Body Says No' is chockful of patients whose early years like my own, were far from ideal.
And these patients later became victims of cancer, skin diseases and so on. My family like many others was a breeding ground for stress and illnesses. My father was an Orthodox Jew, though not a Hassidim Jew. Still he believed in every word of the Old Testament. He was at times a warm caring man but he could also erupt into frightening spasms of anger.
My mother was a long suffering woman from an upper middle class English family. "your father gave her warmth and love," one of my father's future partners said. My mother surely needed both of these emotions. For her father was a tyrant who drove his wife to deafness by his constant shouting.
Many of the patients in the book remind me of my mother. She nearly always put other people's needs ahead of her own needs. She died of breast cancer in the late 1960's of breast cancer. She was only 50 or so. My younger sister Valerie died at about the same time at the age of 20. I still feel that the estrogen-dosed birth control pills caused the stroke that killed her.
I didn't mourn my sister and mother when they died. As a result, when my dad died about 15 years later, I was seized by rage and great feelings of sadness. Then I started to mourn for my three dead family members. Yet I still blamed my father for the poverty our family endured from the early 1950's to the mid-1960's. And for many years I ended up like my father, full of rage and arguing with everybody.
"David is still fighting with his father," a woman said about me after I had a terrible argument with her.
All of this was brought back to me while reading this book. It took me down memory lane and often I erupted in rage and sadness after reading some pages. Dr. Mate by the way, likes anger but not rage.
"Health rests on three pillars," he points out near the book's end. " They are the body, the psyche and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to ignore imbalance and dis-ease."
Gabor Mate touches on all three pillars and opened my mind once again, to the connections between emotions and illness, not only in my own life, but the lives of many others. Though ten years old now, it's still a fine book.
Gabor Mate, a doctor of medicine, has carved out another career as a writer. His book 'When The Body Says No' urges people to see the mind-body illness connection in a new
way.
"Repression of anger increases the risk of cancer," writes the Vancouver-based doctor. "It magnifies exposure to psychological stress." And psychological stress, Mate points out, lies behind many other illnesses too, like sclerdoma, multiple sclerosis or M.S., amytrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease as it's called, and types of cancer.
Here the doctor is leaning on the ideas of Dr. Hans Selye, who Mate co-dedicates the book to. 50 years ago Selye pioneered the ideas that stress lies behind many illnesses. The book forced me once again to look back at my own childhood and adolescence. For 'When The Body Says No' is chockful of patients whose early years like my own, were far from ideal.
And these patients later became victims of cancer, skin diseases and so on. My family like many others was a breeding ground for stress and illnesses. My father was an Orthodox Jew, though not a Hassidim Jew. Still he believed in every word of the Old Testament. He was at times a warm caring man but he could also erupt into frightening spasms of anger.
My mother was a long suffering woman from an upper middle class English family. "your father gave her warmth and love," one of my father's future partners said. My mother surely needed both of these emotions. For her father was a tyrant who drove his wife to deafness by his constant shouting.
Many of the patients in the book remind me of my mother. She nearly always put other people's needs ahead of her own needs. She died of breast cancer in the late 1960's of breast cancer. She was only 50 or so. My younger sister Valerie died at about the same time at the age of 20. I still feel that the estrogen-dosed birth control pills caused the stroke that killed her.
I didn't mourn my sister and mother when they died. As a result, when my dad died about 15 years later, I was seized by rage and great feelings of sadness. Then I started to mourn for my three dead family members. Yet I still blamed my father for the poverty our family endured from the early 1950's to the mid-1960's. And for many years I ended up like my father, full of rage and arguing with everybody.
"David is still fighting with his father," a woman said about me after I had a terrible argument with her.
All of this was brought back to me while reading this book. It took me down memory lane and often I erupted in rage and sadness after reading some pages. Dr. Mate by the way, likes anger but not rage.
"Health rests on three pillars," he points out near the book's end. " They are the body, the psyche and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to ignore imbalance and dis-ease."
Gabor Mate touches on all three pillars and opened my mind once again, to the connections between emotions and illness, not only in my own life, but the lives of many others. Though ten years old now, it's still a fine book.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)