When there is no gratitude

       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)