History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Nine

History May Be Partly Bunk by Dave Jaffe. Part Nine.




      One thing has let me live to the age of 77 and it's not events from history.. It's just plain luck.
"It's better to be lucky than good," tennis instructor Chris Wilson played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers says in effect in Woody Allen's film 'Match Point'. At times I've tried to be good. Yet near my life's end, I realize how important luck is.
    First off, both of my parents were nearly killed by German flying rockets in World War Two England. Yet luckily they weren't hit and they both survived. So I grew up with two parents. Not all children in post World War Two England were as lucky. Then for the first eight years of my life, I lived a middle class lifestyle and went to a private school. Soon my parents lost all their money. With me and two sisters in tow, my parents trekked across the Atlantic Ocean and through poverty stricken times in 1950's Montreal.
     Yet even when we were poor neither my mother or father descended into drug addiction, gambling or alcoholism. My parents never abused me although a nurse I had as a baby did hurt me. My father hit me twice through my entire life. My mother never hit me and nearly always supported me. The British psychiatrist Donald Winnicott said his work had been driven, "by the urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother. " My mother wasn't a very warm person. Yet she gave me love and many gifts. She was a good mother.
    In the world outside my sometimes unstable family, I was lucky too. For in the end I was living in very prosperous times. From the 1940's to the late 1970's, the western world went through one of the greatest economic booms in history. This boom in the end, at last lifted my family out of poverty again.
     Then, too, in the 1960's, the federal Liberal government built up a welfare state. They set up a national medicare plan. a Canada Pension Plan for seniors, a Canada Assistance Plan that guaranteed five rights for welfare recipients and two other payment systems for the aged. Under  prime ministers Lester Pearson and Pierre Elliot Trudeau the Canadian government helped build tens of thousands of units of social housing.
    In Quebec the so-called 'Quiet Revolution in the 1960's, the Quebec government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into post secondary education. If they hadn't done that, I never would have gone to McGill University.
      "The age of big government is over," U.S. president Bill Clinton said in the 1990's as he hacked away at programs that helped the poor and the lower paid working class. Yet in the 1960's when I was young governments all over the western world built up social programs. In the 1990's many governments tore holes in the social safety net. Yet the programs set up in the 1960's helped my survive and grow.
     Another thing helped my immensely and that was the so called 'miracle drugs' that came on stream in the 1940's and later.  Penicillin, streptomycin and the polio vaccines extended my life and saved me and  many others from an early grave.