Silence has become a great friend of mine
during physical distancing, and in the silence, I find great stillness. I have
termed my time as embracing solitude and learning to be an introverted
extrovert, but it is deeper than that it has been about really understanding my
value system and my boundaries. This past week life threw a curve ball my way
enabling me to dig deeper into understanding those values and boundaries. I sat
on Monday night writing at my dining room table at 9.30pm in the anticipation
of getting into bed and being engulfed by the world of my current book ‘The
Outline Trilogy’ by Rachel Cusk. The stillness and the flickering light of the
candle I wrote by were interrupted only by the sound of dripping water. I
hesitated momentarily not yet comprehending the reality of the sound. I bounded
from my seat only to discover water pouring through the ceiling and wall of my
utility room just off of the bathroom. To briefly provide a summary of the
situation (as it is not the focus of this blog entry but rather the jumping off
point), the water heater in the apartment above had burst and was leaking rusty
water into my utility room. It was negligence on the part of the owner (who
rents out his apartment for an extortionate amount to two girls) as the heater
was 14 years old and in a desperate condition. I have good insurance for my
apartment, but there is a new law in British Columbia that the insurance of the
responsible apartment will not cover the damage caused to the apartment below.
There is no rational explanation to this situation aside from the greed of the
insurance companies (this is partly the focus of this blog entry). So it falls
on me to pay my deductible for a situation that I did not cause. I am sure you
can understand that on Tuesday as all this unfolded, I was an emotional mess, penduluming
back and forth between frustration and tears. I had done nothing wrong and I
was being punished was how it appeared to me.
And so I ask you is that not the situation
for the three million Canadians who lost their jobs in March and April, for the
millions of Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indians, international migrants who
also lost their jobs over the past few months. What have they done wrong? Their
only crime is that they live in a broken economic system, one framed by greed
and Politics.
Obama
was quoted today by the BBC as having said about the response to Covid-19 by
the current US administration, "it would have been bad even with the best
of government. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset -- of
'what's in it for me' and 'to heck with everybody else' -- when that mindset is
operationalized in our government." I am not Obama’s biggest fan, but in
these words I could not agree more. I would contend that Obama could be talking
about most governments in the world right now. The reason being is that governments
are now the enabler for large corporations and the general population are being
held hostage by a handful of individuals. What Covid-19 has taught us is that
most of us are the worker ants and that we are expendable, if the ‘queen ant’
corporation no longer deems us productive. How did we get to this situation?
Well we took away any notion of a universal basic income, we took away decent
healthcare, we took away a good quality of education. The pandemic has exposed
the rotten and decaying healthcare systems across the globe; it has made it
clear that our hairdresser, our barista, our waiter are all living day to day
with nothing to fall back on; it has exposed that this pandemic and all future
pandemics are created by the greed of the elite at the expense of majority; it
has exposed how racist and prejudiced our societies are to people of colour,
the elderly, migrant workers.
In Vancouver last week, Tim Bray a VP for
Amazon resigned in protest at the firing of several Amazon employees for
protesting the treatment of workers during the pandemic. Here we have one of
the richest men in the world, I dislike him so much I refuse to write his name
on my blog, and the workers in his company do not feel physically safe during a
pandemic! Amazon is a terrible employer to begin with and I have boycott using
their services for almost five years now, a statistic I have proud of. Covid-19
has exposed just how atrocious the conditions are for all Amazon employees. You
can now multiple the situation of Amazon workers by millions and billions of
people from the shop assistant at Walmart to the garment worker in Dhaka to the
Chinese worker assembling your next iPhone. Across Europe businesses are beginning
to open up and people are clamoring to book appointments with their hairdresser
and plan their first meal out with friends, and yet the threat of Covid-19 has
not lessened. There is no vaccine, there is no cure, global healthcare systems
have not miraculously improved overnight. In fact, today a top Chinese official
admitted that a less than efficient healthcare system in China is to blame for
the poor containment, reporting and early response to Covid-19 in Wuhan.
In Vancouver the beaches and parks are bursting
with people, an illusion that there is a return to normality as the queues at
the liquor stores continue to astound me. I live in one of the most beautiful
places on earth, but it is a city rotting at the core under the pressure of an
inflated housing market, international money laundering schemes, an
unaffordable daily life for many, and an appalling drug (fentanyl) overdose
problem. Like so many other places people are falling for the illusion of need,
they are victims of advertising, they succumb to the accumulation of stuff. Do I want to go to my hairdresser? Do I want
to have brunch in my favourite spot? Do I want to go for a glass of wine with
friends? Absolutely! But I also want to know that we are relaxing physical distancing
because it is medically the right thing to do and not because big businesses
are telling us to do so. Ask yourself who has profited most from the pandemic?
Do you think big businesses are going to hire back all the workers they let go?
So much now can be automated and done by a machine, and they don’t require
healthcare or basic rights.
I am being extremely cynical I know, but I
think so many do not fully grasp the extent of the black hole we are in. We are
still swirling at the opening, still with an opportunity to make changes,
changes that will improve the lives of people globally and will have a positive
impact on stopping climate change. It all starts with you though. You must
change the way you behave, the way you shop, the way you treat others less
fortunate than yourself, it all starts at the local level and that you have the
power to influence. I cannot fight the insurance companies but I can ensure
that what happened to me this week does not happen to anyone else in my
building by working with my fellow owners to bring in rules regarding our water
heaters. As a building we can show the one owner/landlord who does not care
that he cannot behave like that, that it is unacceptable to take advantage in
the name of making more money. What can you do?
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