Austerity isn't on the horizon, it's smack in our faces.

Early this morning at breakfast, the sky was the colour soot and for the first time since last year, snow fell to the ground. It was plus twenty last week, and today the temperature sits at zero like a dog who refuses to budge, no matter how hard you tug on its lead to walk on. The homeless in my area have a second sense for harsh weather because yesterday, I saw some of them furtively carrying bags of firewood to their encampment- which is located in the green space on the edge of the city.

Meanwhile, on our Main Street, municipal workers began erecting decorations for capitalism's annual six-week-long festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus, their fourth-quarter profits saviour. Like local governments everywhere, ours will ensure that come hell or high water, the homeless don’t disrupt the mood of merriment with their poverty. So, they will be shooed from sight. It’s bad for business- although great for the business of irony, considering Jesus' parents were unhoused and unwanted at the time of his birth.

I never liked November, even before it became the month my dad died in, four years ago. It is a month when the light fades into the grey of winter.

The cost-of-living crisis is grim enough in summer. But with winter approaching along with a recession that promises to be remorseless to anyone not firmly ensconced in the middle class with their mortgage paid in full, the outlook is unsettling. We are on a political and economic road where all the signs for approaching disaster are clearly marked. Food banks are running out of food, personal credit is running short owing to interest rate hikes and for a large swath of people keeping housed costs them close to 50% of their take-home pay.

Governments haven’t declared it aloud because they know it upsets the citizenry. But their purse strings are shut to both the ordinary and vulnerable person despite increasing desperation caused by inflation, high-interest rates, a housing shortage combined with excessive rents, low wages, prolonged sicknesses created by Covid and the reluctance of rich politicians to tax their wealthier friends and allies.

Austerity is not on the horizon; it is smack in our faces. Government workers outside of politicians aren’t getting the pay increases they not only deserve but need to live a dignified life. Universally governments are steadfast in denying real pay wage increases to nurses during these rough economic times. They refuse to provide a living wage to the individuals who continue to save our society from total collapse. Nurses kept us alive through these years of plague at enormous cost to their health and economic well-being. They kept me alive; when I was treated for cancer at the start of Covid, and they did it under the most trying circumstances. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, Nurses will tend to the sick, the dying, and the grieving in conditions that are as harsh as wartime. Our governments not only underfunded nurses with inadequate wages, but they did the same to all healthcare workers, from porters to PSWs and everyone in between. Underfunding didn't stop at human resources because governments, at least in Canada, short-changed the physical infrastructure of the healthcare system. It is commonplace for communities to publicly fundraise or seek corporate funds to purchase additional Catscan or dialysis machines for their hospitals to improve their citizens' chances of survival from sickness rather than demand government increase taxes on the wealthy.

The ulterior motive for underfunding healthcare isn't a mystery. This was always about returning healthcare systems to the 1%. So, they can own us like beasts of burden from womb to tomb and make us turn their profits with the docility of an ox pulling a plough in a season of sowing.

Governments have endless cash for road construction, ensuring our extinction from the climate emergency, or feeding the war in Ukraine with armaments. But there is nothing ever left to keep democracy safe at home through maintaining, improving, and increasing the social safety net. The chickens will be soon home to roost. By 2023, the centenary of my dad’s birth public healthcare will be in hospice. Only persistent resistance can stop our frog march to a totally monetised society controlled by the 1% and enforced by fascism. Our choices are bleak; fight for a return to a real democracy where all benefit, not just the top ten per cent of income earners or have our hopes and dreams extinguished by this cost of living crisis created to benefit the entitled. We must demonstrate to our politicians and the entitled; we are unwilling to lose our birth right: public health, public education, the right to clean water, the right to housing, and the right to adequate state benefits when we are too ill, either physically or mentally to work. If we don't; it's the slaughterhouse for us, and I don't mean it metaphorically.

My substack helps preserve the legacy of my dad Harry Leslie Smith who was the World's Oldest Rebel until his death on Nov 28, 2018. It also is a chronicle about today’s politics and living on the edge during a Cost of Living Crisis not seen in decades. Our times are the direst since the 1930s, and I aim to document them for as long as I can. You can subscribe for free or pay if you like both to help maintain his legacy because if Twitter goes, it will be a harder job

Photo by Elter Eric on Unsplash