Let's Hope, We Can Look the Future in the Eye and Tell Them, "At least we bloody tried to stop our healthcare systems from being privatised by the 1%."
For the past year, I have travelled no farther each day than the distance my legs can take me. Throughout winter, spring, summer, and autumn of 2022, I trudged, rambled, and strolled to and from my apartment and covered a distance of over 5000 kilometres. I have walked further than the length of Canada within the boundaries of my city. These jaunts aren’t lonely because the ghosts of people that were once in my life and now are not because of death or other circumstances kept me company. They tagged along in the back of my imagination while in the front, my plans for my present and future held me to a steady pace through woods and cityscapes.
Walking has kept me sane and relatively healthy during these covid times. It has allowed me to believe I am doing my best to ensure the comorbidities that tenant my body, like unruly house guests, doesn’t cause me to check out from life too prematurely. Some would say my life since covid struck the world and rectal cancer called for me personally is constrained and minimalistic.
I don’t think so because I am still actively doing the work my dad and I began in 2010 to advocate for a future that wasn’t his past for the many. My life has yet to become a summing up. It is certainly more reflective than rushing from airport to airport like I once did to ensure my dad could make his many engagements around the world to remind people that life before the Welfare State was a grim affair for most. Although, I am beginning to believe the whole project should have been called "Tilting at Windmills" rather than "Harry’s Last Stand," considering how the nations of the G7 reset their societies during the chaos of the pandemic to the age of the Robber Baron rather than to the era of the Greatest Generation.
Civilisation didn’t stumble into a dystopia in 2023; it was pushed down a flight of stairs by the elites of this world. Unless you are well-heeled, that should concern you. Personally, I am terrified by it because I know democracy’s greatest threat is the privatisation of its infrastructure specifically healthcare. I know I won’t live long enough to get the old age my father had because not only is my health precarious; but I am without a nest egg as I reach my sixtieth year. To live long now, you need private wealth and the fortunes of fate- along with being a caregiver to my dad for the last ten years of his life- guaranteed me a sunset of short duration.
Neoliberal society doesn’t have a plan for millions of people like me, except that we leave this mortal coil sooner rather than later because we are no longer effective units of labour for the profit margins of the 1%. So many of us became like sweepings on a factory floor to capitalism. But like the 19th century in the time of Dickens or the early 20th century of my dad’s youth, middle-class people and those richer than them have conditioned themselves to ignore the misery that fuels their good times. The despair of the ordinary is always relegated to a footnote in the ledgers of capitalism.
Our suburbs and downtown cores now teem with the homeless like it was in 1930. And like it was 1930, the middle class want the “tramps, bums, hobos, drug addicts” or whatever the negative stereotype is in vogue now to label the homeless put out of sight and out of mind. The homeless are just flotsam from the Welfare State that was scuttled by politicians on the orders of the 1%. I fear bad things will happen to the homeless because, in New York City, the mentally ill on the streets are to be forcibly detained in locked facilities if they are deemed unable to take care of themselves. It’s only a matter of time before corporations will return mental health treatments for the poor to the days of Bedlam for big money.
I sometimes think if only our governments would fight the privatisation of healthcare the way they are fighting Putin; we might pull through. But then I remember, it has been a long time since a government has been in the business of being on the side of the average person. Governments only see the top 15% of income earners as the constituents who need to be treated with kid gloves, whilst everyone else is somebody they assign to a file marked “thoughts and prayers.” Don’t get me wrong, sometimes Governments pay more than lip service to those their politicians would never have as neighbours. Canada did that temporarily with its CERB payments to workers displaced by the pandemic. But it was a one-off and most likely done out of fear that society would collapse into anarchy if there was neither work nor money. Normal was returned prematurely to countries still overwhelmed by Covid because if the majority of your population is underpaid, bread and circuses must be on offer or; else face a mob looking for revolution.
Society’s only chance for a future is when governments stop being controlled by the 1% that dictate the economy is only successful if they own all the wealth. Before my life concludes, the western world I was born into that had a functioning Welfare State will be eradicated by the 1%. We will be dragged to the living standards that destroyed millions of lives during my dad’s childhood. Let’s hope for our sakes that, at the very least, we can look the future in the eye and say, “At least we bloody tried to stop it.”
Thank you for reading my substack. Your support and subscriptions help me maintain my dad Harry Leslie Smith’s legacy alive as well as keep me housed. On February 25, 2023 Harry Leslie Smith would have been a hundred. I think he would have been sickened that his warning to not make his past our future became true. Take care, John
