Like Sanctions Against an Enemy Nation, The Cost of Living Crisis enabled by our Governments and Entitled are Shortening Lives, Including Mine.

I've been waiting over two months to see a specialist about my lungs. My third annual CT scan for cancer reoccurrence indicated the interstitial lung disease detected in 2020 when I was diagnosed with a rectal carcinoma, crossed a radiologist's red line.

It now warrants a specialist's opinion to determine if my shelf life will be brief or extended to more than five years. Knowing that my dad's sister Alberta died of interstitial lung disease at 53 and my brother Peter at 50 means whatever the verdict, I've had a few more years than them in the sun.

But the time I've left is going to be shorter than it should, and that pisses me off. Our healthcare system is in chaos not from the pandemic but from a plague of privatisation that was lobbied to governments by the wealthy as the panacea to our problems rather than as a wealth generator for the 1%.

It's not some great conspiracy why this happened. If the majority; of your politicians come from a professional class, no matter their duty to represent every citizen, they will protect their own in legislation. It's human nature. Politicians aren't having dinner with you or me. They are supping with people from wealth, who they have an affinity to because of similar postal codes, holiday plans- or what schools their children attend, and of course, the friends they all know in the news media.

I am not saying all politicians are like that. What I am saying is; there are enough of them on the side of the rich; to hold a majority in our parliaments, legislatures or government houses across the USA.

It's a closed shop to anything but wealth, which makes democracy, if not exactly dead, dying with the dignity of a wounded animal at the side of a busy highway.

Joel Grey's character was not wrong when he sang in Cabaret, "Money makes the world go round." The province of Ontario, where I live, can't stop proving that point. Doug Ford's conservative government is wasting billions on a non-essential highway, which, surprise, surprise, is being built across thousands of acres of protected green land.

But it doesn't have the dough to pay nurses a living wage or reduce wait times except through privatisation of the healthcare system that will give the best quality of service to the well-off and the scraps to people like me.

I don't stand a chance to get the healthcare I need to prolong my life with good quality when the public healthcare system is being starved of funds. I strongly advocated, for myself, to get the best surgeon in 2020 to treat my bowel cancer and went to Toronto for my surgery and radiation. But after surviving my treatments and recovery during Covid, three years later, I am out of coin and physically weak from it all.

It's not incompetence that has caused politicians to forsake their duty of care: to all of their constituents but their priorities which are to serve their economic class before all others.

It's why citizens only get the "I feel your pain" bromides as help during this cost of living crisis. Huw Pill, Bank of England economist and well-off bloke told Britain they must learn to live with their poverty. Aristocrats in 1789 France said things like that and literally got the chop. In 2023 when the entitled speaks about others making do with less, they get an LBC update on their phone about James O'Brian sighing into his microphone or a witty piece in the Guardian by everyone's bucket list dinner party guest, Marina Hyde.

The cost of living crisis has caused as much financial distress to ordinary people in our neo-liberal Western economies as our government's financial sanctions have on people in Russia over Putin's war in Ukraine.

Hunger and food insecurity are not out of the ordinary for most, including me, on days when money is lean. There is something dysfunctional in society when I, nearing sixty, can feel lucky to find chicken thighs with the fat still on them that had two 25% off stickers, last week.

The young woman who rang up my purchase complemented me on my luck as if I'd snared a rabbit as a first-time poacher. She even flashed me a "lucky you," grin, which, because many of her teeth were either missing or rotting, was the saddest of smiles.

I can't remember a time in my six decades of life when peanut butter, eggs, bread or other simple staples were this expensive. The supply chain and wars abroad may play a part in why I can't afford to eat as well as I once did. But it is not the real reason or the most compelling. Grocery Food oligarchs know they can gouge the consumer with higher prices like they were a wartime spiv because neither governments nor the news media feels compelled to stop them. At best governments, like Canada's, hand out the equivalent of Great Depression Rockefeller dimes to its poor with a one-time grocery rebate cheque of $234 whilst the nation's newspapers produce an endless array of articles about how to make the best of life-on-a-shoe string written by employees making 150k plus a year.

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I hold little optimism for my long-term survival, not because my health isn't good but because in more normal times; I could survive for a decade or more. No, it is because the democracy I was born into in 1963 that pledged all citizens would be treated, with dignity and have a life free of want has ceased to exist. I am redundant to the fascism overtaking society and the 1% enabling it.

Thanks for reading my susbtack because your support is my life line. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. This month is proving to be real scramble to get next months together. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. And if you can’t join for free and spread the word. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John

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