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| Newly arrived immigrants at Pier 21, Halifax, Canada, mid-1950s |
The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialisation. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is something unsettling about seeing the happy, laughing, vacuous faces of the wealthy and their happy, vacuous children; privilege doesn't evoke empathy. For some, the parents or grandparents of the wealthy were born here, for others their parents or grandparents were immigrants to Canada. In either case, people had to work for what they had, they put in long hours of work to make money and to build a legacy for their children, to make a good life for their families, they didn't want their children and grandchildren to go without as they had. And they succeeded; see the expensive cars in the driveway, the big houses, the mansions, the fine clothes, the Patek Philippe watches, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and other brands indicating status. It's from rags and being poor to riches and wealth and back to rags and poverty in three or four generations. Material stuff doesn't last forever, eventually it ends up in the landfill, the dumpster, or dust.
So now I suggest that we think like immigrants. These are people who arrived here with nothing but a suitcase and five dollars; they were willing to live in small apartments, several generations living together and being frugal, working several jobs. I am not suggesting that we all live exactly this way but at least we could reduce our level of acquiring stuff we don't need, stuff that we just want, we could be frugal and careful with money. We could remember what it was like in the past. We could prepare for the hard times ahead of us.
It is with this in mind that I wrote a memoir of my grandmother, Edith Morrissey; it is a memoir of her Girouard Avenue flat. I wanted to remember her--she whom we all loved--and so I wrote Remembering Girouard Avenue. My grandmother had little money but she lived in a large flat and family members who needed a home were welcome to live there, her door was open; she always had family members living with her: her Aunt Lib, her father, one of her sisters, and then, later, another sister lived with her and also her daughter, my Auntie Mabel, who never left home; and in the early 1950s my parents, my brother and I, lived with my grandmother for several years. The irony of this is that when my grandmother's husband died in 1932 my father told her to move to a smaller place, that family would want to live with her, he knew her generosity and what do you know, almost twenty years later, we were also living with her.
In the past few people were homeless, now there are homeless people everywhere. Now homelessness is a possibility for all of us; indeed, many Canadians are one pay cheque from being homeless, one rent increase from being homeless, one visit to a food bank from being hungry and eventually homeless. Homeless people live on the street, in a tent, in a bus shelter, they have no home to return to, they have no home to return to, no bedroom with a comforter on the bed, a night table and a book to read, food to eat, the heat turned up in our cold northern climate. There were always a few homeless people, they were usually older men who were often alcoholics; and they were taken care of by mission halls or the Salvation Army that fed them and put them up for the night or as long as they needed; it was not an easy life but it was not as widespread as it is now. Now, the homeless are everywhere and they include young people. What family did in the past is being replaced by government services, and while there are well-meaning people in government we can't rely on government to provide for everything people need.
I remember two elderly women in Vancouver, they lived a few blocks from where the billionaires now live in West Point Grey in their $45M homes, 15K square feet for two people, indoor swimming pools and a helicopter pad on the roof, a view of the water, and these two old women had a large house but it was getting old and looked a bit run down. It would eventually be sold for the land it sat on, that's how it works when a city lot costs $5M and higher, you don't live in the old house on the lot, you tear it down and build something new. These two old women drove identical cars parked in their driveway, cars maybe forty years old. Here's the point: prepare for an uncertain future, be anonymous, don't draw attention to yourself, don't forget where you come from. Think like an immigrant.
