"IF YOUR RICH U WILL LIVE"
Navigating a tense era of anger and pessimism
I’ve been struggling to identify why something feels a little off lately. With me personally maybe, but also with my environment, the world abroad, and of course, our favourite, terrible, beautiful and traumatic internet. I feel a new, unfamiliar sense of dread that I don’t completely understand; a strange sense of fragility, like the air is brittle, full of glass.
We can blame the weather, of course—we are emerging from winter in the Pacific Northwest, when the city reflects its characteristic gloom. Thin mists wreathe round the North Shore mountains, and needle-fine mists cling to the air. A little while ago, we experienced something called an atmospheric river. The clouds swelled and filled to bursting, and when it finally poured out over our blue city, if you opened a door into the outside world, you could only stare out into a wall of water. Even when it stopped raining you could still feel the water in the air, cold and foreboding and tasting of storms.
When the world is like this it’s easy to feel a little melancholy. But now, spring has come early in the Pacific Northwest, and my sense of dread persists despite the blooming flowers. I feel a sense of hopelessness in the community, of tension and frustration.
The other day I was standing in line at the grocery store and a woman came up behind me. It was my turn in line, and she had just been served, but she had returned to argue with the clerk for overcharging her. It was only a few dollars, but she pulled out her receipts, desperate to get those few dollars back. At the bus stop, a man was on the phone with the transit line, angrily letting the customer service rep know that he had missed four buses as they were all packed, a sign that our population is growing past what our current infrastructure can support. “I need to get to work,” he snapped, brittle and on edge.
And on my walk past the hospital the other day, I passed some graffiti on a set of concrete steps which perhaps conveyed the mood of the city best—an angry black scrawl that read: “IF YOUR RICH U WILL LIVE.”
Sometimes people ask what it is you do as a social worker. “I try to solve problems,” my office roommate often says. “I help people,” some others like to say.
I don’t personally feel like I am able to do either of those things. I try, but part of my job is to try to give people resources when they are struggling. But the available resources do not actually work. They really aren’t enough. People still struggle massively, and I often find I am unable to help anyone. “I witness people’s pain,” I feel sometimes, which is probably as accurate as I can describe it. Witnessing, trying, but often the situations do not change—there remains sadness, poverty, homelessness, injustice.
One could try to argue that it is not true that something unusual is happening in the air. That nothing is really wrong, that poverty and pain have always existed, and that it’s just the work that is making me feel this way. But this doesn’t resonate with me. Regardless of whether I work in this industry or not, the problems are still there. They’re real. They’re true. They’re happening. And they’re common—they are becoming increasingly common, as affordability issues are now affecting people with higher and higher income levels. These cases reflect the reality of the world. Their experiences show that our world is wrong, that our structures are failing, that something is slowly cracking.
I have written a little about Canadian discontent lately. Everyone is mad at Trudeau, who seems as if his political journey may be coming soon to an end. Yet his main opponent Pierre Polievre only shows me anger without hope . Meanwhile, Young Canadians are navigating the loss of dreams—of ever owning a home, of being able to climb out of their economic class, of feeling like adults that have earned their place in the world. And older populations, particularly those of lower socioeconomic statuses, are not guaranteed peace either, seniors being our largest growing homeless demographic. And this is not even getting into our fentanyl crisis, which continues to worsen every year.
It is not just Canada that seems to be navigating this era of pessimism, negativity, fear, and anger. I see it everywhere. In America, the populace remains alarmingly divided. Neoliberalism and American global influence also appears to be in decline, something that America and perhaps the rest of the world might never have expected to be possible. Ukraine appears to be losing the war, meaning America will have to acknowledge it cannot control what other countries do anymore. The States also refuse to take a hard line with Israel, sending them weapons while innocent people are killed in Gaza. It feels incredibly reminiscent of the Bush era of the 2000s, when the government and the media demonstrably refused to tell the truth of what is truly happening in the world.
In Europe, too, there is tension, anger, and unrest. Bafflingly, Canadian and American media also barely cover the protests that are happening there either, though the footage of the protests are dramatic and you’d think that journalists would consider them worthy of front page news all the time. In France, Germany, Belgium, Romania, Poland, and Spain, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they argue are not allowing them to make a living wage. They are massive, significant protests, but no one here seems to want to pay them that much attention.
There is tension, something cracking, thin ice about to shatter.
I try to write about this without being alarmist. But it feels somewhat impossible—how do I write about this without conveying some degree of alarm? There seems, to me, pervasive unhappiness unraveling in more countries than usual at the moment, and that’s why it’s all the more intense to watch the situations unfold in Ukraine and Gaza. How will they end and how might they fracture our current way of life? Are we truly experiencing the end of the American Empire, and the dominance of the West in the world? How will we navigate that when we know how hard it was for USSR loyalists after the Cold War?
My goal of this Substack is to find hope through writing. But I have to be honest that I am not yet sure how to do this. I feel that I am currently mourning the world as I thought it was. Perhaps when I have mourned long enough, I will enter a stage of hopefulness, where I may provide support to those about to go through the same thing. But for now I wait, and I watch, wondering when things will crack completely.
I do believe very much that this will not be forever. Historically, eras of great pain are followed by great social change, because, sadly, governments and people in power do not really care about poverty and pain until a big enough percentage of the population is affected. According to James T. Patterson in his book “America’s Struggle Against Poverty”, it was the ten years between 1929 and 1939 where the most progress was made in public welfare and relief than in the former 300 years. Because of the Great Depression, enough people were suffering that Franklin D. Roosevelt was essentially required to pass the New Deal to try and relieve terrible distress.
I feel that this era of tension will end in some similar way. Enough people will be angry and in pain. Enough people will protest or direct their anger to the correct targets—power structures rather than their fellow citizens. Perhaps this will provoke some unprecedented change. But unfortunately we will need to live through the painful part first, which is an anxiety-provoking concept.
I hope people will take care of each other as we get through it. I hope people will try to be kind and compassionate during this difficult time. I feel a new era will dawn, and the dignity of individual human beings will someday soon be respected like it never has been before.
For now, we wait.
And it gives me anxiety.
Thank you for reading. Please consider subscribing to support my work.
Some Writers and Articles I’ve Been Reading on Substack:
Caitlin Johnstone: We Think This Dystopia is Normal Like People in Abusive Relationships Think It’s Normal
Joshua P. Hill: How mass media is enabling mass murder
William Schryver: An Epoch of Great Change is Upon Us
Antonio Melonio: Life is All About Work, Didn’t You Know?
Thom Hartmann: Why Are Too Many Americans Ignoring the Ongoing Collapse of Democracy in the US?
You are right, Elleanor, the frustration is palpable. I don't know how much longer the collective anger can be sustained. Something will happen at some point - something that may just lead to a new equilibrium.