AllMyHopesAndDreamsVille
The following is a re-worked version of one of the first posts I ever wrote.
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I really do live a charmed life.
I have a wonderful wife and two great kids.
I also have a job I actually like, where most of the time I get to do what I want to do.
And that job pays me well; not fantastically well, but well enough that we were able to buy a house in the city of Vancouver a couple of years ago which, considering the prices, is pretty darned well.
In fact, I guess some might say that I am upwardly mobile enough that I should quit all my complainin' because I'm one of the lucky ones that actually benefits financially from many of the 'rich folks first' policies of Mr. Campbell et al.
But here's the thing.
I am most definitely not one of those 'ladder puller-uppers'?
You know, somebody who's got theirs, and now says, "Screw you Jack," to everybody else.
Why?
I'll tell you why.
It's because of my Dad.......
My old man was a Union man.
And the folks in the Union fought like bastards...and they fought constantly, usually for the tiniest of things in each successive contract...things like an extra quarter percent on a COLA clause, or one little add-on like an extra free filling per year on the dental plan.
And when I was a kid, especially during that time when I was a barely no-longer-a-teenager-aged kid, I thought the folks from the Union were just a little bit off their nut....all that energy going into what, exactly?
After all, it was the 80's, and Dave Barrett and the Socialist Hordes were long gone, and the Wild Kelowna boys were rolling along, and Unions were bad, and Expo was coming, and Trudeau was going, and John Turner was hiccupping, and Mulroney was lurking, somewhere off in the distance....
....And if you were a half-bright, apolitical science-geek kind of kid like me, breezing your way through college and thinking about graduate school, you laughed when you saw the boy wonder from Burnaby, Michael J. Fox, shirk his Family Ties and ape the young Republicans while making fun of his willfully neutered Leftie of a Dad on the TV screen...
....And if you were that kid, you thought that you were living in a golden age that was tied, not to the social democratic reforms of the past, but to the coming of Free Trade and the promises of the Reaganites from the South...
...And from that perspective you sure as heck didn't get the irony of Bruce Springsteen singing about the plight of the working class in 'Born in the USA'.
But now that I have spent a good chunk of time in USA where I started a family of my own before coming home, I do get it.
I understand that my Dad spent his entire adult life hauling logs up and down the West Coast, working his guts out to help keep the robber baron families rich because he had to make a living to support his own family....
....And I get the fact that, because of the Unions, my family's standard of living gradually improved, bit by bit, over the years so that by the time I had grown up to be that callow young man described above my parents had saved enough to help me go to University....
....And I get the fact that I was the first one in my family who got to go to University.... ever..... and it wasn't because I was so damned smart....
....And I get the fact that, while my parents' limited financial help and support was important, it would never have been enough to get me into the same good schools if I had arrived on the scene a single generation earlier or, perhaps, later....
....And I get the fact that those Wild Kelowna Boys, and all the other neo-cons that have come since, have been doing their damndest to destroy the dream of a University education for all, and instead have instituted an elitist education for some and one-trick-pony Technical training for everybody else.....
....And I get the fact that, if it wasn't for folks like my Dad and the other lefties of his time, my current world, one in which I make a living with my eyes and my mind wide open, would not be what it is today.....
....And most of all, I now get the fact that my Dad was, and is, my hero.
____
Talked to my Dad for about half an hour with the two E's and C on the speaker phone out on the sundeck this morning..... We went through all the usual stuff, which was fun, and then just near the end of the conversation Dad, who got me hooked on Pat Burns sometime around 1967, slipped in a little zinger about how he was listening to Sean Holman's radio show earlier this morning and noticed that there was an Email from the 'Pacific Gazetteer' that the 'hell-raising' panel discussed briefly. Now why would I have been sending electronic messages to Mr. Holman on this, the finest of the fine morning of the Day of The Father? Well, if you really want to know I was banished to the Subterranean Blues Room for the duration while my kids made me breakfast and laid out all my fantastic gifts, some made (ie. a collage picture of littler e. and me; a box of homemade snowball truffles and a book of poems from Bigger E.) and some bought (ie. a new microphone and stand for the family band from C.). Man, life really is good, except that....now I have to go cut the grass.......drats.
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