History shows us how blessed we are! - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Through my choice of reading material and movies recently, I’ve been taking a tour of the past. I can’t help thinking the world would be a little better if we looked at where we’ve come from instead of obsessing about where we’d like to be.

 

We’ve come so far in a relatively recent time. In honour of the anniversary of the Blyth Festival, I got A Summer Burning off the shelf. Harry J. Boyle’s novel of growing up on a St. Augustine-area farm in the 1920s was adapted by Anne Chislett for the 1977 Blyth Festival.

 

Stepping ahead to the 1930s and 1940s, we recently re-watched The Book Thief, a 2013 movie adapted from a novel by Markus Zusak of orphan girl, Liesel (played by young Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse), who lives through World War II and the years leading up to it, in Nazi Germany. With her adopted family, she survives the book burnings, the round up of Jews and the forced recruitments of young boys and old men by the Nazi authorities as the war begins, and through her luck, to the end.

 

We also took an older movie off the shelf, Sally Field’s second Oscar-winning performance in Places in the Heart, as a young mother determined to keep her farm after her husband, a sheriff, is killed in Texas in the 1930s. A banker “thoughtfully” suggests she farm out her children to relatives to make it easier to get by. 

 

These three dips into the past reminded me how much our lives have improved in 2024 from the past. In the Sally Field movie, for instance, when her husband is killed, there is no compensation from the government for the risks he has taken in his job. It was also a time when there were few jobs for women, and so widows had deep trouble providing for their families.

 

There’s also a grim reminder of what second-class Black residents were experiencing in southern states as the Ku Klux Klan threw its weight around, overturning the law.

 

The grim world in our own backyard is illustrated in A Summer Burning when a teenager from a slum in Toronto is sent to a Huron County farm for the summer. His mother, back home, has taken in different men as partners to survive, but they seldom treat her well. It’s a different world on the farm as people are kind and generally thoughtful, even if they are poor.

 

The Book Thief (the little girl steals books because she loves to read) shows the cruelty of the Nazi reign over Germany and most of Europe, yet at the same time, the little girl’s neighbours are still kind and thoughtful.

 

It’s hard to imagine how different our world is from the lives of any of these people who lived in a period not yet a century ago. It’s hard to imagine that in the 1920s there still was no unemployment insurance to give some sort of stability to people who lost their jobs. Or that there was no insurance for the government employees who were killed doing their work. People kept working, even in mines, into old age because there was no old age pension.

 

The world was a different place in Germany, trying to recover from World War I and the penalties imposed by Allied victors. Many German people were ready to turn to the Nazis to escape living as a conquered people.

 

Harry J. Boyle wrote A Summer Burning in the 1960s, before Prime Minister Lester Pearson introduced the Canada Pension Plan which gave an extra source of income - as well as the old age pension. The old age pension was first introduced by the federal parliament in 1927. It was jointly financed by federal and provincial governments.

 

Pearson also brought medicare into effect in the late 1960s, providing free medical care for all Canadians.

 

Recently, to gain the support of the NDP, the Liberal government announced free pharmacare and Deputy-Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced free access to birth control and diabetes medication to begin the plan.

 

This news provides a stark contrast to our neighbours south of the border. Not only do we have free medical care, which the Americans still don’t have, but we also have free abortions while several states have made abortion illegal thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling and some are banning sale of contraceptives.

 

The lessons from our books and movies, and even more from south of the border, is how far Canadians have progressed thanks to progressive governments (though we still trail many European countries). Life, for most of us, is so much easier, though there are still thousands of people who can’t afford their rents and must live in the streets. 

 

The majority of us live such a blessed life in Canada. We complain about taxes, yet we still afford to travel around the world on vacation - often to poorer countries where people don’t live nearly as well as we do. Every now and then we need to look back to learn gratitude for how good we have it.