“Some days I don’t know why I bothered to go clean.”
This came from a woman who had been on the streets for 30 years and obviously was not seeing the benefit of putting a stop to the very drugs she said made her feel good; or at the least, not care. For many of those 30 or so years, she earned her living as a prostitute; drugs and alcohol taking the bite out of the wear and tear of her work.
I very seldom have spoken with someone like this who is so open about their former life, and although quite graphic at times, she gave me a glimpse of how she felt about the current state of world affairs. I asked her many questions about her feelings on these different events, because I felt that somehow these must have played a part in her life’s choices.
One of the questions was about the #metoo movement presently underway. After giving me a wry chuckle she stated, “It will just be a flash in the pan event; they’re going in the wrong direction.” Of course I had to find out what she meant by that, so she obliged by adding, “They’re going after individuals, destroying their lives, and saying they won a victory, but they’re wrong and it won’t last; they should be going after the producers of all the smut materials you see on TV every day, and blasted at you in every magazine.”
Although I had to clean up a lot of the language she used, I found that she was very articulate; not once expressing any remorse for her past, and she was very sure of her way of seeing the world. “It’s like taking a pill for a headache, it may take the pain away for a bit but you still have not dealt with the root cause of why you had a headache in the first place,” she carried on, “until you deal with that root cause, your battle will be ever so much harder.”
This got me to thinking about what she said, and so at 4:30 in the morning my head was churning with her responses. I reflected on the progressive influences on television, and we already know just how influential it can be. Thirty or 40 years ago, shows like The Lone Ranger, Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch were very popular and included very little, if any, innuendo of any kind. Then a couple of days ago I saw a commercial for a new TV series that aggressively used both verbal and physically demonstrative sexual innuendo just to elicit viewership.
This made me wonder how right my friend could be, and she does not even believe the same way as I do. So I concluded that if a non-religious person sees life that way, there must be more to it than what I thought.
We will always have some of these problems in this world, but are we really exacerbating the situation by what we allow on the television and in movies, etc.? If the problem is one of uncontained and influential sexual misbehaviour, why are we allowing the promotion of it in all our media?
My friend and many like her have seen an opportunity, (right or wrong) and have been influenced into a behaviour, which just plainly destroys; drugs help to make it somewhat acceptable to the mind; never to the heart. One thing that she did say which sort of made sense was, “I should become a politician, then if there are enough women doing that, we may be able to start fighting this battle properly; and doing it with teeth”.
She won’t of course, but if that happened, she might not have to ask; why change?
Chris Salomons is the kitchen co-ordinator at Potters Hands.