Have you ever watched these magnificent films of social realism by the British filmmaker, Ken Loach? Veronica read somewhere that his latest film and maybe his last was about the gig industry and how hard it is to survive as people grow older and get stuck in it.
Veronica first watched Ken Loach's film twenty three years ago. The British Council organized the screening. It was about a British woman who frequents pubs where she sings karaoke as a way to cope with the fact that the state repeatedly takes away her own children.
Who would ever imagine that Vero would sometimes feel like that? Repeatedly having to leave jobs with children, parents and students Veronica bonded with after working with them daily for three, four, five or more months. Why would the mom who hires Veronica to tutor or the administration of the school enforce these separations? Is it so hard to understand that these early terminations affect both students and Veronica?
An elder from a religious group Vero frequents, she told Veronica that coworkers are selfish and self-interested at work. This is why so many scary things happen there. The mom decides to switch tutors, because another teacher covets Vero's job. The same things happens at school with extremely cunning and competitive coworkers.
Veronica was reading an article advising people how to survive the disruptions CoVid-19 created. The author suggested functional, relational and historical continuity. In other words, it really helps when a person maintains the roles he/she has at work, in her community, with friends. Finally, we all have ancestors who had a way to survive, and it might be good to rely on those historical ways of survival too. Is it easy, though, to maintain such relationships with students and coworkers when jobs end suddenly, when jobs change often, and when people have no way of contacting each other, because the system enforces this way of separation?
Veronica contacts for the first time former employers and coworkers on fb and in other ways technology offers these days. Vero never had so much time to do that before. Technology offers a way to keep in touch in some occasions.
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The Heart Goes Last in Chicago
Teen FictionVeronica is in her forties now. She still addresses health concerns at her various jobs in schools. The days of hitchhiking and casual sex are behind her. She moved to a different state in the north. Her dreams of becoming a medical doctor did n...
