The era of victimhood

"Things are okay with me these days,
Got a good job, got a good office,
Got a new wife, got a new life
And the family's fine"

(Billy Joel, "Scenes from an Italian restaurant", from the album The Stranger, 1977)

Geez, Billy, do you have any idea how wrong that sounds today?  If you're really in such fine shape, just shut up about it, will ya?.  To get any attention today, you gotta be a victim.

And boy, are there a lot of victims about!  Here in Canada it seems like just about everyone is being oppressed by someone.  A little while back, the Toronto Star ran a piece about the need to do something about mental health problems among high school students.  If I recall correctly, the number of kids allegedly suffering from such problems was close to 50% of the teen population, a finding that may have had something to do with the breadth of the definition, everything from autism (serious) to anxiety over lining up a date for Saturday night (get serious!)

Then again, the Star is a paper that still runs columns just about every day about how badly women are victimized in this country.  One of the newspaper's more crazed columnists, Heather Malick, recently used the news of Angelina Jolie's mastectomy as grounds for a rant that we lived in a world where women were seen as the "sum of their parts, like chickens"!  This worldview seems completely impervious to the fact that at the moment, the First Ministers of the country's four most populous Provinces are all female.  We live in a world where many millions of women really are oppressed.  For a columnist (or rather columnists -- the Star is full of them, all cut from the same cloth) to blither on about sexist oppression in a country where women regularly rise to positions of political power, are increasingly better educated than men and live longer than men do, shows an alarming loss of perspective and empathy.

It's not just Canada, of course.  The victim card is played everywhere and by all sorts of people -- even by whole nations.  Back when Yugoslavia was in its death throes, Serbia tried to present itself as a victim even as its actions in Bosnia clearly marked it out as an oppressor.  Most nations in the Middle East cast themselves as victims on a regular basis -- and yes, Mr Netanyahu, this includes you.  In fact, two of the three so-called Abrahamic religions see themselves almost perpetually as victims of some perceived offence or other -- and to be fair, the third religion isn't far behind on that score.

The thing is, these days victimhood works.  Here in Canada and in much of the developed world, shout and scream loud enough and some government or other will feel compelled to come to your aid, even if your problems are entirely your own fault.  The old adage that "victory is to the strong, and the race to the swift" no longer holds.  All must have prizes!  Heck, if you keep losing the race, or the game, just complain that it's making you depressed, and the rules will get changed for you.  That's why kids' soccer leagues in much of North America no longer keep score during games.  If that upsets the strong or the swift, well, too bad for them  Let them make their own complaint!

Likewise internationally.  Almost half a century after the colonists went home, much of Africa still sees fit to blame them for most of its problems.  The state of the Middle East is blamed on the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour declaration, both of which took place more than nine decades ago.  If you feel you're a victim, you may feel entitled to wait for your oppressor to fix things up for you; but these days, chances are your oppressor is casting himself as someone else's victim, so that's probably not going to happen, is it?

I started off with a slightly mouldy musical reference, so let's end with another.  After adopting a new religion in mid life, the late Sammy Davis Jr wryly noted that he'd achieved a notable trifecta of disadvantage, being now "a one-eyed Negro Jew".  Sammy managed to overcome that and to make his own way in the world; these days he'd likely have a troupe of psychologists and public servants shadowing his every step.