I was raised liberal, which means nonstop sympathy. I was expected to feel sorry for other less fortunate people pretty much full-time. Which is funny because my mother is a Scotswoman, and when I was a child I often felt that I was one of the less fortunate, and vastly so. In winter, the thermostat was set at Chilly, all our meals were boiled and every vacation was a speeding landscape of carsickness. Our dishtowels were ice-white and gossamer-thin; I only realized in my teens that they were old diapers. Fashion choices were few: Which parka? For a night out, we’d dine at the local hospital cafeteria.

Children aren’t stupid. I knew we weren’t poor. My father, a surgeon, ministered to the less fortunate (we lived in the far north). I don’t think my mother ever actually said it aloud but “We weren’t put on this earth for pleasure,” was the family theme. I learned to shut up and embarked on an adult life of feeling sorry for other people, for “victims.”

And that’s when the trouble started. People who decry the way that so many people clamour to achieve victimhood miss the genius of my family’s Scottish twist on this. The Scottish view is that you make sacrifices in order to help victims, as long as they don’t ask for help.

Nowadays, the oddest people ask for help, at full volume, and in January when I have already set my personal emotional gauge at Misery Maximum, my hackles rise.

No place for young people

A young Saskatchewan woman has successfully sued her drug dealer after she overdosed on crystal meth. He went to kindergarten with her and seems fairly nice as dealers go. He lives in his grandma’s house and is more scared of her than of his victim, 23-year-old Sandra Bergen, who seems to think there is such a thing as “good” crystal meth. The woman’s at war with herself. I hope neither side of her wins. Imagine living in Biggar, Sask., pop. 2,351, and blaming your dealer because you took a bad brain vacation. I’ve lived in towns like Biggar and they’re no place for young people. There’s a paucity of entertainment. I speak as someone who was once offered a mystery pill in a heavy-metal bar, briefly weighed the advantages of insanity and swallowed it. (Spot the literary reference.) I don’t blame the generous, giggling meta-makeup ultra-booted girls who shared with me. It’s not their fault I was awake for the next 48 hours, mostly outdoors as I remember, and cannot imagine suing them.

If the suit fits

Lawsuit stories are an easy hit, I know: the Canadian who won $350,000 after a fly in his bottle of spring water precipitated a nervous breakdown (his, not the fly’s). Or the Denver sofa salesman suing because he contracted a lung disease from eating 2.4 bags a day of extra-buttery popcorn. Eventually he couldn’t get from his golf cart to the hole. Yes, he’s fat. Which brings us to a story that enlivened CBC.ca readers to an extent rarely seen.

The recent ruling by the Canadian Transportation Safety Board that airlines must give a free second seat to morbidly obese people clearly enraged readers. Overeating is a choice, not a disease, letter writers said, that the rest of us should not have to pay for. Does that mean that alcoholics get free drinks, one reader asked, and he had a point.

But I say that before this ruling, everyone was a victim. The seated passengers prayed the obese person coming down the aisle wouldn’t be placed next to them. The fat person was painfully squeezed into a tiny seat and humiliated. The person in the next seat had to cope with the flesh overflow.

Now no one is a victim. No one feels fearful or squished, the obese person is comfortable, and the only sad person is the 6’3″ man saying to himself, “Where’s the justice, where’s the leg room?”

A tale of two victims

I read a stunningly good four-part series by journalist Susan Clairmont in the Hamilton Spectator on the life and death of a morbidly obese woman, much of its merit in the fact that it answered questions other journalists are too prissy to ask. Obese people need help wiping themselves. They are in constant pain. They live with daily humiliation. Okay, okay, so do most of us. But imagine weighing 421 pounds, tripping on the sidewalk and finding yourself unable to get up because of your weight. Spend hours lying there like a dead bug while people walk past, not a single one offering to help. Imagine the psychological scars of that experience.

The woman died after a gastric bypass. I’d say she was a victim.

But then I read a feature in my local allegedly liberal-minded paper on rising rates of diabetes in Toronto. Type 2 diabetes is linked to fatness i.e., junk food, and physical inactivity. The article suggested that their inertia wasn’t really their fault: Some suburban streets don’t have sidewalks.

That’s a hell of an excuse for not getting off the couch.

In each case, someone is claiming attention, essentially saying “I wasn’t loved the way I should have been.” It’s an eternal complaint.

But let me offer you a new and unlikely victim, a people who have never asked for sympathy and would be indignant if it were offered: Americans.

I was sitting in the café of an absurdly expensive grocery store the other day, a store famous for its saintly staff and rude customers. The clerk was telling a rich L.L. Bean-wearing American tourist and his scarily skinny wife that his U.S. dollar was worth 85 cents. “What âe¦ the âe¦ fuck,” the woman said loudly. The husband exploded.

My sympathies were with the clerk, who was not responsible for a rip-off exchange rate. But imagine being a wealthy American couple being told in public, probably for the first time in their lives, that the greenback didn’t rule. In Canada, no less.

No one was asking them to admit that their president was an idiot or that Iraq was a catastrophe. It was just a math lesson. Or rather a lesson about money and power and how it dribbles away.

And I sympathized, yes I did.

This Week

McSweeney’s 24 arrived, the latest quarterly from the young Americans led by Dave Eggers who publish new writing, frequently by young people (who I suspect have a harder time of it in Canada). I once read that Kazuo Ishiguro visibly winced when one of his writing students at the University of East Anglia began a story with a phone ringing and someone answering the phone. Apparently, the delicate Ishiguro thought short stories should ease into such violent action.

Aaron Gwyn’s story “Look At Me” begins: “He was sitting there eating when he looked up and saw the pickup approaching the large glass window fronting the cafeteria âe¦” Before the sentence has ended we are in the midst of a mass gun killing. The story is perfect, every word riveting. And maybe this is why fewer people are reading literature. Humans love narrative, and writers have forgotten to provide it. Life is a place where things happen. Novelists neglect that at their peril.