Any Asshole Can Be Taught to Read.

Louis Shalako

Some form of standardized testing has been around in Ontario for many years.

In Grade Six, in elementary school, there were tests of math and reading skills.

In the early seventies, the local separate (Roman Catholic) school board brought in a new program.

Students who tested higher or much higher than average were advanced to the next level.

What this meant was that a Grade Six student who read well found themselves sitting in a Grade Eight class for English and a Grade Seven class for mathematics.

On the standardized reading and comprehension test, I was apparently reading at first-year university level. That was as high as the scale went. The math was more like Grade Eight or Nine. Obviously they couldn’t provide that sort of material to a twelve year-old kid.

On the one hand, the system was proud of me and wanted to take credit for my ability. This was unfortunately not borne out by the numbers turned in by the student population as a whole. I guess they figured they had to do something, as the separate board relied on funds provided by the province—as long as they were meeting minimum educational standards.

One of the things the program did was to draw the student to the attention of the bullies. A couple of years of physical development goes a long way at that age. They were always bigger, stronger, more experienced, but then the bully isn’t interested in a fair fight. He wants to inflict punishment on someone who can’t fight back.

Once you learn how to fight back, they quickly lose interest.

Every person who ever attended school in this or any other country knows all about schoolyard bullies. So one of the additional benefits of this program was to teach the student unarmed combat skills in a fun, engaging and informal way. You learn all about knock-em-down, drag-em-out people skills at recess, lunch hour, you name it. It’s all about social status, isn’t it, social status among the more immature members of society.

(They watch a lot of TV, don’t you know. And the good guy always wins the fight, right?)

There comes that day when your tormenter, the worst of the bunch, comes up, mouth going, and you know enough to punch that cocksucker right in the mouth, no questions asked. Be the one to do it first. Don’t wait around for that barely educated, opinionated little prick to make the first move.

What did you think was going to happen there, asshole?

Another thing it does is split the student away from their contemporaries. Now everyone hates you. 

On the plus side, you can take ‘em—no matter who they are, and you know it, too. You ain’t shy no more, are you? They’re all cowards anyways.

What was really schizoid about this grand experiment was the way the school board abandoned it after a couple of years.

At this point, the accelerated former Grade Six student had taken Grade Eight English for two years in a row already. They had taken Grade Seven math twice. On exam day, all the really cool guys say hi. They pat you on the back. They give you a smoke. Then they all cluster around your desk as the teacher hands out the papers. They want to see your answers. They want you right there, so they can whisper at you like their best buddy and you’re supposed to give up the answers and help them get through it.

Man, were they pissed, when just before we were told to turn the papers over on our desk and begin, when I got up and moved to another desk—right in the front row, right in front of Dingbat’s desk.

Screw you.

I did the work.

You didn’t.

Besides, you’re a fucking bully.

I don’t give a shit if you assholes pass or fail.

Back then there might have been thirty-five students in a room. One of the most painful ordeals was when the class had to take turns. We had to stand at our desk and read aloud. Everyone remembers this, and everyone sort of hated it at the time—even the ones that could actually read.

But there is no more sure way to determine someone’s reading level than to listen to them talk.

They give themselves away in pretty short order.

There was nothing more painful, nothing more calculated to raise my ire, than to have to sit in the class while some dummy, who clearly hadn’t done the homework (for the past eight or nine years), stumbled and mumbled and fumbled, and followed along the lines with a finger, lips moving as they tried to sound it out.

“Kwa-kwa…”

“Quick, Dwayne. The word is quick.”

Jesus, fucking Christ. And this is Grade Eight, for fuck’s sakes…

“Be quiet, Louis. Go ahead, Dwayne.”

No wonder we found school boring. It was intolerable really. At some point, those of us who kicked up enough of a fuss were excused from English class.

A guy called Phillip Morrison and I would be sent to the library, where we played table hockey with a roll of masking tape. There was a lot of shouting and laughing, as I recall. The librarian generally found something else to do during this time. No one quite knew where he got off to.

Our bullies, our tormenters, had moved on to high school, where they hopefully met their proper fate. We were no longer being beaten, or fighting for our lives and our dignity every stinking day on the way there, at lunch, and on the way home. We were bigger now, and better able to hold our own.

I stole quite a few books out of there, too.

The people who are against standardized testing are stupid cunts. Tell them fuckers to shut up.

As far as I'm concerned, any asshole can be taught to read.

END

Applying for the Ontario Disability Support Program

Louis Shalako

Applying for a disability pension is a last-ditch resort. No one wants to end up on disability—no one in their right mind, that is. You really would have to be crazy, which will become clearer as we go along.

After an accident, an illness, an injury, people struggle along as best they can, perhaps not understanding the life-changing nature of what has happened to them. Most people already have a home. Honestly, they really do. Later, they might be told this is an asset and they must live on that asset, until their assets are down to an acceptable level of poverty, before they can come back and apply for disability again. They do what they can to find work, just trying to pay the bills and keep that roof over their head. If someone has children or dependents, feeding them takes priority. I was lucky, in that I didn’t have any assets, nor any dependents…welcome to the topsy-turvy, upside down and inside out world of the disability pension.

It is a world where every fact is a lie and every statement must be examined with great care.

It might take a bit of a push, some extraordinary event to get someone to apply at all. People who apply for ODSP typically need it.

In my own case, I had gone back to school for a couple of years. I had sent resumes all over Canada and put applications in all over town without getting a bite. I was in a lot of pain, I had no skills (other than journalism and other communications courses) and the only jobs I could ever get, paid the most minimal wages. Some jobs were part-time, seasonal, odd jobs and self-employment of a creative nature.

Months and years went by when I had no income at all—not even welfare. I was a scrounger, a mooch, a bum. I lived in the parent’s basement. I picked up beer bottles and cans, and I drove guys to the mall to shoplift. I used the parent’s borrowed car to do that. This was good for a bit of gas money or a couple packs of smokes…you need a source for the narcotic pain pills by this time anyways.

For three or four years I was on Welfare (now called Ontario Works, with the government’s knack for ironic propaganda generation) before I went back to school.

Welfare was about five or six thousand a year, and the student loans and grants were more like eighty-eight hundred a year. This was a calculated risk. Those loans will never be repaid as far as I can project, that is to say not within the next five or ten years. But, for better or worse, that’s where I got all those skills, including journalism, broadcasting, marketing, photography, etc.

It was a way to learn how to write, which is a whole other story and not really important here.

But for years I had tried to get into this plant or that shop, always with an eye to making it through the probationary period and getting on full time, preferably with a union. I knew I had a bad back, even then, and I thought many things. If I could just make it into a union, I thought…then someone would go to bat for me if real problems came along. I knew my back was screwed in my mid-twenties, at least for the jobs I was getting. At a later date, the thoughts changed: if I can just get some education, if I can just make it through school, if I can just get in the door in some good place, a newsroom, a TV or radio station…anything, really. Anything at all would have done by that point. 

(Ultimately, I did work at a small newspaper, and even as a baby photographer for a brief period.)

My goal was to try and find an appropriate job. I tried everything, and applied anywhere I could think of, wildly over-reaching as often as not. I tried taxi-driving, and found that twelve hours in a car was more than my lower back could take. Working as a security guard was all right, but the five-buck an hour part-time wages meant that I would always be living in my dad’s back bedroom. Yet at one time 

I had made a lot more money—and we sort of have our expectations. I even lost the security job, and 

I had at least two different ones—one in Sarnia, which lasted for about fourteen months, and one extremely temporary one in London. They did train me, though.

Observe, identify, and report—mall cop stuff to be sure.

The whole time I was taking narcotic pain medications. I had to have those pills to work. I had to have them just to make it through the day. This is not always a good idea, when you are working with power tools, heavy machinery, or driving a cab. There were times when I was nodding off on the job as a security guard—and this was at the Shell fuel terminal.

I was a walking bag of liabilities for any employer who figured things out, right? They all have to make it past the scrutiny of Workmen’s Compensation, (now Workplace Safety and Insurance Board) site inspections and their own private liability insurance provider’s inspection. In a chemical plant these are serious considerations.

I’ve had a few good jobs in my life—mostly when I was younger.

At first, not having a doctor, and sort of erroneously believing that they simply wouldn’t believe me anyways, I bought painkillers on the street for fifty cents a pill, a buck a pill, whatever the going rate was. It was only when I heard about a certain doctor, from an acquaintance, that I got the scrip for Tylenol 3.

“Come on, Louis, half the speedos in town go to him—the other half go to that other guy, but he’s my doc and he’ll set you right up.”

This turned out to be correct.

Each tablet has 30 mg of codeine, and codeine is an opiate. It’s addictive, even if you didn’t have any pain. The trouble with the Tylenol, is that it gives you a real lift. I was never a speedo or heroin junkie. The lift wasn’t what I was looking for. What I wanted was pain relief. Discussing this with my doctor, he was easily persuaded to prescribe Lorazapam, a member of the diazepide group, which includes Valium and a host of other similar drugs, branded and generic. The Tylenol got you high, and the Lorazepam kept you from bouncing off the walls all day long like Ricochet Rabbit. Among other things, Lorazepam is cheap—and it’s listed in the ODSP approved meds catalogue that all Ontario doctors keep right there on the desk…

I discovered that doctors love to prescribe pain pills. I also discovered that people will pay you good money for your meds.

There’s just a whole shit-load of issues here, and while some may think I am incriminating myself unnecessarily, some of this really needs to be said.

(Consulting with the legal department indicates the statute has long since run out. — ed.)

I went back to the doctor more than once, eventually persuading them to prescribe 90 Tylenol 3s every two weeks. I began by taking them as prescribed, one pill every four hours or about three pills a day. Some days maybe even less, if there was little pain and I didn’t really need pain control. At first I was selling the bulk of them for fifty cents each, but seven years later I was taking five or six of those pills a day myself. Six or seven years later, I was up to six or seven Lorazapem a day, and that stuff is real strong bug juice. This is exactly what they call it in jail, and some of them guys ought to know.

One day my dad asked me a question. It was kind of a hurtful question.

“So. What’s your big plan for today?”

I was laying on the couch, watching TV and it must have been his day off. He had a really good job in Chemical Alley, and he had always aspired to the same thing for me. I hadn’t worked in a while. In fact, I had been a real disappointment to him. Every time I got into one of the plants on a tryout, they dropped me before the ninety-day probationary period was up. They do this to everybody, it’s common knowledge, but over time I think he just lost hope, or faith, or respect for his own son…not that he had all that much to begin with.

I told him that my back was on fire and I wasn’t planning on doing anything much at all. This was after a long history, including a fall from a scaffold in 1989, where there is an incident report and all that sort of thing. One of the things we need to do is ‘document things’ when applying for disability.

“Well, if your back is really that bad, why don’t you apply for disability?”

All these years later, I don’t know if that was so snarky after all. Memories dim with time, and the more painful, the dimmer they get in some natural psychological survival mechanism.

The next morning, I went downtown and picked up the forms to apply for ODSP. I can’t recall the exact details, but at that time I was on welfare and they probably provided the forms, as half the disabled people in the province ended up on welfare over the years. Some of them are still on it, decades later.

There but for the grace of Darwin go I.

Bringing the forms home and filling them out was one thing. There is a little box on one sheet where you describe the nature of your disability, and a box where you describe the impact on your life—in my case, painful sitting, standing, unable to lift heavy objects without risk of re-injury, all kinds of things. This is where taking every shit job that came along tends to haunt you. It gives you an employment history—maybe that’s not so good, but mine was definitely spotty and intermittent. It’s a small box and there’s not much room to write there…

They ask about employment history, and all this is taken into account in some way.

I worked here and there, some of those jobs were menial, heavy labour, and even though I might have only lasted a few days or weeks, it played against me. Back then, the criteria included the following phrase.

“…unable to seek, hold and maintain regular, renumerative employment due to the nature of their disability…” or words to that effect.

This is important, because I could still walk—I could still talk, I still had some kind of skills.

The way I looked, I could apply for some sort of shit, unskilled job and stand a fair chance of getting the job. Keeping that job was another thing. I recall one job in particular, where I was hired full time but had to quit after four hours. It involved cutting strips of screening and sheet metal, on a table-brake or a set of foot-stomper shears. Metal workers will perhaps know what I’m talking about, but the name of the machine eludes me. The pain was so bad I couldn’t go back the next day. This happened sooner or later at every job I had successfully gotten.

There is a process to apply for ODSP.

You take the forms to the doctor, and he sort of tries to dissuade you. I was a young guy. I wasn’t really going to the doctor regularly, and this was the first time he’d heard of it.

What happens is the doctor, and later the ODSP themselves, or the Ministry of Community and Social Services themselves, send you to specialists. They want more information. You submit your application with whatever information you can provide. Then you wait. And a few months later, you get a letter in the mail saying you have been turned down.

The Ministry sends you all kinds of mail. You’ve given them an application consisting of a few pages, and two weeks later you get something back from them. The gist of it is that you have rights.

On the face of it, they are saying that you have rights, and at the same time, this package that comes in the mail is a bulky envelope with a quarter of an inch of materials in it. It took a while before I caught on. They have gotten so many complaints from applicants who feel their rights were violated, that legislation had to be enacted, ensuring that all applicants are fully informed of their rights.

But it’s also a bit of a snow-job. In that package, they also had questions, they had requests for further information. If you do not comply, your application will be denied—surely the government has the right to full and complete information before making a decision. If you do not agree, you may appeal. 

If you do not provide the information by a certain deadline, the application will be denied. Then there is some rule that you have to wait six months or a year before you can apply again. The whole process is like that—Catch-22, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, they present you with all kinds of stuff to read about the process, your rights, duties and obligations under the system. They want more and more and more information. They’ve got you running off to London to see an orthopedic surgeon, and they’ve got you in the MRI machine, and they’ve got some guy injecting cortisone into your lower back and hip, and at some point I began to wonder at the nature of the game. What are the rules of engagement, and how is it played? I know how to lose by this point—I’ve already done it. No one knows how to win, but win they somehow did—often with a lawyer, and the rules of evidence. They were persistent. When they were denied, they bided their time and went back. What you are fighting against is a snow-job.

How many times, how many people have told me that their doctor didn’t get the forms in on time, before the deadline.

Duh.

Many.

Many, many people.

That’s why they send a guy claiming back injuries or chronic back pain for a psychological exam. (If you don’t show up, the claim is denied, right? The client is presented with one more opportunity to fail.)

And yet, to your certain knowledge, they have already read a number of medical reports stating your injuries, the ongoing nature of it, the permanence, the pain, the suffering, and they don’t seem to care about that at all.

You wonder what the hell’s wrong with them, but you soon learn: they send everybody for a psychological exam. That’s just a fact. They send everyone.

If you ask about it, they always say the same thing: “We treat all of our clients, (and applicants), the same way...”

It’s true enough, too. They treat all of their clients and applicants like shit, ladies and gentlemen.

Apparently, it is the policy of ODSP that every single person who ever walked through their door was a no-good piece of shit, someone set on defrauding the system.

This appears to be their standard operating procedure.

***

One of the real eye-openers with the ODSP application process is the obligatory psychological exam. 

Every person I ever spoke to said they had been obliged to attend this exam. Now, I would be the first to point out that there is a good case to be made for this exam. So many people who fall through the cracks of our educational system, our employment system, and our social support system, are suffering from some form of mental illness.

More than anything, they want to identify the people who are going to fall through the cracks of the system and make sure they do it quicker…or something like that.

Children who suffer from mental illness, or any one of a thousand other ailments typically do not do well in the school setting. It’s fair to say that steps have been taken and the situation is different today than it was thirty or forty years ago when I attended school. But a lot of applicants aren’t all that literate or all that educated to begin with. The mentally ill are particularly easy to stigmatize, for when you maybe talk to someone for the first time, or for a limited time, they might not tell you their entire life story—probably not their entire medical history, all in the first go. This affects their education, it affects their self-image and it affects their ability to navigate the system and be an effective advocate for themselves. It affects their employment prospects and their fates in general.

It’s easy to assume someone is a criminal—for surely many of them (or us) present in exactly this fashion.

Some guy swilling back a beer, handing you a meth-pipe and telling everyone that he’s got court tomorrow for assaulting someone isn’t necessarily the most sympathetic character to begin with.

Yet there are certain implied issues there. This is not the typical, average model of behaviour in this particular cultural mode, i.e. Canada, in a relatively prosperous city in a developed part of the country.

Then when you find out he’s got a record as long as your arm, going back years, and you also find out they’re on welfare or ODSP.  Now you’re halfway to stigmatizing someone. It’s pretty easy to do, especially if we don’t know much about mental health, or the process of socialization in children, or the longer term effects of child abuse, beatings, sexual interference, deprivation or neglect…we need to ask those questions, and sometimes the person themselves might not be the best witness or most objective narrator of their life so far.

All we have is a snapshot of how they are right now, and sometimes it ain’t pretty.

Suffice to say the psych exam is Standard Operating Procedure for the ODSP. They probably do detect, suspect, or confirm, many cases where the applicant does indeed suffer from some form of severe, chronic, permanent or ongoing mental health issue—one (or more) of which might seriously affect their ability to seek, obtain, and to hold, regular, and renumerative employment. To be fair to this aspect of the public health system, many applicants go on to get treatment and support through this system.

In other words they need support. They actually need ODSP and the system recognizes this.

What is interesting is that the sort of experience I had, and the answer I got from the social worker I was dealing with.

The doctor asked certain questions, at face value looking for specific answers, but also pushing your buttons a bit and trying to elicit a response—which it did.

“Do you hear voices?”

“Only enough to formulate speech—there’s nothing wrong with my hearing, doctor.”

I pressed my social worker for the result of this exam, and they tell you it’s all confidential—you don’t even have the right to know what their assessment is. When pressed further, the lady told me, 

‘Some kind of anti-social personality disorder, but the psychiatrist really would prefer not to say because a proper diagnosis takes more time than one interview.”

Anti-social personality disorder. So they’re not allowed to tell you, but somehow they told me. This may seem a bit ‘paranoid’ but what were they really trying to tell me?

I was just some guy who fell from a scaffolding. I was just some guy who fell through the cracks of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board—an injured worker. And the government was trying to tell me that I was crazy if I thought they were going to give me a disability pension for a back that was broken in three places.

That’s what I got out of it, ladies and gentlemen.

When people are in pain, when people are desperate, they’re just looking for help. They are looking for a friend. The system makes a real bad impression sometimes, usually when you are at your most vulnerable.

We never ask enough questions, because we know so little about the system we are dealing with.

I may not have all the answers, but I sure as hell got a lot of questions.

END