Toxic Pudding/Or: The Woman Who Opened The Hole In The Dyke

Boy oh boy, Whit. I'm not sure you want/wanted to get me riled up again on this issue. Open up this subject matter and I'm like the faucet you can't turn off; the dyke you can't plug the hole in; the wound that is oozing with underlying infection. Having already written this email, and having taken hours to write it, I will now give it a name. In fact, I will give it two names:

Toxic Pudding -- Or: The Woman Who Opened Up The Hole in a Dyke

I think i may use this as my opening piece in:

Hegel's Hotel: Part 1: Reverse-Discrimination, Reverse-Preferentialism, and Inequality in The Domestic/Sexual Courts of Canada

Hi Whit,

I'm not sure whether to thank you or to curse you for opening up some old and new emotional wounds. Perhaps both. Given the fuel to relight my rage against the domestic court system in Canada, it is very hard -- practically impossible -- for me to present anything but a highly biased male perspective on what I see as the 'prolific increase in feminist rights groups pounding Ottawa and creating a hugely discriminative domestic court system against men that sucks men financially dry while men lay bruised and beaten and anally raped on court room floors and then finally stumble out of the court room and do absolutely nothing except alternate between rage and misery in their 'rooms' and 'basement apartments' -- licking their wounds and saying nothing about them -- men who make $50,000 incomes and more and yet who may be trying to live on a net income of $15,000 or less -- that's less than $1500 net a month, having to borrow money for their food and/or transportation -- until an article like this comes along to break the silent male pain and rage'

The article itself was pretty tame by a woman who was trying to partly move in the right direction -- i.e. trying to see things from a male perspective in a way that does not vilify all ghost fathers -- but the article paled in comparison to the feedback comments it generated mostly from separated/divorced men who have experienced much the same thing as I have -- indeed, many of these men have experienced things much, much more harshly than I have both in court and in their support payments.

I was lucky -- very lucky. I met a woman ten years ago, Sharida, who has been supportive to me through all of my worst days, both emotionally and financially. I got off easier than a lot of men with payments of $235 per month compared to many men who pay $500 per month or more.

Even so, with Revenue Canada problems due to not paying enough tax on my cashed RRSPs after I left/was downsized out of the TTC, with lost income at the time from taking a huge cut in pay to start over again in the taxi business, with debts from my old income, and lawyer fees of $180 per hour when my ex was getting her lawyer paid by the government, there were many days when even with Sharida's help I was a combination of miserable, despairing, and raging anger and hated against Canada for its domestic bias against men and particularly separated fathers.

I saw my roomate paying over a thousand dollars to his ex for back payments in support money for several months in which he was unemployed. I heard him talking about her using the money to go on vacation with his son somewhere in the Caribbean while he was bicycling to work and working 60 hour weeks to pay for this vacation -- a vacation that neither he nor I have had in probably a decade or more, at least not while either of us have been separated which in both our cases is a decade or more. I have seen my roommate continue to pay a thousand dollars or more in a month to make up for back payments owed to his wife while he was unemployed -- even while his teenage son was staying with us at the townhouse for the summer.

I've heard of many well-to-do single, separated or divorced women in their 40s and 50s who are despairing themselves of the many single, separatedor divorced men out there who may be making great income but are losing it all or have lost it all in court battles with the exs. Some may be supporting two and three families.

I say what goes around comes around. "Ladies, you partly created this monster of financial inequality amongst separated/divorced men and women.
You are now looking at older, single, divorced men -- like your ex -- who have been financially taken to the cleaners if you have had kids -- by women like you."

I know there are opposite horror stories that many a separated or divorced woman could tell you but I am here -- like the many men who commented on this particular article -- to tell the man's story, not the woman's. The woman's story has been documented many, many times before. It is time for the miserable, raging separated man to break the wall and impasse of Clint Eastwood like silent pain -- and speak up. Indeed, do something other than keep your pain and misery and anger to yourself.

Here is the icing on the cake -- for me at least. I thought I would be 'free' of my support payments when my daughter turned eighteen -- especially since she was working full time and not living at home with her mother anymore but rather with her boyfriend.

I asked Family Responsibility in Nova Scotia what they could do to help stop my support payments from coming out of my bank account each month, even as my daughter passed her 18th birthday. I had no problem helping my daughter financially if and when she needed it as I would and have even after my son turned 18. But I wanted to do this as any normal family father would do -- with an eye towards the family budget as a whole; not out of coercement and intimdation from the government.

Family Responsiblity said they could do nothing about my situation -- I would have to go through a legal process and fill out about 20 pages of legal documents -- to have a judge hopefully stop my payments. Otherwise, I was told, I could still be paying support payments til my daughter was 24 or even older! When did this law pass without men knowing about it?

The legal documents I signed with my ex back around 1992 have become worth about the same as the toilet paper in my bathroom upstairs. Laws keep passing in the woman's -- and the government's -- favor, and the separated fathers in Canada/America have become the financial scapegoats and Whipping Posts of all that is wrong with Canadian -- and American -- family life.

There is a collusion going on, you see, between the Government of Canada and aggressive feminist political lobbying groups. Most people miss this part of the equation but it is there just as covertly and sneakily as the collusion between Big Government and The Big Gas Companies. The more the Big Gas Companies charge for their gas -- until people start screaming -- the more government makes on gas taxes. When the people start to scream, the price of gas finally starts to go down again -- at least until the people are placated and the whole process of increasing gas prices starts over again. Both the Government and the Gas Companies gain from gas increases until the people start to complain hard and loud.

The same goes with Casino Revenues. The casinos 'slowly tighten the screws to increase revenues and lower payouts while the government pays little attention to what is happening because they are gaining revenues too -- until the people start to complain loud and clear. It is the old principle of 'the squeeky wheel gets the oil.'

And so it is with the collusion between aggressive Feminist lobbyist groups and the Canadian government. The government has no masculine lobbyist groups to contend with -- at least none with much clout or power. So the squeeky wheel gets the oil. The government wants the feminist vote. And the men sit on their hands with apples in their mouths (I could say worse.) -- and say absolutely nothing.

Until an article like this comes along and opens a hole in the dyke. And water starts to come gushing through. Pretty soon a tidal wave of masculine pain and rage starts to destroy the dyke. The dyke is our Canadian Domestic and Sexual Court System.

The story only continues to get worse. After a huge email argument in August in which my daughter got between myself, my ex, and the goverment, I am now totally alienated from my daughter. Since our argumetn in August we have had only one other significant set of email transactions in December which only solidified our mutual anger (if not rage). I regret the fact that my daughter got into the middle of this horrible mess but I also hate the fact that she can only see her mother's -- and her own -- perspective. My daughter seems to think that as a father I should be (financially) supporting her for her entire life. I shook my head in disbelief on this perspective but even more shockingly she seems to have the Government of Canada currently on her side.

Forget the fact that this money I send to Nova Scotia every month could be used to help prop up my parents rather paltry pension -- a minute portion back from the much, much larger portion that my parents paid the government. Forget the fact that the money could be used to help prop up my non-existant penison. Forget the fact that the money could be used to prop up my own standard of living and/or helping to finanially equalize the relationship between myself and my girlfriend of ten years who has propped me up to the tune of thousands of dollars over the years.

Forget all of this. The proof is in the pudding -- and here is the most bacterially infected, rancid part of the pudding.

My ex phoned me about a week ago for the first time since about August. She was drunk like she usually is when she calls me. She told me that she hasn't been receiving any support payments from the government since August -- even as they have kept coming out of my bank account every month since August.

If this is true, then what other conclusion can we draw from this than to say that the Government of Canada -- or at least one part of it -- is totally fraudulent. Money is being taken from me on the pretense that it is being passed to my ex to help support my daughter -- and yet neither my ex nor my daughter have been receiving any of this monthly money that continues to be taken out of my bank account under false pretenses.

If this situation were reversed, and the government was aware of what was happening, I would be up on fraud charges. But the government of Canada -- even with Stephen Harper's alleged 'Accountability Act' and 'Ethics Committee' -- remains like all Canadian governents that we have experienced in the last 30 years or so, if not longer: immune and invulnerable to all charges of fraud. The worst/best that happens is that some political culprit/scapegoat gets politically nailed to the cross (but he still gets to keep his gold-plated pension), and then the Government of Canada continues to carry on business as per usual -- and I can think of a lot of synonyms here -- non-transparently, covertly, deceptively, deceitfully, manipulatively, fraudulaently...the type of adjectives and/or adverbs that the people of Canada -- and America -- have become used to thinking of, when referring to the actions of our respective narcissistically corrupt governments. There's another good adjective -- narcissistic.

Yes, the proof is in the pudding -- the bacterially infected, rancid, toxic pudding -- that makes up the Government of Canada, and more particularly, in this case, the Domestic and Sexual Courts of Canada.

Amen.

db, January 18th, 2007.

So Whitney, do I thank you or curse you for bringing this article to my frontal attention? To my 'frontal lobe'? I think I thank you.

My email to you was at least partly 'psychotherapeutic'.

However, I would not blame you at all if you did/do not completely buy into my obviously tainted masculine bias.

Furthermore, I would not even blame you if you stopped reading this email half way through it -- or before.

Like the Canadian Government and Domestic/Sexual Courts, my email is oozing toxicity from its pores.

Sometimes, you just have to throw out the pudding and start over again.

Would you like to start a fresh topic?

Thanks for bearing, or I will assume to be at least partly bearing, with me through this righteous onslaught.

I think you poked a hole in my dyke.

But I feel better.

Cheers,

dave