My father told me that, as a child, he swallowed spoonfuls of powdered sugar during commercial breaks on his shows. Guarding the fort of the house at the age of five, he had plenty of time to indulge in this pleasure, letting the sugar melt on his tongue until the next break. The sugar inoculated, perhaps, the maternal sweetness from which he had been weaned. He and his brothers and sister lived in relative poverty following the untimely death of their mother at the age of 39.
The years passed, and my father tore himself away from this environment by accessing a quality public education. A class defector, inhabited by a pride mixed with a vague regret: that of having moved away from those who had been generated by the same austerity as him but whose fate, unlike my father, seemed locked . Not everyone had seized or received the same opportunities as him.
Nevertheless, for several years my father was embarrassed by his decayed teeth from the sugar he had ingested. He was particularly sensitive to jokes about it. His teeth bound him to his previous condition. The radicalism of the means he had to take — tearing them all out, then laying new ones — was matched only by the magnitude of their costs.
The great Jean-Claude Labrecque, filmmaker, director of photography, said that filming a face was, in fact, filming a country. In the middle of it, the smile shows the marks of the events that have marked the life of the wearer. Poverty, for example, acts like an insidious bruxism. It wears out and eventually spoils the teeth, revealing the environment in which a person was born or evolved.
Spoiled teeth put up a barrier in front of the individual wishing to subscribe to a new job. They relegate it to that part of our imagination dedicated to the naughty and the lazy, the less frequentable. When the cavity reaches the stage of an abscess, the pain seizes the spirits, reducing the individuals to their suffering, tense and helpless bodies.
Excessive fees
The inaccessibility of dental care must be tackled, as it hampers social mobility. It attaches individuals to the stake of their original social condition, condemning them to revolve around it without being able to stray too far. The current costs of dental clinics are prohibitive. Moreover, they suggest that dental health care is a privilege, the prerogative of those who are born or who have reached a more privileged social status.
Failing to eliminate hereditary injustices, our society can at least even out the gaps in access to care and promote universal access to it. However, the disproportionate fees demanded by dentists fix the social order, which remains immutable. They represent an out-of-reach investment for millions of Quebecers. They flatten the less fortunate at ground level on which our social pyramid rises.
Because he is poor, the smile of an individual comes to be spoiled, for lack of the resources or the education necessary to take care of his teeth. And because he’s poor, he can’t get the arguably more substantial dental care his teeth will require — a paradox as glaring as the smiles of those in toothpaste ads, a paradox that translates easily to the field of mental health and the inaccessibility of psychotherapy services.
Instead of valuing this universal access to care, and cherishing our collective wealth, instead of enriching the field of possibilities for those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, moribund parties, such as the CAQ, the PCQ and the PLQ , are atomizing our society. Collectively, the individualistic measures they are proposing, namely the tax cut, are ruining us and truncating our future.
Unfortunately, these promises temporarily manage to silence a certain grumbling, like those spoonfuls of sugar that my father swallowed and which soothed his anxieties for a few minutes. Until the next commercial break.