Determined Zach, with his parents. meeting with the Mayor of Barrie before he set off for his march to save souls
A young boy from Barrie, Ontario did a fundraiser walk/run/cycle from Barrie to Ottawa to "raise awareness and funds for youth mental health." He says got the idea from Terry Fox, another Canadian cross-country fundraiser who made his historic walk across Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer on one leg, the other having been amputated from cancer.
But what was it that really triggered Zach's efforts?
Well here is a report on his mother Shelley Hofer from the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in 2012:
Shelley’s sought various treatments for twenty years, but traces her feelings of sadness, crying for unexplained reasons, and depression back to age five or six. She’d tried psychotherapy and medications without much relief.And here is what she says:
“It’s hard to explain that you’d feel so low and the only way out is to take your own life,” explains Shelley, who has been getting treatments at CAMH for a decade. “I would have died if I didn’t get this help.”And another, not readily available piece of information:
Zach Makes Tracks is a 410-kilometre trek to Parliament Hill.
He's accompanied by his mom Shelley and his stepdad Derek.
His mother "suffered" from the "disease" leaving this young, already fatherless boy, bereft and motherless.
I tried to figure out what was exactly this "mental health" this woman "suffered" from.
All I could deduce was that it was the usual "lack of self-esteem" that seems to be afflicting women, young and old, and almost always white, in this world full of pressures, where women are no longer allowed to be women but a masculinized form of themselves, in line with the aggressive and pervasive feminist world in which we all live, and where men have been demasculinized.
Striving for feminists' standards doesn't make us into successful female managers and CEO, but divorced, unhappy women with amorphous psychological ailments.
And everyone bears the brunt, including those like young Zach, who talks about his "mental illness," which is simply his attempt at understanding his mother's suffering, and which he, in his boyish masculine way, wishes to cure.
He did so much better at confronting the problem than Ms. Hofer, who retreated into self-pity without regard for what she was doing to her family, including her young son.
So this is the lot of young, white boys, whose parents (and whose society) have deemed them "mentally unstable," yet who can prove themselves far sturdier than anyone around them when given the chance, and, like Zach, even when not.
And would (has) an ordinary young girl done anything similar where she confronts the dangerous elements of nature and technology, by herself, to raise money for a cure?
So far, the best women have done is run in groups for short spurts in order to sell pink ribbons. I couldn't find any young girls who took this on as something to emulate.
Being a minor, Zach had his father ride with him through the course
