In an ironic twist of what I’ve always considered logic, I’m feeling pretty good about having grown old. Don’t worry, this isn’t a trip down nostalgia lane. I’m not about to bore you with how good things were in the good old days because, well, they weren’t that great.
But they were, in some ways, better.
I know this is going to be hard to believe, but there once was a time when people actually wanted to be smart, well-informed and aware of the subtle distinction between truth and fiction.
This fine distinction was brought home ad nauseam the past few days with the 18-wheeled protests taking place in Ottawa. Ostensibly a protest of “truckers” aimed at the federal government’s vaccine mandate for cross-border essential workers, it has, like so many other things, morphed into a hodgepodge of irate people protesting pretty much everything. It brings to mind Bob Dylan’s response to a mid-1960’s reporter who, riffing on Dylan’s reputation as a protest singer, asked him, “What are you protesting?” He quipped, “What have you got?”
The supposed foundation of the truckers’ protest rests firmly on a bed of quicksand. Let us, momentarily, recall what the spark was that started this fire. The truckers—and I use the word advisedly—are protesting a government mandate that came into effect on Jan. 15. It requires all essential workers who cross the Canada-U.S. border to show proof of vaccination wherever they enter the country in order to avoid testing and quarantine.
One would think that is a good thing. If I was a trucker I’d much rather get vaccinated and roll across the border than go through a time-wasting, often-wrong testing procedure and possibly wind up having to quarantine for however many days we’re supposed to do that.
These rules have already applied to the general travelling public since last fall.
It’s probably worth mentioning truckers who aren’t crossing the border aren’t impacted in any way by this mandate.
But wait; there’s more. Around the same time the Canadian government was taking this step, the U.S. government crafted a similar requirement for Canadian drivers coming into the U.S. It took effect a week later.
So if Canadian truckers can’t get into the U.S. without being vaccinated, how can Canada’s requirement for them to be vaccinated to get back into Canada... wait a minute, something’s not right here. Is it?
Never having been one to let facts get in the way of telling a good story, I stand with my trucker brothers and sisters. This sucks. How dare the feds pass a pointless law that really has no consequential effect? This is clearly an infringement of my licence, er, liberty. I’m standing up for freedumb!
Which is what this charade has pretty much become: A rallying point for everyone who is fed up with covid restrictions... whether they were warranted or not. And, of course, they weren’t. How could restrictions on personal freedumb be warranted when they were aimed at fighting something that clearly doesn’t exist? Or so it goes in the truly deluded mind.
How deluded, you ask? Well, if you ask, you’re simply not paying attention to the same sources of “information” the non-believers spend their time paying whatever limited attention they have to. So virulent is the belief in the non-existence of covid among those extolling freedumb above all else that we’ve been witness to people occupying ICU beds, ventilator tubes shoved down their throats, who still insist that whatever they have keeping them from breathing on their own certainly isn’t covid... which doesn’t exist. Q.E.D!
We’ve witnessed a man so “uncertain” about the science behind the vaccines he refused to get that after three months on a ventilator, after his family had been told to get his affairs in order and say their goodbyes, he proclaims, “It’s a miracle!” when he recovers enough to breathe on his own. I can only assume it took all the self-restraint and compassion his overworked medical team could muster to keep from hitting him upside the head with a bed pan and screaming, “No, you moron. It wasn’t a miracle that saved your ass: it was medical science and round-the-clock care you probably wouldn’t have needed if you’d just got the damn vaccine in the first place.”
And so now we’re witness to the degradation of an admittedly small segment of society that have followed the trails blazed by the Trumps and Berniers of the world, gathering to protest their loss of freedumb to do whatever they want and have someone else pick up the tab for the devastation they leave behind. Truckers may have lit the fuse, but the fire is raging amongst those who are against any vaccine mandate, against restrictions on gatherings, against lockdowns, against masks, against Zoom meetings, against whatever ya got. Cue Groucho Marx singing, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”
They hate the prime minister—yeah, who doesn’t?—claiming he’s the love child of Fidel Castro and...? There are more than a few visual references to Nazis. There is a group petitioning for the Governor General and the Senate, yes, the Senate, to take over the government, as though completely unelected people might do a better job. Yes, there is everything but pitchforks, torches and a lynching, the latter likely for lack of a good opportunity.
Missing in this is, of course, the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of pandemic-related decisions are provincial, not federal. Insert eye-roll here, accompanied by mumbling, “There ya go again, confusing me with facts.”
Of course, that set the stage for the centre-right provincial premier in a neck-and-neck race with other conservative premiers for the right to claim Worst Performance by a Premier in Handling the Pandemic to announce his government will be stopping requirements for proof of vaccination to go to restaurants and other places people have gathered to give each other the virus. Yes, Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe, who currently holds the record for chutzpah after announcing the number of covid patients in the province’s hospitals had gone down... after previously sending a number of them to other provinces because there was no more room for them in Sasquatch, feels the time is right to open up.
It’s sad. When I moved to Canada a lifetime ago, the country—Quebec excepted—seemed so quaint, so civilized, so cohesive in a multicultural sort of way. But more and more it just seems like the U.S. writ small, with the same mindless palaver coming from the same folks who don’t realize how good it could be if we managed to set aside just a bit of self-interest and put a bit more effort into making it an even better place to live.
I never believed age would bring wisdom but I wasn’t expecting it to bring sadness and even less faith in my fellow man/woman.
