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I submit the following to GuelphToday for this week’s column knowing that I’m about to nuke my email from orbit. It had a good run.
So let’s talk about what’s going on in Ottawa right this moment (at noon on Saturday), and what happened here in Guelph last weekend.
Though there’s a difference in scale, the intention and desire of the ones organizing these two gatherings are more or less the same, but while the so-called 'Freedom Convoy' has gotten a lot of attention, what’s happened in Guelph with these anti-mandate groups has gotten practically none.
Last weekend, a couple of hundred people who don’t consider themselves anti-mask or anti-vaccine walked though Old Quebec Street making noise while maskless to say they’re fed up with the pandemic and pandemic restrictions. “I’m glad we’re finally doing this,” one woman said. Another man asked the stunned people looking on in Old Quebec Street to take off their masks and show off their smiles.
If I were to have stopped and asked those people what they just saw, they would probably be hard pressed to explain it to me. A lot of those people were too young to remember the 'freak outs' of the 1960s, and the one security guard I saw arrived on the scene several minutes late. It was over and done in less than eight minutes.
Consider what happened last Saturday as an experiment. It was an experiment for those participating to see how far they can push things, and it was an experiment for our city leadership: Can they ignore what’s almost literally happening under their nose?
I know 90 per cent of the eligible population is fully vaccinated, but this is not just a matter of being vaccinated because I’ve been told by a few of the people participating in these rallies that they’ve gotten two jabs. It’s also worth noting that over 80 per cent of Canadian truckers are fully vaccinated, but look at the attention wrought by the other 20.
To understand the inherent danger, you have to understand how people are indoctrinated. To use the word feels disturbing, but there is a continuum of information, or misinformation, that people go down and it starts with the simplest of ideas, an idea that you’ve already thought about in the course of the last 22 months: Aren’t you sick of this?
I talked to one man a few weeks ago who told me that he won’t get vaccinated because he doesn’t trust the government and he doesn’t trust big pharma. Hey, fair enough. My sense is that a majority of Canadians, if asked, will enunciate some level of mistrust in most institutions, from the Government of Canada to the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes. But this is how it begins.
The seeds of doubt, perhaps long sowed in the person, are then fertilized with a rapidly changing information landscape. With COVID-19 we’ve seen the scientific process happen in real time, and the best advice of March 2020 (disinfecting your groceries anyone?) has now been proven by researchers as pointless and ineffective in stopping the spread.
So now you don’t know what to believe. It’s possible you might have once trusted your family doctor, if you have a family doctor, but he or she is saying all the things you hear from the three levels of government and the World Health Organization. If you can’t trust them, how can you trust your doctor? Are they in on it (whatever “it” is)?
You’re told to wear a mask, but some people you know on Facebook say that they don’t work. You’re told to get a vaccine, but then you’re told some vaccines have side effects, and those same online friends are now telling you that the other vaccines are bad, or that they’re “gene therapy” to change your DNA (they’re not).
And now you see the real plot and intentions. COVID-19, whether its real or fake, is a means to an end. That end could be Agenda 2021, or Agenda 2030, or the Great Reset, or some other international conspiracy to grind people under foot or de-populate the planet. All of this sounds crazy, but it’s also the best case scenario.
What’s more disturbing are the white supremacists and far-right figures who understand well how indoctrination works and have attached themselves to the anti-mandate movements, like the trucker convoy, to find new blood. The frightening thing is that the ones being recruited don’t know or don’t care that their perversion is happening, they’re just happy to have friends who believe as they believe.
And that’s why we need to take these things seriously, the trucker rallies and the freak outs through local malls. To stand back and watch without saying anything is a kind of dereliction. To stand there and laugh, or to call those people names, is even worse.
We’re rapidly approaching the second anniversary of the first lockdown because of COVID, and our public health leaders have started to pivot to the idea that COVID is something we must start learning to live with. Meanwhile, the pandemic of radicalization is just beginning, and living with it, like ignoring it, is not an option.
