I'm a Different Person, a Better Guy (Part 5 of 5)

'With this peaceful protest, without throwing a fist, we was able to ignite the whole globe.'

Part 1: You Can See Me from the Moon

Man tells Csaba he has travelled from Prince Edward Island to meet him. That’s 13-hours of driving ‘I appreciate you being here…It’s about my daughter and about me, and you representing us.’ Profanity warning.

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While he was being fingerprinted, trucker Csaba Vizi says he told the police officers, “You aren’t protecting us, you protect this corrupt government. There's still time for you to stand with us, you're gonna be heroes after the government goes down. If not, you might arrest us today, but we gonna arrest you tomorrow.” Having witnessed the fall of Communism in Romania, he was describing historical facts.

It was in Ottawa, he says, that “I realized I have some kind of power in my broken English. If I can make somebody leave Prince Edward Island after what I said in an interview, and come all that distance and look for me and shake my hand, I have some power in my voice.”

While in their twenties, both Csaba and Anna reacted badly to a vaccine. “We end up very, very sick,” she says. He couldn’t get out of bed for a week. She, herself, “couldn’t brush my teeth, couldn’t brush my hair.” They both remember their daughter, who was five at the time, trying to care for them, trying to cook them breakfast.

“So I swear,” says Anna, “Never, ever again.” She knows it normally takes eight to ten years to properly test a new vaccine. Csaba nods, “They have to test it on animals. Then they go to humans. And they have to wait years to see how people react. Maybe in six months you’re gonna have a heart attack.”

The fact that the authorities pretended to know for certain that a product less than a year old was safe told Anna something was off. In Csaba’s view, “it was very alarming when they said, ‘Oh, you have to take it or you will not get a job.’ I was driving in the United States and suddenly, in the middle of the night, on the highway a big sign came to life: ‘Take the first exit. Come take your vaccine. We gonna give you $100 cash.’” He scowls, “Come on.”

Their youngest daughter was the only unvaccinated student in her class. “One day she came home from school and said, ‘I’ve been kicked out from this team, I cannot play chess, I cannot do this.’ She told me, ‘Please let me get the vaccine so I can do activities with the rest of my friends.’”

He urged her to be patient. “It was hard for her to understand,” he says. “Probably she was thinking my parents are nuts.” For him, the fact that Bill Gates had declared the world to be over-populated in the 1990s was an important point. “Who the hell is this guy? Just because he’s rich,” he thinks he gets to decide.

“Then the COVID started. After a few weeks, I see Bill Gates again. He said, ‘Our scientists are working 24/7 to come up with a vaccine to save you all.’ I said, Hold on a minute. Not long ago you said we was overpopulated at seven billion people. Now we are over eight and you wanna save everybody? I said, No, I’m not going to take that vaccine.”

Other family members made different decisions. “I called my mom, my dad,” in Romania, says Csaba. “I said, ‘Hey, don’t even think about taking the vaccine.’ And my mom said, ‘They said on the TV it’s free now, later on we have to pay for that.’” He urged her to be the last person in the city. He also offered to pay should it later become necessary. 

“She went without telling us,” he says. “And by the time we heard back she already had three. Now she’s losing her vision in one eye [at the age of 72]. My sister has myocarditis. My father, thrombosis.”

After the Canada government finally relented and permitted them to board an airplane without providing proof of vaccination, Csaba and Anna flew to Romania for a month. “Maybe we see them for the last time, I don’t know,” says Anna. “It’s painful watching them,” struggling with serious health problems that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“We won’t take any other vaccine for the rest of our life,” Csaba says quietly. “We don’t trust the medical system anymore. I lost my trust.”

Eleven years earlier, Csaba had quit smoking. Two days before his arrest, he began again. “Over there, somebody give me a pack of cigarettes. I said, ‘I will give it to my wife, she’s a smoker.’ But the stress was way too much.”

For this everyday trucker, the Freedom Convoy was a watershed. “Ottawa changed my life, man. I'm still strong. Even if I have a broken bone in my wrist, even if I have some problem with bones in my neck. These things are not that big a deal.”

Meeting so many Canadians. Seeing “all that joy, how happy everyone was there.” Witnessing people “caring for and helping each other, making food in the street, giving it away for free.” All of this, he says, “changed me completely. I'm a different person, a better guy than I was before. Yeah, Ottawa was something wonderful, man.”

He once would have scoffed at a sign advertising free hugs. “I wasn't that type of guy,” he says. “I f**king enjoy hugging people, now.”

His old self used to think there was power in a fist. But “I realize love has even more power. We won in Ottawa. We came home victorious. With this peaceful protest, without throwing a fist, we was able to ignite the whole globe.”

He’d gladly do it again, he says, even if it meant enduring another beating. “If I can go back to Ottawa for another three weeks, I will leave now.”