Kyra's Story
Kicked out of the gymnasium and off of sports teams.
In late January 2022, Kyra jumped into a big rig with her stepmom and joined the Freedom Convoy as it passed through Winnipeg. After arriving in Ottawa, she was part of the trucker protest for an additional three weeks. I’ve written about her adventures here.
Kyra was 12 when COVID turned the world upside down. She’s now 15 and, two days ago, she bravely testified at the National Citizen’s Inquiry in Winnipeg (beginning at 8:31:00 on this video.) It’s stressful speaking in front of an audience, when everyone’s attention is focussed on you and the proceedings are being recorded for posterity. She did a fine job.
When COVID first appeared, Kyra’s schooling and extracurricular sports were shut down for months by officials who seemed blind to the fact that healthy young people had virtually no risk of dying of COVID. This was bad enough, but things got worse.
COVID enforcement has never been compassionate. The tone is always judgmental, punitive. The government’s policy-of-the-moment is always right, everything else is wrong. Few sensible conversations actually take place.
As a society, we have great clarity that racial segregation is morally despicable. The fact that people couldn’t get served at a lunch counter due to the colour of their skin several decades ago, the fact that they were consigned to the back of the bus disgusts us. Yet this same society had no problem turning COVID dissenters into second-class citizens.
Kyra’s family was leery of the rushed vaccines partly due to the fact that, after receiving a flu shot as an 18-month old, she stopped breathing, paramedics were called, and she was rushed to hospital. During 2021, after her unvaccinated parents were no longer permitted to enter the local hockey arena, it was Kyra who took her younger siblings in and out of practices.
When her age own group became eligible to receive vaccines a few months later, she reports, “I was kicked off of both my teams” - volleyball and ringette. Theoretically, she could have participated by producing a negative test before every game or practice (two to three times a week). But the tests cost $40 each and had to be done at a pharmacy, so this wasn’t a viable option.
Kyra describes a surreal world in which all students took part in gym class at school (everyone was required to be masked), but “as soon as the bell rang for lunch, you had to show proof of vaccination to be in the gym area.” This meant that Kyra and a few others were banished. The school, the government, and public health officials all ganged up on a small minority of kids. Together, they transformed innocent children into outsiders.
Kyra says the date after which she would no longer be allowed to play ringette was somewhat unclear. One day, pre-game, she thinks one of her own teammates ratted her out - after which “the coach came into the dressing room and asked me to leave.” This conversation occurred “in front of the entire team…I was very upset.”
Let us all remember that time seems to pass more slowly when we’re younger. Three years, when you’re aged 12 to 15, can feel like forever. Kyra’s world was growing ever-smaller. She couldn’t join friends at a Halloween gathering “because at that time anyone over the age of 13 had to show proof of vaccination and I didn’t have that.”
In contrast, the Freedom Convoy protest was a refreshing experience. People were friendly, in good spirits, and socialized without masks. At last, she says, she felt “a sense of normalcy.”
As someone who’s 78 years old I want to apologize to the young people that went through this insane time of Covid restrictions. My entire generation failed to preserve the hard-fought freedoms generations prior to mine forfeited so many lives to pass on to us. They died to ensure that Hitler’s vision did not become today’s history. Regrettably, too few of us failed to see that a smiling face with pretty hair can also have dictatorial aspirations.
Somehow, the insanity that is requiring an unvaccinated person to receive a vaccine to protect already vaccinated people from getting the disease against which they've already been vaccinated, has never occurred to government officials or teachers or shop owners.
When the Soviet Union fell, I was impressed that Orthodox Christianity could so immediately and so strongly appear in a population after nearly 3 generations of government-enforced atheism (of the most stupid kind). I thought that persistence remarkable.
But now enter Canada (and the US), where, after 250 years of culture based on freedom of thought, of conscience, of speech, and of person, we see the immediate emergence and embrace of oppression and tyranny by so many of that same population. All it took was a little governmental and social encouragement. The persistence of cruel oppression running beneath a culture of freedom. Certain people seemed eager to jump at the sudden opportunity to bully free-thinkers.
We've learned a deep lesson about humans. It should be brought out and discussed openly. So that, never again!