Not How Healthy People Behave

Many people responded to the Freedom Convoy with severe, implacable judgments. No shades of gray. Not an atom of self-doubt.

stock photo

During a discussion recorded earlier this year, UK writer GB Goldtooth asks Canadian trucker Gord Magill about the reaction of Ottawa residents to the extended Freedom Convoy protest. “It was pretty loud,” he admits, and there were lots of people. He understands why some folks weren’t thrilled. “But I mean, it’s the capital. You gotta expect protests.”

In his view, a few weeks of inconvenience and noise simply did not compare “to being fired from your job, having your family driven apart by the question of vaccine mandates,” or being the target of “very official scapegoating” by the Prime Minister.

Interesting, isn’t it? That there was so little sympathy in some quarters for fellow Canadians groaning under the boot of government oppression? After tolerating misery-inducing COVID restrictions in out-here-in-the-real-world workplaces for years by then, how dare these truckers complain for longer than a weekend? How dare they disturb the ruling class, the work-from-home bureaucrats by remaining in Ottawa for three weeks straight?

In Gord’s view, the Canadians who descended on Ottawa that first Saturday “instinctively understood this was history in the making.” It was, he says, a “symbolic end” to the two-year “COVID nightmare.”

Returning to his US residence after that first weekend, it became clear to him that “the media machine in Canada” was smearing protesters as “these evil Nazi assholes.” Experiencing an employment lull at the time, he spent hours online challenging that narrative:

I was just having none of it. So I just spent all day on Twitter saying: ‘You’re lying.’ You’re lying, Trudeau’s lying, the media’s lying…

…some people noticed what I was saying, they had saw the videos that I’d live streamed from Ottawa…because the rest of the world was trying to understand what was going on with the Freedom Convoy.

…So anyway, I go on Fox News. I was on for, like five minutes on this lady, Laura Ingraham’s show. And within 36 hours my Twitter account was suspended. One of my best friends whom I’ve known since I was like five years old texted me and said ‘I don’t know who you are anymore. Don’t ever talk to me again.’

Speaking a bit more than a year after the Convoy, Gord the trucker says some members of his own family still

won’t talk to me and have never given me the opportunity to explain any of this - to present arguments, to have a rational, adult discussion.

If this weren’t so alarming, it would be endlessly fascinating. The way some people reacted. Minds made up in an instant. Severe, implacable judgments. No shades of gray. Not an atom of self-doubt.

Only rigid absolutes. Lines that cannot be uncrossed. Split-second damnation. Eternal shunning.

This is not how healthy people behave. This is not how healthy societies behave.

This is a blinking, neon warning: A great deal is now broken - within and without.