Truth Teller David Maybury

Ottawa resident's Convoy essay sparked a huge response.

Yesterday, I told you about an amazing essay written by a resident of downtown Ottawa during the first week the Freedom Convoy truckers were in town. It’s filled with lovely sketches and poignant moments.

As Barbara Burrows pointed out in a comment yesterday, David Maybury, the author, demolishes the Continuous Honking Myth. Numerous people who didn’t set foot in Ottawa during the trucker protest are convinced the truckers cruelly tormented residents by honking their horns 24/7 for three weeks solid.

David describes meeting a young couple who were part of the protest, and who’d already spent several uncomfortable nights sleeping in their pickup. When he tells them he lives across the street,

Immediate surprise washed over the young man’s face. He said, ‘You must hate us. But no one honks past 6pm!’ That’s true. As someone who lives right on top of the convoy, there is no noise at night.

I said, “No, I don’t hate anyone, but I wanted to find out about you.” The two were from Sudbury Ontario… [bold added]

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I read David’s essay a few days before heading to Ottawa for a week. Only recently have I returned to it again. Wow, did it strike a chord with people!

He published it on February 3rd. Six days later, inundated with feedback from readers from around the world, he stopped accepting comments. In his words:

Thank you all for the messages, It’s overwhelming both figuratively and literally. At this time I have to close comments because I can’t keep up with moderation. I have only been able to read a fraction of what has come in. For days now I have been receiving a new comment about every 30 seconds and sometimes faster than that. I had no idea that what I wrote would touch so many.

(Whenever comments are fully open to the public, spam quickly becomes a problem. Get-rich-quick-schemes, profanity, trolls of all flavours. Cleaning out that stuff is incredibly time-consuming.)

The 994 comments now displayed beneath his essay provide a rich snapshot of a particular moment in Canadian history. There was an immense appetite for curious, honest, non-judgmental reporting.

How tragic that the mainstream media failed to provide it.