The trial is finally underway for a couple of the Freedom Convoy ringleaders, but I'm mostly ignoring it. They're my kryptonite. Time to leave it to the judge.💪
I continue to ride my bike to the pond every day and have a swim. The other day I had it all to myself. Then a couple of people showed up and we had a pleasant chat about what a great season it's been. But just as I was leaving, two women showed up, one with what sounded like a Russian accent, although I'm not great with eastern European accents, talking at the other about her "practice", how she's helping people heal. The other woman I recognized as a regular, although we've never spoken. She keeps to herself.🙅
Anyway, the one with the accent was aggressively spewing forth all manner of anti-vaxxer garbage, right down to the vaccine infecting us with the virus, sterilizing her "clients", and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc. The other woman was allowing herself to be splattered with it, even volunteering she'd been vaccinated because her doctor suggested she should due to her auto-immune condition, but then got the virus and was sick for a couple of weeks.😷
"See!" shouted the other woman. "The vaccine gave you the virus!"💩
I muttered "oh shut up" when I went by them, but it was involuntary, as I long ago made myself promise to never engage with an anti-vaxxer, having figured out in early days it's what they want, and there's zero percentage in it.🙈🙉🙊
But she just continued on with her proselytizing, anyway, likely not having even heard me, as she was in full spew forth mode by this point.💩
Then, as I was walking towards my bike, my eyes filled with tears. It's so frustrating, the irrationality of it all. No, more than frustrating, terrifying. So many adults, lots of them parents, some of them in positions of power over us, either fervently believing anti-social irrational garbage, or pretending to believe it. And they're everywhere. In our faces. Freedom Convoyers attacked us, in our streets, on our properties, ripping off our masks, tearing down our PRIDE flags, threatening our children. And the people we pay to defend us from attack - the Freedom Convoy may as well have invaded in tanks, ffs - either couldn't or wouldn't.👮
And that's when it hit me, why their unconscionable co-opting of the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, wearing their yellow stars, claiming persecution and victimhood even while they invade our school board meetings and picket our schools and libel and slander anyone who stands up to them, flipping reality on its head while they attack us, turning truth into lies. It's projection. The fact is, people who believe anti-social irrational garbage cause Holocausts, they don't suffer them. Always in the back of my mind now is what it must've been like to be Jewish in Nazi Germany surrounded by anti-semitic white nationalist Christian mobs believing anti-social irrational garbage about them, how terrifying it must have been, no reasoning with the unreasonable, and nobody who can defending you from them.👮
At its core, anti-vaxism is anti-semitism, the same anti-semitism that's plagued our societies forever, the horrifying facts of it learned when we studied the Holocaust in elementary school. The Freedom Convoy travelled from Alberta, home of the Reform Party, our Bible Belt, and a known hotbed of anti-semitism to punish us, residents of a Liberal riding. Of course I'm having panic attacks. Anne Frank, a girl just like me once-upon-a-time, was murdered because adults in her society believed anti-social irrational garbage.💀
Putin and the Russians who support him have for years now been spewing forth anti-social irrational garbage about Ukrainians. And just like our anti-vaxxers and their Freedom Convoy, he believes, or pretends to believe, the opposite of the truth, telling Russians they're the persecuted ones, even while he deliberately murders Ukrainian children with his indiscriminate bombing of their homes.💀
It's all so crazy-making. Trump, Trump, Trump. Canadian Conservatives wanting Pierre Poilievre to be Prime Minister. Why? He publicly supported the Freedom Convoy while it attacked us, ffs, Canadians. He's a fellow traveller of Jordan Peterson, a certifiable nutcase and supporter of Putin's genocidal war on Ukraine. According to our pollsters, if a federal election were held today, Pierre Poilievre would be elected Prime Minister of Canada.💩
In the meantime, instead of being on Twitter, I go to the library and take out books, often based on their cover, and read them, the key for me being the deadline of a due date. Even though it's artificial I still respect it and return the books, read, within three weeks. I also pilfer from free libraries and buy new (almost always used but occasionally new) books to store in my glass doored bookcases. I do this because I know not to subject myself, not just to the back and forth between the sane and insane, but to the equivocators.🙈🙉🙊
There's no middle ground here. There's no truth to be found in the anti-vax "movement". It's the same anti-social irrational garbage that resulted in the Holocaust. I witnessed the Freedom Convoy. I know what I saw. It was a white power rally, Christian nationalists who may as well all have been waving swastikas and Confederate flags, and Pierre Poilievre and Andrew Scheer and Maxime Bernier and Candice Bergen and Randy Hillier and Hell's Angels and Diagolon Accelerationists and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc were all there and cheering it on. And the publicly funded police we pay to protect us from violence, our most ballyhooed and well-funded of all first responders, were either unable or unwilling to do it - even when our healthcare workers and their patients, the sick and dying, were attacked.😡
I want people to like me, it's my achilles heel, and I don't always speak up when I should. So I'm doing this now, screaming into cyber space, while I wait and watch for the next panic attack I hope not to have.😱
Sorry, I didn't mean for this to be my post but here we are anyway. Again, I guess. Thanks for reading.💗
