Instead of focusing on the thugs who occupied Ottawa and kept their horns blasting for the better part of the night for almost two weeks keeping everyone – including seniors, children, and the ill – awake, why don’t we focus on the many health care workers who continue to work long hours caring for the vaccinated and non-vaccinated alike though they reached the point of exhaustion long ago.
Let’s celebrate them.
Instead of focusing on those who defaced the Terry Fox and war memorials – which in itself should have resulted in jail time – let’s focus on the young college student who carried his placard alone into the sea of sheep protesting on Parliament Hill telling them to go home and return the city to those who live there. They were tired of the noise; tired of being harassed and tired of being held hostage in their own community.
These are not freedom fighters; they are terrorists. Let’s call them for what they are.
Instead of focusing on those who carried swastikas, confederate flags and signs supporting trump’s run in the next American election, why don’t we support the thousands of truckers who were vaccinated and did their best to keep the supply chain running despite the roadblocks set up at the border. We know who the heroes are – they are not those who put our well-being at risk, but those who did their best to keep on keeping on despite the uprising.
Rather than talking about the hooligans who received much of their funding from the United States and likely from the miscreants who stormed capitol hill just over a year ago and indeed garnered the support of the Republican Party who promoted that insurrection, let’s congratulate the GoFundMe people for shutting this particular platform down saying the protest promoted and encouraged violence and hate – something that went against the higher ideals of most Canadians. Sadly, we thought in this great country of ours that we were above the kind of behavior but the only thing this rally proved that the same kind of people that attacked the white house causing the death of four people there, haunt this country too.
And rather than talk about those who stole food from homeless shelters, bullied business owners and threatened people who did wear masks; let’s talk about the three heroic women in Ottawa who stood their ground, holding hands and forming a human chain to block a noisy flatbed truck from driving through their quiet neighborhood again. The driver tried to run them down.
We know who heroes are and it was not those in the protests but the many who stood up to them with little more than raised fists and voices telling them the party was over kids…go home.
As I sit and write listening to the sounds of ambulances and fire trucks going by to help someone, somewhere — I am well aware, as we all are, of who real heroes are. It is certainly not the people in these rallies.
No one in this democracy denies that one of the gifts of living in this country is the right to peaceable demonstrations which is something that many, many good Canadians gave their lives to protect. They did not die so that future generations could act like bullies and intimidate their fellows. Surely, we had legions of soldiers rolling over in their graves while witnessing what took place in the last two weeks.
It hurt all of us and not in the way the demonstrators may have thought.
We are all COVID fatigued. There is not one among us who has not had enough but we continue because we care about others. We continue because we know that our carelessness could contribute to the illness or death of another. We continue because we remember the mass COVID graves that speckled the North American landscape not long ago and we want to do our part to avoid a repeat. We do it because we feel fortunate that we survived at all.
In short, we do it because we understand that it is not all about us.
Let’s hope those who participated in these acts of terrorism decide to do the same.
