![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was chatting with a friend online.
There’s a quote from The Martian that I’ve always liked:
Real life is not like movies, because movies have to make sense, or so the saying goes. Which brings us to current events: The Freedom Convoy, which has been holding Ottawa hostage for going on ten days now. It’s closed down two of Alberta’s border crossings (including the main one, which is the only one that can process livestock). It’s been irritating people in every major city. Hell, these hillbillies have been tying up the streets in Calgary, every Saturday for months, like clockwork.
They are maliciously ignorant - a term I learned this week. Not just stupid, but cruel and mean in their stupidity. An ignorance so profound that it’s morphed into evil through it’s black hole-like density.
They scream at retail workers, block traffic, blow their air horns at all hours. There have been threats of violence, as well as threats followed through on. Just today, I learned that they tried to set fire to an apartment building in Ottawa. And on that incident, one of the most galling things was seeing a twitter reply from a convoy-supporter say, basically, “crybaby, that lobby didn’t look that flammable to me”. As if the problem wasn’t someone setting a fire in a lobby. Oh, and they wrapped the front door knobs in tape to make it harder to get out.
The cops refuse to do anything (in general - time will tell if they take the arson seriously), because why would they arresttheir drinking buddies people they are ideologically aligned with.
If the rank-and-file are just maliciously ignorant, verging on evil, the organizers started out at evil, and doubled down. Like, every big name in this protest is a fascist. As in, members or leaders of known white-supremacist hate groups.
Which is where I really worry about this becoming an insurrection. You have a bunch of “merely” right-wing nut jobs, that are being deliberately agitated on the issue of the week by a bunch of stealth-Nazis. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Especially when you a few of your fellows start waiving around swastikas and Confederate flags along with the F*ck Trudeau banners. Suddenly, everyone hates you and your cause (because Nazis), and lacking any sort of critical thinking skills, you conclude that since you’re perfectly reasonable, and everyone hates you, and everyone hates Nazis, those Nazis can’t be so bad, maybe I’ll hear what they have to say.
And suddenly, you have more Nazis. Or at the very least, you’ve got a large population of people who are willing to let Nazism slide.
It really is true, History is doomed to repeat itself. And my theory is that it does so just as soon as the generation that had to experience it is all or mostly dead. Ten years after the Great Depression, we had the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Ten years after the Great Recession and we have this. All just as the Greatest Generation’s numbers are dwindling to nothing. Ugh.
Vancouver at least has the good sense to counter-protest these yokels. I fear Calgary is too right-wing for the left to do that without putting themselves into great danger.
I am just so sick of this bad situation being deliberately made worse by a bunch of morons who whine about their freedoms on one hand, while dreaming about being the guards of the concentration camp on the other.
So how are you doing?
“So how are you doing these days?”You know, if we were just dealing with COVID - social distancing, isolating when possible, getting our vaccines, and basically just waiting until it is collectively safe again - this would all be a lot easier. Not easy mind you, because all of that takes effort. Nobody wants things to be this way, and we’d all be happy if it were over. But there is a sort of camaraderie that happens when everyone works together towards a goal. It’s not pleasant to live through a natural disaster, but it does bind people together in common cause.
“Oh, I’m doing fine... Actually, that’s not true. In addition to all the other COVD-related stuff, I’m feeling a lot of anger. I am filled with rage about these fucking #FluTruxKlan assholes. These clowns exist, are in our collective faces, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So yeah, felling an awful lot of rage.”
“Same.”
There’s a quote from The Martian that I’ve always liked:
“Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception.”I’m not sure if that quote made it into the movie (I remember it as a voice-over in the trailer, rather than a scene in the movie), which is why I was really surprised that the line continues:
“Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.”I’m sure that if you were to film an earthquake disaster movie, and you included victims who denied that an Earthquake took place, despite the evidence being all around them, it wouldn’t make it past test audiences to the final cut. And if some of those victims insisted on pissing into limited clean water supply at the aid station, they’d rightly be seen as villains.
Real life is not like movies, because movies have to make sense, or so the saying goes. Which brings us to current events: The Freedom Convoy, which has been holding Ottawa hostage for going on ten days now. It’s closed down two of Alberta’s border crossings (including the main one, which is the only one that can process livestock). It’s been irritating people in every major city. Hell, these hillbillies have been tying up the streets in Calgary, every Saturday for months, like clockwork.
They are maliciously ignorant - a term I learned this week. Not just stupid, but cruel and mean in their stupidity. An ignorance so profound that it’s morphed into evil through it’s black hole-like density.
They scream at retail workers, block traffic, blow their air horns at all hours. There have been threats of violence, as well as threats followed through on. Just today, I learned that they tried to set fire to an apartment building in Ottawa. And on that incident, one of the most galling things was seeing a twitter reply from a convoy-supporter say, basically, “crybaby, that lobby didn’t look that flammable to me”. As if the problem wasn’t someone setting a fire in a lobby. Oh, and they wrapped the front door knobs in tape to make it harder to get out.
The cops refuse to do anything (in general - time will tell if they take the arson seriously), because why would they arrest
If the rank-and-file are just maliciously ignorant, verging on evil, the organizers started out at evil, and doubled down. Like, every big name in this protest is a fascist. As in, members or leaders of known white-supremacist hate groups.
Which is where I really worry about this becoming an insurrection. You have a bunch of “merely” right-wing nut jobs, that are being deliberately agitated on the issue of the week by a bunch of stealth-Nazis. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Especially when you a few of your fellows start waiving around swastikas and Confederate flags along with the F*ck Trudeau banners. Suddenly, everyone hates you and your cause (because Nazis), and lacking any sort of critical thinking skills, you conclude that since you’re perfectly reasonable, and everyone hates you, and everyone hates Nazis, those Nazis can’t be so bad, maybe I’ll hear what they have to say.
And suddenly, you have more Nazis. Or at the very least, you’ve got a large population of people who are willing to let Nazism slide.
It really is true, History is doomed to repeat itself. And my theory is that it does so just as soon as the generation that had to experience it is all or mostly dead. Ten years after the Great Depression, we had the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Ten years after the Great Recession and we have this. All just as the Greatest Generation’s numbers are dwindling to nothing. Ugh.
Vancouver at least has the good sense to counter-protest these yokels. I fear Calgary is too right-wing for the left to do that without putting themselves into great danger.
I am just so sick of this bad situation being deliberately made worse by a bunch of morons who whine about their freedoms on one hand, while dreaming about being the guards of the concentration camp on the other.
So how are you doing?
