February 9, 2022

Notes on what is (hopefully) the final weeks of a plague

In the last week, I’ve booked airline tickets and concert tickets, though I’m still not ready to write any of these dates on the calendar. And even the dates that are on our calendar—for engagements much less monumental and crowded—are written faintly in pencil. We keep talking about jinxes. The last time we were supposed to fly to England was March 16 2020, and everybody knows what happened after that. I am sure I’m not alone in imagining the very act of imagining the future might be something of a risky endeavour.

*

I’ve been thinking about freedom, about what freedom means. How empty rhetoric really can be, The possibility that freedom really could be another word for nothing left to lose, because these seem to be sorts of people who’ve been employing the term a lot lately. Thinking about what freedom is once its been thoroughly drained of meaning. The idea of anything being “for freedom,” in particular an 18-wheeler truck parked obstinately in a city block whose driver is quite certain he has the right to demand a democratically elected government be overthrown. I’m remembering a comment by Elamin Abdelmahmoud on the Party Lines Podcast last year in response to the idea that Albertans have a particular affinity for freedom as opposed to the rest of Canada, and Abdelmahmoud dared to disagree, because surely all of us like freedom, every single one of us.

*

(I also think that freedom is a buzzword standing in for something darker, something sinister. That woman who writes cookbooks about glowing said she couldn’t stop crying as those trucks drove across the country, and that finally the world was waking up, and I just don’t trust anybody who’s pining for a revolution because, well, I’ve studied the twentieth century and revolutions never really worked out well for anyone except scary men with weird beards and people who run prison camps. For people who seem to spend so much time worrying about creeping totalitarianism, I am surprised these dots aren’t being connected.)

*

It seems like a weird time to be pitching a fit about Covid restrictions. See my first line about airline tickets and concert tickets. Even if vaccine requirements were your sticking point, if the trajectory we’re currently on continues, these are likely to be lifted as well, which will be a sweet relief, I tell you, because being screamed at about kindness and inclusion by people who refused to be vaccinated in a global health crisis really might just be the end of me, and the sooner I can never think about this ever again, the better.

*

I like everybody better when I don’t have access to a ticker-tape of their every waking thought.

*

For the last five days, an average of around 50,000 people been vaccinated in Ontario every day, a total of more than 700,000 people across the country. (You can find all those numbers here!) I don’t share these numbers in the spirit of “there’s more of us than them” (although I think this is probably the case) because I think that us-ing and them-ing is a terrible trap.

We’re all us, even if we disagree, and figuring how to make that work is how you build community, strengthen society. (Holding a city hostage with your very large truck is not how we make that work, however, in case anybody was wondering.)

The idea that some people’s interests matter more than others is such a dangerous one. (The idea that any of us are morally superior to those who disagree with us is just as bad.)

*
I continue to be strongly resistant to the use of the term “folks.” I mean, I hate it. It’s awful. And it doesn’t matter to me if it’s a right-wing populist saying folks or anyone else who’s saying folks. I don’t like the word “folks” because it’s not supposed to mean “people”, it’s supposed to mean “my kind of people.”

I am really really trying to be someone who says, “It takes all sorts,” and actually means it.

Especially since I think this is fundamentally true.