The Mask of Sorrow
Returning from a world that is totally free and beautifully human in southern Florida to the dystopia that seems to be intractable in Canada might seem like a foolish move.
Call me a cock-eyed optimist.
For me it was a choice made to take the temperature and to see for myself just how much Kool Aid has been ingested in Canada. Having viewed it from afar for many months I returned apprehensively and admittedly, with a sense of dread.
One must first gird oneself for the absurdities, inconsistencies and incompetent border policies of Trudeau the 2nd’s regime. I won’t even talk about them, other than to say that I am shocked at how the people of Canada, by and large, accept and obey them with little pushback. The media even whined about the fact that people crossing the land border don’t have to stay in the hotel-prisons.
Then one must deal with the omnipresence of the Government, with constant intrusion and harassment during a useless quarantine period that ignores science and data. Calls, visits, questions, daily online reports, testing in real time while being watched - and all this by friendly, even hapless, employees and servants of the state. Canadians, as they say, are just so nice!
Stalinism with a smile.
But the real moment of truth comes when quarantine ends, when you burst upon what should be a bustling city of Toronto. Just how are people faring after months and months of a lockdown binge?
Call it the bender reveal. The city has been more like the set of Night of the Living Dead than the fourth largest metropolis in North America.
The symbol of it all, the physical representation of the level of psychosis that is refusing to depart, is the infernal mask.
Never mind that masks are shown to be utterly without efficacy except in extreme circumstances of indoor confines, and only then when there is obvious and symptomatic illness. Why do I see most people outside with masks? Why do I see people in their cars alone with masks? Why are the only people who have any sense bullied, coerced and shamed when they do not wear it?
Never mind that those who do wear these virtue signalling muzzles almost never wear them properly. Hanging under their nose, over their lip, no sealing at all and on and off like a jack in the box, the mask people refuse to see this as their own negation of their religious belief in what the Government has convinced them to accept as gospel.
Never mind that most people are vaccinated. If the vaccine is effective, why are masks still in use? If the vaccine is not effective, why is it being administered to an unwitting and gullible public with such religious fervour?
It seems that common sense is something that is a relic from the past.
But here is, for me, the big question. When will the majority of people regain their humanity? When will they lose the deep fear I see in their meek eyes? When will they remember their basic human condition as a social being? When will they recall that it is our common germs that have kept us alive as a species in the last 100,000 years?
Of course, I am happy to report that there are some brave people that have retained their essence and have resisted the nonsense around them. I admire them. These people are critical to any sense of optimism I have.
The mask is not just a symbol, it is a deep submission to a dark force by those wearing it. It is a white flag of surrender to the most odious aspect of human weakness. It is a supine bending of the knee to those for whom science does not matter and logic has no place.
Putting aside the fact that Canada is far behind the world in reopening what should never have been shut, the people are at a precipice. Will they continue on this path of fear and worship of Government? Or will they somehow regain a semblance of confidence in themselves as sentient beings, and throw off the shackles and the mask of sorrow?