About a bunch of trucks

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a thing called the novel coronavirus and we’re in a pandemic and the virus killed 33,000 people in Canada and nearly one million people in the United States. And if it hasn’t killed you, if you get it, it can leave you with potential lifelong complications.

So with that being said, with the way things are right now, you’d think that I don’t feel safe.

Let me be incredibly blunt right now: I don’t feel safe. It’s not because of a virus that has killed at least 33,000 people in this country and nearly one million people in the one south of us. I don’t feel safe because if my life doesn’t end over covid, it may very well end at the hands of white supremacists. People who believe I should not exist. People who believe that people who look like me should not exist. People who believe that others I have commonalities with should not exist. They hate me (and a hell of a lot of other people) and they are mad that I exist. I can easily say “let them stay mad” but that could open a dangerous Pandora’s box.

And these white supremacists have spearheaded the trucker convoy protest movement that you and I are seeing on the news, with wall-to-wall coverage.

My social media feeds right now are as close as you can get to Russian Roulette. Each time I log onto Facebook, or Twitter, or open up someone’s Instagram story, it’s only a matter of time that I find out that someone close to me, someone I grew up with, or someone that I share my professional life with, is brandishing a bunch of Canadian flags saying that they’re fighting for freedom.

It’s got my back up against the wall. That people I’ve been close to over the years are siding with a movement laced with the Gadsden flag, the Confederate flag, and the Nazi Germany flag. If this movement isn’t a racist one, why do I keep seeing flags like this at far-right protests? And when these people admit that there are bigoted people in the movement, why is it just tolerated?

And I can’t even see Canadian flags anymore outside of government buildings without getting chills of the worst kind.

This is the shit that people have done to me.

That’s never to say that there aren’t legitimate grievances over what’s been going on for the last two years, but it seems that people don’t want to focus on those concerns. I would never be an apologist over this shit, but I think about the root causes. I get it. I got temporarily laid off. From a job in which I had to add bouncer to my job title. My jobs over the last two years have been incredibly sensitive to lockdowns, so I get it. But never once, could I have it in me to shack up with people who want to see me dead.

I get it. Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Ford have done the worst possible job handling this pandemic compared to so many other jurisdictions. There are so many better ways as to how this pandemic could have been handled. Like paying people to stay home and proactively giving us the tools we need. Quite frankly, I think that all of these leaders should be judged accordingly by all of us. But I could never ever find common cause with people who would think that I’m a threat to the Anglo-Saxon race, whatever the fuck that is.

And a lot of these people have been fully oblivious to the history of our own country. To compare not wearing a mask to state-sanctioned segregation is offensive enough, but to say that segregation itself is not Canadian insults the intelligence of all of us. All of a sudden these people forgot about the Indian Act, or reserves or whatever? And the end goal of “taking back Canada”. From whom? That aside, it’s not their land.

If you’re not actively disavowing hate and bigotry in whatever movement you’re in, you’re clearly at this point a part of a hateful movement and it hurts to see people I know take part in it. Whether it’s the person who serves me coffee, a former high school classmate, a former coworker, the guy I bought a sweater from. That people could go to the 401 and Wellington, and then come back to my community and be okay with allying with people who want me dead, makes me literally physically uneasy. That’s not hyperbole. That’s the truth.

I don’t feel safe. Fix it.

Either these dangerous white nationalists are a cornerstone of the movement you belong to, or they are removed from this movement. And it is of my opinion that these white nationalists are a cornerstone of this movement. And if you’re okay with that, and I don’t feel safe because of you, then you do not have to be in my life anymore. You want freedom of choice, here’s some freedom of choice.