Canadians have had a front row seat on the fracturing of American society over the past few years. We have seen at close range how different world views can split a country in two and damage the very institutions that were purpose-built to reconcile such differences. It has involved lies about many things, not least the outcome of an election, and led to the ransacking of the Capitol by an angry mob.
Somehow, it didn’t inoculate us against something similar erupting here, as it has over recent weeks.
As much as we might want to move on and think about other things, there is too much at stake. We need to try to understand how it came to pass that our capital city was besieged unlawfully, our federal legislature rendered unsafe and major trade routes blocked.
At the heart of it is the frustration among some truckers that they must be fully vaccinated in order to travel back and forth across the Canada-U.S. border. For many of us, whether or not to get vaccinated is optional. We have the freedom to weigh the issue and make peace with the consequences of our decision. It’s not as easy if your livelihood depends on getting the vaccine, as it does for international truckers, among others. And, after two years of pandemic precautions, who can’t empathize with the yearning to be free of all of this? So, the frustration is understandable.
So is the opposing view. In the name of protecting the health of our society, in general, and of our most vulnerable citizens and health care workers, in particular, getting a vaccination seems a small personal sacrifice that might also save your life. Evidence from such places as Ocean County, New Jersey, where vaccination levels are low and death rates from the virus are one-in-200 residents, bears this out.
So, yes, there are different views on this, as there are on most things. But how does this turn into an assault on the very institutions that are meant to help keep us civil?
One lesson from the U.S. is that there are forces outside our borders working to make this sort of thing happen. But they can’t do it without a large measure of complicity on the part of people within the targeted society. Just as surely as terrorists flew American planes into American buildings two decades ago, enemies of freedom are driving people all over the free world to destroy their own democracies. Their most powerful weapons are no longer nuclear bombs or hijacked planes but the echo chambers of social media that they seed with fear and hatred.
It is, by now, a well-known chess game in which the concerns of unwitting pawns are stoked to an unruly fever pitch in the hope of fomenting such anarchy that a heavy-handed authoritarian response will be welcomed even by moderates, if it restores order. The end-game is the curtailment of the kind of freedom that people lay down their lives to attain.
Whether our views are on the left, right or somewhere in between, we are all susceptible to being manipulated into action on false pretenses, to being pitted against each other by messages that play on our emotions rather than inform our rational minds. And we all have a responsibility to remain wary of their seductiveness.
When the drum beat of social media is used to justify anger towards people holding a different view, hatred against others based on religious or ethnic differences, or violence toward democratic institutions or elected officials, alarm bells should go off.
Rather than succumb to the latest manipulating post on social media, we should be just as quick to believe in the inherent goodness of most people, the friendliness of our neighbours and the strengths of our country.
Anyone dissatisfied with the course society is taking has many peaceful ways of doing something about it. Write a letter to the editor that will be published in a newspaper. Work for a political party. Mount a court case and, when necessary, organize a lawful protest. And through it all, take the time to sort out fact from fiction.
It might also help to take a moment to imagine that the disdain or grievance you are prompted to feel may be the dastardly handiwork not of your fellow citizens or even your political leaders, but of external forces that stand to benefit from a destabilized and less-democratic western world.
We all share an interest in using our freedom responsibly, and to resist being duped into destroying hard-won freedoms that have taken centuries to evolve and cost much personal sacrifice to protect.
Charles Dickson
