Age of Irony

 

Twenty twenty-two was a year and a half. Now, thankfully, we have seen its back with that of one of the existential issues of our times. I speak of Covid-19, of course, which, during its peak, had confined most of us to barracks. Happily, the majority of us survived it, and are now returning to something like normalcy. We are still not yet back to the relaxed ways of pre-pandemic days, though. Whatever satisfaction we may feel at this point, it is well to remember that the pandemic has taken nearly 7 million lives. These dead are not just numbers. They left behind deeply scarred families who watched their loved ones sicken and die. The worst is now over. Probably. We must spare a thought though, for those among us who avoided Covid’s worst outcome, yet survive to contend with the debilitating symptoms of “Long Covid”.

The virus’s other legacy, the economic one, endures too. The pandemic disrupted industrial production and dislocated supply chains everywhere, contributing to the anxiety that haunts many of us, especially among those who could not quarantine because they had to earn a living at-site. By contrast, those who could work off-site and earn from home, did so with smug satisfaction. Thus arose another divide between the haves and the have-nots that intensified appetites for false narratives about Covid, its nature and origins and, indeed, whether it is a real thing, undermining what governments and their public health experts were trying to do to keep us all safe. From that place, it was only a short hop for dissenters to jump on to the bandwagon that was headed for Ottawa, the Canadian capital, where they tried to ransom the city and the rest of the country. On their way, the agitators collected an assortment of antivaxxers and anti-maskers, racists and fascists, putschists and would-be assassins avowing, bizarrely, to kill the Prime Minister, topple the Federal Government and install an alternative that was more to their taste. Canada was headed for its January 6 moment.

The government was prepared. Using special powers, it eventually put an end to what was becoming a national embarrassment, and which had been seeding similar outbreaks elsewhere in the country. Social media had, once again, shown its power to spread false information and stoke up emotions.

The medium remains massively disruptive with that ability to disseminate false anti-science narratives about the pandemic (and other matters) that could have resulted in much worse clinical outcomes while, at the same time during 2022, enabling dissenters to collect and amass a substantial war chest. It is an irony that, quite possibly, escaped the convoy organizers and their followers: The weaponizing of the internet (and diesel-powered trucks) for the war against the very science that devised them.

Meanwhile, Covid’s economic fallout continues into the new year, taking the world to the brink amid forecasts that grow darker by the day.

The year twenty twenty-two also fuelled a couple of exotica, NFTs and cryptocurrency, to illustrate how easy it is for a fool and his money to be parted. As if to emphasize the point, the world’s richest man dropped $44bn lusting after a dysfunctional chat box.

“Loss and Damage” was the 2022 mantra that resounded from Sharm El Shaikh to all corners, as activists call on rich countries to foot the bill for the harm they continue inflict on the environment that threatens to take lives and destroy livelihoods everywhere, especially in poor countries. Yes, the survival of the world itself is at stake, with record high temperatures in many regions including in Europe and North America. The UK’s Met Office recently announced that 2022 was the hottest on record. In the Horn of Africa, drought was relentless, creating and sustaining a famished landscape throughout the region. On the other side, Pakistan and Nigeria drowned in unprecedented floods that displaced millions and killed thousands. The think tank, The Copernicus Climate Change Service, predicts that unless we change our ways, the world will warm up by 1.5 degrees by 2034, and the end will be nigh.

Unless Putin’s special operations does us in earlier.

Tell Fren Tru

Compare and Contrast

 

Canada has always been a place of peace and good order. In fact, things are so orderly here that the country has become a byword for niceness. We Canadians accept this as given, and gracefully bear niceness jokes frequently directed at us. At least this has been the comfortable and comforting narrative. The actuality is rather different. Certainly, the original peoples of this place have always experienced a different reality: that their happiness, peace, and well-being have never been of much concern among those who govern.

More than four centuries on after the first European settlers landed on the eastern shores of what was to become the country of Canada, what the original inhabitants have had to endure at the hands of the settler population is beyond calculation. Although now, at last, the governing class have been dragged, kicking, and screaming into acknowledging that their treatment of the indigenous peoples has been abominable, residues of these centuries-long mistreatment persist. Indeed, through a series of laws and administrative actions that the framers themselves openly acknowledged were designed to drive the “Indian out of the Indian” (Insert the expletive), the “Indian”, a misnomer that endures, was not only driven out of the Indian, but the Indian has also been kettled into restricted areas in their own country, in constructs that Apartheid South Africa frankly called Bantustans, but which we, in our Canadian niceness, characterize as “Reservations”, and out of which, the indigenous individual, especially women and girls stray at their peril. So, now, after a long history of evasion, equivocation and neglect and even outright opposition, Governments of Canada, eventually, emulated South Africa, again, by striking up a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” of our own. This, in time, has come up with a series of recommendations, ninety-four in all, that form the basis of a road map for reconciliation with the indigenous population.

Fair enough.

But here is the thing. It has taken four centuries for the power elite to see the light, egged on by countless protests, demonstrations, and occupations of public installations, year after year, mostly ignored, but in some instances brutally dispersed. So, it was with some wonderment that we watched a huge rabble, gathering numbers as it proceeded from the Pacific coast, across the Prairies, on to the nation’s capital and to end up occupying it, ostensibly in protest against Covid-related restrictions and mandates. The occupation of the country’s capital was unprecedented and resulted in paralysis of its civic life for more than three weeks. Here was a disparate group of anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, racists, anti-Semites, anarchists, and others of shadowy lineage, waving flags and carrying placards that threaten the overthrow of the government and murder of the country’s leaders.

"And the crazy rascals raged their fill".

But for three weeks, not a single baton was wielded, nor a trickle of water discharged from hose, nor a grain of pepper sprayed..

We know how it ended. Not a single drop of blood shed.

Compare and contrast.

                                                                              Tell Fren Tru