The Other

The past two weeks have been hard. That’s the nicest thing I can say about it. Last week, the Quebec government announced a tax on all the unvaccinated, to punish them for the government’s inability to solve a problem that the government itself caused. They haven’t announced the amount of the “tax” (see also, fine), but have said that it is meant to be a punishment to anyone who is not vaccinated. This week, they announced the closure of Costco, Walmart and Canadian Tire to the unvaccinated, preventing people from getting their vaccinations and prescriptions, getting essentials such as food and diapers, getting their car serviced except from boutique places that charge higher prices and have fewer options.

I don’t trust government. I studied history, I studied governments that fell because they deserved to. Tyrants who were killed by the people they “ruled” because they had it coming, and the horrible lead up to the fall of those nations. I have studied the history of people who were victims of democide. They were proscribed, attacked, starved, and actively demonized and then murdered by their own governments and I see a lot of similarities today. The gaslighting of the population is staggering to me, but even scarier is the fact that so much of the population seems to be buying into the government line, the fact that people don’t even see the parallels to 1939 Germany when they support jailing the unvaccinated or taking their children from them. I can barely fathom people who agree with Trudeau when he called unvaccinated misogynists and racists, but out here, I’m sure more agree with him than disagree, after all, its where he was elected.

I used to trust governments. I wanted to be a politician when I was younger, because I thought there was no better way to serve people than to work to earn their trust and then spend 2-4 years working harder to show that trust was not placed in vain. I was young and idealistic. I knew that government was not perfect, but I also knew that we try to make it the best that we can.

I don’t trust government anymore. I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when it happened, but no longer do I think being an elected official is an honourable role. In the last several years though, I’ve gone from thinking that public servants worked to serve their electorates to a place where greedy, useless wastes of my hard-earned money collect and write laws telling me what I can and can’t do, screw over small businesses, throw innocent men in prison and, in my current province, tell me what language I can and can’t speak in the workplace and what constitutes allowable jewellery or hair adornments.

Government isn’t here to help us. They are here to control us. They have forgotten that we are their bosses, and not the other way around. Over the last two years, my view has only become more jaded to the “use” of government. The Quebec government is a bully, an abusive relationship that we can’t escape. We are not allowed to visit friends or family, go for a walk late in the evening after a difficult day, shop on a Sunday, go to a restaurant or speak English wherever we want to without fear of recrimination.

Two years ago on January 14, the World Health Organization falsely claimed that there was no evidence of human to human transmission of Covid. March 12 is the two-year anniversary of two weeks to flatten the curve. On January 24, Quebec will refuse the unvaccinated the ability to enter a Costco, Walmart or Canadian Tire. Last year I wrote about the loneliness, the frustration and the swearing and the crying. Now there’s no more frustration. The tears have run dry. The swearing silenced. The loneliness… is there a word to describe something worse than lonely? The feeling where the loneliness has hollowed you out so much that you can’t remember your last real smile. The feeling where the hopelessness makes you wonder why you brought a child into this horrible oppressive world. The feeling where there’s only darkness and two people, one who is happy in solitude and silence, and one you lie to because he’s too small to know just how evil this world is and you have to do everything you can to keep that darkness from touching his tiny soul, because you know how much it hurts when that darkness finds you.

I have one friend out here and we aren’t allowed to see one another. She is rotting away her second maternity leave alone, her spouse travels for work and its illegal for me to go and check in on her except via electronics, and phone calls and texts are only a tiny step above pointless now. We do text, but all we can say now is “I miss you” and “I’m so sick of this”.  We try to lift one another’s spirits by saying platitudes like “this too shall pass” but I don’t think either one of us believes it anymore. I don’t know. When you can’t talk face to face and see one another and give a hug and hold a baby or lend a hand, do you really know?

It will never end. What illusion of freedom will be taken away from me next? What punishment will finally break me and I will give up pretending that my body is my own and not the property of the government?

It will break me. It’s only a matter of time now.

French Phrases for English Moms: Ca n’ira jamais bien – It will never be all right.