The trucks and the elite “package” of status through complacency
When we say that the truckers’ protest should end, we should also speak out about the complacency and coercion that led to the protest.
As you read this in what might perhaps be your Zoom-based home office, chances are that any object or edible item around you was at one time on a truck. In recent days, truckers have been delivering something else—a message of resistance against vaccine mandates into the heart of Ottawa.
What I have seen with my own eyes on the first Saturday of the protest was peaceful and did not correspond to the narrative of a violent protest. However, an ongoing protest at the heart of the capital—however peaceful or well meaning—is a loud and potentially bothersome occurrence that inherently carries the risk of escalation. For that reason, I want the protest to end peacefully. But I also want the vaccine mandates to end—and over the past two years the assumption that misguided policies can be reversed through evidence-based discussion has been painfully challenged. So as we ask for the disruptive loudness of the truckers’ horns to quiet down, we must peacefully become less silent ourselves and encourage open, evidence-based debate about vaccine mandates.
The loud and heavy trucks are here only because they disrupt a deadly and dull silence that has existed among the “educated classes” exactly where vigorous, peaceful and evidence-based debate about vaccine mandates should have been instead. Silence is perhaps too generous a description, since some members of the “educated” classes have often not been shy in expressing contempt and derision for anyone questioning the COVID narrative. The basic point that the truckers are making about bodily autonomy should have been spoken by health officials, academics and government workers who are paid to think critically: vaccine mandates are misguided both morally and scientifically, given data that vaccination does not stop transmission. This opinion should not be forbidden. The passion and thirst for honest debate and conversation should not be the new love that dare not speak its name.
But the problem is that for quite some time now, bodily autonomy and open debate that takes real pleasure and finds true meaning in conversation and in human interconnectedness have not been a significant enough part of the “package” that defines the identity of the “educated classes.” By “package” I mean the metaphorical parcel of signifiers that secure our place in the world and that are often communicated in daily conversation through the dropping of key words such as my cottage, check; my kid’s extracurricular activities, check; where I went on holidays, check; where I plan to go on holidays, check; how busy I am, check; etc.
And to this packaged “checklist” of status and prosperity, we have eagerly added vaccine mandates because these mandates deliver something that is socially valuable: a feeling of superiority coupled with, for many of us, the convenience of working from home with a fully stocked fridge, new laptop and yoga pants—all delivered by trucks. How dare the truckers interrupt the industrial silence of our “aristocracy?” Don’t they know that once a particular item has been added to the package of “status signifiers,” our willingness to defend it will be almost as fierce as the desire to acquire a cottage or go on a holiday?
The lack of independence and intellectual curiosity noted by Irving Layton earlier in the twentieth century should not be far from our conscience as we peacefully work toward a renaissance of truth seeking and meaningful conversation:
From Colony to Nation
A dull people,
but the rivers of this country
are wide and beautiful
A dull people
enamoured of childish games,
but food is easily come by
and plentiful
Some with a priest’s voice
in their cage of ribs: but
on high mountain-tops and in thunderstorms
the chirping is not heard
Deferring to beadle and censor;
not ashamed for this,
but given over to horseplay,
the making of money
A dull people, without charm
or ideas,
settling into the clean empty look
of a Mountie or dairy farmer
as into a legacy
One can ignore them
(the silences, the vast distances help)
and suppose them at the bottom
of one of the meaner lakes,
their bones not even picked for souvenirs.
Source: https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/en/Layton,_Irving-1912/From_Colony_to_Nation
Ironically, here is the poem read by Justin Trudeau, starting around minute 2:15 of this video:
While an ongoing protest is a precarious situation that should end peacefully, the risk-averse, checkmark-oriented and conformist “educated class” have something to learn from the truckers who in their ordinary lives are doing highly responsible work to serve us all. In the truckers’ jobs, there is very little room for error: mistakes can lead to terrible accidents that, unlike some of the errors of the “educated classes,” cannot be doctored or swept under the rug. One lesson from the truckers is that, going forward, we have to be a bit more conscientious about which ideas we uncritically adopt into the self-congratulatory “elite” package. When we ask the truckers to leave Ottawa, this should also come with a call to evidence-based, honest policy making. Just as we expect truckers and they expect of themselves to take utmost care to avoid accidents on the road when they drive our laptops to us, we should do our best to seek the truth. We should demand of doctors, public-health officials scholars, policy makers and all other members of the educated elite what we expect of truckers: do no harm!
Beautiful, thank you.
I reflect that had I been on the West Coast yesterday, my son and I would have stood on different sides of the street - he fed up with the noise outside his window and me in support of the truckers (as they remind us of the unlawful and cruel nature of these mandates).
Both this essay and Charles Eisenstein’s this morning have me turning to the Bhagavad Gita- when loving family members meet across a dividing line..and find themselves confused as to how they got there. Ultimately each has to heal the divide in their own soul.