Will the trucks cross paths with intersectionality?
Will there be an apology to the “unvaccinated?”
I was grateful to receive from a friend today a link to this moving and powerful discussion of “The Fruit Machine,” a movie about Canada’s gay purge. Under the guise of “science,” gay people in not-so-distant Canadian history were interrogated, humiliated and lost their jobs due to no other reason but their sexuality:
https://www.tvo.org/video/canadas-gay-purge
One of the unintentionally disturbing features of this otherwise important TVO video clip is that it puts on display Trudeau’s impressive ability to perform apologies for the sins of the past (see around minute -9:10 of the video).
Today, as people who chose to not get vaccinated have lost their jobs and as protesting truckers and those who wish for COVID measures to end are being demonized as the enemies of science and moral “normalcy,” we have to wonder if Trudeau will ever apologize.
To borrow an expression sometimes used by the youtube personality Lady C., “when apples grow on a lilac tree,” we can safely say that Trudeau will apologize to the victims of Canadian COVID culture when mangoes grow on a maple tree.
The abuse of some Canadians under COVID culture is a call to activists and educators to ask questions beyond their specific fields of activism, work and scholarship. Why are activists engaged in a broad range of social-justice issues focused on the rights of marginalized groups not speaking out often enough about what has been happening to unvaccinated people? Isn’t intersectionality supposed to be about considering everything that can marginalize people and lead to discrimination?
For example, many have characterized the protesters as white supremacists. And yet, we know that there are many racialized Canadians who have chosen to not get vaccinated. Could it be that some racialized Canadians might not be coming to demonstrate partly due to fear of police brutality?
Attempts to draw analogies between different forms and instances of abuse are often met with rage. But asking why so many activists are silent about the suffering of unvaccinated individuals, of those who suffered vaccine adverse effects and of other victims of COVID culture is not about comparing apples and oranges, as every thing that exists is indeed unique and different from other things. It is asking whether advocacy is really about truth or about power. It is asking about what we truly mean by “diversity and inclusion.”
As a Jewish person, I am irritated when I hear inappropriate comparisons between the Holocaust and events that are fundamentally different from the Holocaust. I believe that those comparisons are either ignorant or motivated by systemic lack of empathy toward the Jewish people. I am against using symbols such as the swastika and the yellow star in demonstrations to speak out about the totalitarian tendencies of COVID culture because the crudeness of those traumatic symbols cannot convey the nuance required in the discussion about COVID culture and totalitarianism. However, it is the moral obligation of people with knowledge about the rise of Nazism—especially those with highly advanced expert knowledge—to point out the warning signs that a pseudo-scientific totalitarian regime might be on the rise.
If activists and educators do not venture beyond the boundaries of their specific fields to speak out or at least to ask questions about the abuse of some Canadians under COVID culture, then what they are really teaching us is a cynical lesson: life is not about truth seeking but about power and position, and positions of power, once achieved, ensure complacency.
In Nazi Germany, one of the reasons that doctors and academics as a group were highly supportive of the regime was that firing Jewish doctors and professors “made room” for others to take their positions.
Giving a person a lucrative position has always been an effective way to buy their silence, regardless of formal declarations about academic freedom, freedom of speech or speaking truth to power. To avoid “leading” us into the depths of cynicism, it is important for people in positions of power and leadership today to think and speak as if their positions are not just about occupying a position but about using critical thinking and empathy-based thinking to serve humanity.
And yes, there should be an apology to “the unvaccinated,” including, of course, their immediate reinstatement into the jobs that they have lost.