Essays in Idleness

I have spent too much time on the Internet, lately. This is due to the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, and being “locked down” by slippery winter, physical unfitness, the Batflu and medical regulations. In turn I probably bore those readers whom I do not actually annoy, with my kicking against the pricks. Yet there is so much more to say, both gently and harshly.

My mind is in Ottawa, and all other places in Canada and abroad where people are struggling to get their lives back — now, before they die. These people are overwhelmingly the self-employed, and workers in small businesses: such as truck drivers, who bought their own rigs. They have consistently been made to pay in many ways for government lockdown measures, and are generally despised by the “laptop class,” who cannot lose their jobs, and work from home.

Few people in the Big City (which includes Toronto and Ottawa) have ever met a trucker, or would think of chatting with him. They may patronize small “boutique” operations, for conspicuous consumption. But Amazon drivers deliver their regular goods, and their services, too, are mostly dialled up.

True, the Batflu has sometimes interfered with their holiday bookings, so I must add, boo hoo.

A Rasmussen report on public opinion recently showed that in America, three-quarters of Democrats supported vaccine mandates, more than half thought those who refuse should be fined, and almost half would give them gaol sentences. Nearly a third thought the “vaccine hesitant” should have their children taken away. As Californicators, and the inhabitants of most urban constituencies, seldom have children, this can be received with rolling eyeballs. For luckily, there are Republicans in the more rural places, whose votes are sometimes counted.

Ottawa (outside “the Valley”) offers a caricature of this point of view. I recall my days as a columnist, published in the Ottawa Citizen. (Eventually, I was deleted.) To walk downtown was to invite verbal assaults by those who recognized my mug in the paper. Some were actually friendly, and said hiya. But I was often called a fascist, or something else obscene, by people who didn’t notice I was human. “Are you David Warren?” the grim inquiry would come. I tried to counter it with some jest. (“It depends: do you like David Warren?”) This might cause my assailant great pain. (Humour is violence, as every Leftist knows.) But it was tiresome for both of us.

One may check election results from the middle of that town, to learn that a large majority of its inhabitants vote Liberal, in the manner of zombies. One thinks of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Ottawa authorities, beginning with the police, have summoned Children’s Aid to help them punish the invasive truckers. It is an organization designed to capture children from traditionalist homes, and expose them to woke brainwashing in isolation. A large portion of the truckers brought their families, including children not wearing masks. Indeed, the city was disturbed to find “bouncy castles” had been set up, and to witness the spectacle of kids playing on them, and producing decorative art. Worse, they were flagrantly laughing, and running about. Their parents, and other adults, were seen hugging each other, and confessing to happiness, for the first time in two years. For Ottawa, this is a grave scandal.

A lady friend who was somehow born and raised in that town often says (now from a safe distance), it is “the city that fun forgot.”

But the truck “occupation” is a spot of good news. For however the demonstration ends, people who live in the Big City will have had a glimpse of human life; of its friendliness, humour, and good nature.