The Jew, the Fag n’ the Hag. That’s us. My husband, my youngest son and myself. I’m being ‘semi-facetious’ but these words do describe a demographic that we individually fit. We can’t completely escape this reductionism because it is a part of what makes up our identities. My husband is Jewish, my son is trans and gay, and I am an older woman with lots of opinions.

And now we are Conservatives. It is part of the mélange. A soup of identities. But these labels are reductive, they don’t define us. We are Canadian citizens too. And rural. And unconventional. And free thinkers.

For the majority of our lives we have thrown our lot in with the ‘intellectuals’, the university educated, the artist-run galleries, the LGBTQ support groups, and old time hippies and feminists marching with placards. We marched, we ranted, we protested, we made ourselves heard. But since 2020 we have had our world turn upside down.

A very old pal of mine, an established artist, said that he could no longer defend his lifelong conviction to uphold free speech and reject censorship. What about your principles, I asked? But no, he abandoned his principles and he had accepted the atmosphere of fear. ‘Misinformation is dangerous’.

Art was the first thing to go. Federally funded art galleries have no room for dissenters. And the news? Newspapers funded by the Federal government have no space for alternate opinions. Universities? Absolute fail. How much of their funding comes from pharmaceutical companies?

Once upon a time I believed in socialism. I believed that I would be happy to sacrifice for the larger community. In my projections I imagined that we might, in the near future, need to limit and control our use of fuel, water and food. I was open to that concept. But what my innocent mind had forgotten was the corruption of greed and the capitalist system. Pure socialism could only exist if each and every person cared for and respected their fellow human beings equally.

My husband, my youngest son and myself, we shared a home during a transformative winter. We were physically well, we walked every day and ate well, but our hearts were gradually broken as we were slowly imprisoned by rejection. Even beloved ones turned their heads away. We were closed off, locked out, and separated from so many people. Loved ones, old friends and new acquaintances disappeared in droves.

They left because of our decision to hesitate. They turned away because we resisted compliance and questioned authority. We were rejected, excluded, isolated, shamed and punished for questioning this sudden global push for an ineffective and dangerous gene therapy experiment.

We were hesitant about the new MRNA technology and the fact that there were no long term studies. We decided not to take the shot. And then my Jewish husband, my trans gay son, and me (just call me Karen), we shared a very long winter. Our main income was cut. Fines were threatened. I lived in increasing alarm that we would end up losing all our savings and our house. Threats were made by political leaders and repeated in newspaper bylines and on the street. Maybe those that had decided against the shots should be banned from health care, maybe they should be locked up.

We are your neighbours, your loved ones. Would you have been content if we had lost everything? Did you really believe that our hesitancy put you on the brink of death? But let me tell you, the mass coercion did nothing more than strengthen our position. The harder the salesman makes the sale, the less I want to buy. My gut, my brain, my whole body told me that the mass hysteria was being manipulated.

Let’s just say that there really was an especially virulent corona virus circulating and it was a particularly harsh virus. There are so many other ways to decrease infection and illness than to base your whole medical response on a new ‘vaccine’. The new ‘vaccine’ was not the only way to avoid illness, and, as time goes on, it seems it was one of the least effective ways to avoid contacting this particular virus.

You can also decide to minimize contact with sick people. You can eat healthily and exercise and get out in the sun and protect your immune system. You can, if you are ill or caring for an ill person, take supplements, like Vitamin D3 and zinc. And doctors do have other tools in their belts that, with their expertise, they can decide to use when someone is very ill. Yes, ivermectin is one of the treatments that doctors use in cases with severe infection and inflammation.

But suddenly, the choice of how to protect your own body against illness is not your choice to make. You have to accept the opinion of a collection of unelected health officials and profitable pharmaceutical companies. That’s not the way I was brought up. That’s not how I care for myself and it is not how I cared for my children. I have personal choice. I have the right to decide on my own medical involvement. I have personal bodily autonomy.

How is my attachment to these essential rights suddenly ‘wrong’? I have not changed. I have always been this way. My desire to protect my bodily autonomy is not a new development. The society around me has changed. And why has it changed? Because of a corona virus? Do you really believe this? Can you see what is happening right in front of you?

When did the ‘left’ decide that personal choice was only for the rich? How is it that the ‘liberal’ media believes in censorship now? Because it serves their needs (or is it their fears)? When did the world flip upside down and inside out? Oh right, it was when we were locked in our houses and fed a diet of fear on our gadgets of communication. That’s when it all began.

But it was during that vulnerable period that the spark of the rebellion was ignited. Because all though you can lock up the laptop class, you can’t lock up the working class if you want to be comfortable. Some people had to keep working. Grocery stores still had to be open. Food had to be delivered. Cleaners still cleaned. Nurses still worked. Workers still worked. The workers kept working, and most of them kept working throughout.

And it is the workers who were the leaders of the trucker convoy. And it is the workers who are watching the attacks on the farmers. And it is the workers who can’t afford gas to work or food to fill their fridge. If the plan was to break the spirit of the people so that they could make large scale changes to the way our societies are run, with the end goal of ‘saving the earth’, they have picked the wrong people to crush. The working people are stronger and smarter and much more competent than the laptop people, when it comes to day to day survival.

How did it feel for us to watch our loved ones, under pressure of excommunication from life (loss of travel, social life, work, and education) accept not one, but numerous shots of an untested medical experiment? How alarming was it to watch our brethren, family, friends and acquaintances, once well meaning thoughtful people, follow directions from the television and radio as if they had been hypnotized?

Are we angry? Is that what you think? Or bitter? I would say we are traumatized and untrusting, like anyone who has been discarded and abused. In the winter of our lost civil rights many of the rejected resisters compared the government’s actions with Nazi Germany, and then the righteous affronted Liberal media would sneer, ‘death camps are not the same as being banned from a café’, conveniently forgetting that the Nazi’s slowly gained power though small changes to their society.

But in my quiet contemplations, I thought about the internment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war. I read books about them, wondering how they recovered, how they lived, after having their homes and possessions stolen before being shipped out to camps. Theirs was truly worse then my situation, so how did they go on, how did they look their fellow Canadians in the eye afterwards, when the crimes of internment were forgotten? How do you trust your country again?

We are free from the restriction for now, for the moment. But as citizens, we have been changed. I have been disappointed by the NDP for some time but recent political moves have been utterly unconscionable. I can no longer support the Greens, and I never supported the Conservatives before, but I must now, if only to return us to a level ground of personal rights and freedoms.

The idea that our earth can be saved from global warming by a coalition of governments and corporations is quite the saddest and most pathetic approach to decreasing the destruction of our living home, the planet, that I can imagine. It is an elitist and self serving plan that pretends to be serving all of humanity, while sacrificing the poor, the working poor and ‘those who desire to join the middle class’.

My husband was ‘allowed’ to return to work recently. My son and I were ‘allowed’ to travel by plane to another province, and finally, October 1st, we are all ‘allowed’ to travel out of our country without risk of harassment and threats of thousands of dollars in fines. We were never a risk. We are not now. We have not changed. There is still the same risk of illness in the general world. What changed?

I do hope that the people who may have paid fines are compensated, but I don’t know how they can apologize enough to those who had their travels end in misery and anxiety. Canadians with passports returning to their own country? Healthy, productive tax paying citizens, treated like criminals over rejecting a medical treatment that we all know does not diminish infection or illness? And this same experimental medical treatment is now gathering incontrovertible and increasing reports of adverse reactions of serious illness and death.

It’s madness. And who does it serve?

Our Prime Minister cynically suggested that people who did not comply with the mandate were anti-Semitic, stupid, racist, homophobic and misogynist. That’s us! My Jewish husband, my gay trans son, and me, a foolish idealist who believes truth will make its way to the surface some day.