A week of highs and lows
Last weekend was a volutpat vestibulum horribilus. And for those who remember, “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.”
From my perspective on the world, which is very narrow in this Time of COVID, there was another one of those dreaded weekend storms. This one hit us with just about everything it had – torrential rain, wind, snow, freezing and melting – all within three days.
It looks like the rain did the most damage – washing out driveways, filling up basements, overflowing bridges and breaking up the ice in the Annapolis River with all the new runoff from the North and South mountains. Our household was fortunate, many neighbours weren’t. Other neighbours pitched in and helped where they could.
And then there was the mess in Ottawa and other places across the country. While there have been some really ghastly things said about the situation in Ottawa, I am trying to figure out how this happened. I don’t for one minute believe a group of truckers out west just miraculously joined up on the Trans-Canada Highway to go and tell the federal government to resign so their “committee” and the Governor General could govern for 90 days until all the vaccine rules and regulations were abolished across the country.
I don’t think I’ll go further in that direction, but I will say that if it took the Emergencies Act to bring in all those police bodies and to look at the “money,” then I’m for it. I will add that there needs to be a thorough and unbiased review of what happened and what didn’t – sooner rather than later.
There is a level of anger bordering on rage in people who feel they have no say in how things are done. They feel they are ignored, and this was an expression of frustration, which another more politically astute group has taken advantage of. We haven’t heard the end of this.
My last Sunday morning perusal of thoughts expressed on various internet platforms gave me some hope.
Somehow, we must find a way to give voice to the “silent majority” in our country who have followed the science and done the “right thing” for our families, our neighbours, and our friends. We have been vaccinated, we wear masks, we social distance, we are very careful about where we go, and we buy local whenever we can to keep our community alive for the “afterward time.” We must not give in to this tail wagging the dog bunch. They don’t speak for me, and they don’t speak for millions of us.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say anything about Zexi Li.
She lived in the area where the truckers were blaring and keeping people locked in their houses and apartments for three weeks. She put her name out there as a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the convoy organizers and got the blaring horns mostly stopped. She is 21. My faith in young people has been lifted beyond what it was. And she is another hero to be added to the books.
My reading took me to that group of neighbours who blocked a group of truckers heading to Wellington Street in Ottawa with supplies. They started out with a small group, which grew in numbers. The incident became known as
The Battle of Billings Bridge. My grandparents lived five minutes from there. It is five minutes to Lansdowne Park where I saw Barbara Ann Scott skate in 1948 after winning her Olympic gold medal. And where I saw Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip be driven around the park in 1951. I say this because Ottawa was once my home. And to hear that that neighbourhood said, “Enough is enough!” gave me hope and pride.
It's one thing to see demonstrations on my television set in other parts of the world where atrocious actions bring those demonstrators to terrible grief. I can sit and say, “How terrible!” It’s quite another to watch an orchestrated damaging demonstration take place in the country where I live.
To assuage my anger, I kept flipping the television channel back to the Olympics. How about that women’s hockey team? Gold! I stayed up until 2:30 a.m. to watch the game. I am not an expert in the game, but I do know that if that game kept me up that long, it must have been a good one. Hooray.
And this is how last weekend brought lows and highs, frustrations and cheering, and the knowledge that, somehow, we live in an odd time where wars are fought by words rifling through the ether and victories come at us the same way on our TVs.