Domestic Abuse, Rapists, Child Molesters & the Trucker's Convoy in Ottawa

The Sad Stories we Tell Ourselves When "The Outsiders" Come to Town

I would really encourage everyone who lives in Ottawa to take a walk downtown.

There is a dance party and a celebration happening that we’re being told to stay away from.

I’m long a student of psychology and story and archetype, and I’m utterly fascinated by the tales we humans tell, and by the games we play so often that they become concretized in myth and legend and song. There is a big human story unfolding on Parliament Hill with the truckers and we are all playing characters in it.

If we pause for a moment we’ll recognize the patterns and structures of this narrative and perhaps that can lead us to a conclusion of this painful episode in humane and enlightened ways; but all too often when this particular story plays out, the ending is dark and tragic. In any case, what we have in front of us is history unfolding; the endgame of a pandemic, the inevitable results of a visit from one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It is one of the many predictable and normal societal symptoms of Pestilence.

Downtown smells like Diesel. The engines are loud. The weather is cold. It’s the same bitter February cold that has had us boast days as the coldest capital on earth more than once in the last few years. When I came in from outside several times on Saturday to warm up, the skin on my face felt like it was burning.

If you're a trucker, diesel and loud engines, midnight breakdowns, weather delays and long nights in the cab on some God-forsaken highway is your life. Cold wind toughens your face and ages you prematurely. Lucky is the trucker who lands a cushy route repeated four or five days a week, with normal daytime hours. More likely, especially early in this life, are the long days, the shift-work, the overtime on holidays and many days or weeks on end on the road away from family.

I drove truck for a few years. Mostly five-ton delivery in Vancouver during university and I still have nightmares about crossing-routes like the frighteningly narrow Pattullo Bridge and the thin lanes of the Lions Gate. I drove crew in the bush for a while, twelve-passenger vans and 4x4 super-crews with trailers. For a while I drove a twenty-six-speed Mac Special in the yard, moving pups and trailers on and off the door of a shipping company five days a week. Three-am, in the chill of Vancouver rain is not fun for picking up and dropping trailers and running them in and out of a warehouse, onto and off of the loading docks. I can’t imagine some of the the conditions truck drivers across Canada endure on a daily basis. It’s a tough job most of us never have to think about.

I’m as agnostic and ambivalent as I can be about the cause that has moved truckers to protest here in Ottawa over the last ten days. While it has been cast as a movement of a fringe radical and racist minority with unacceptable views, I see it as the legitimate response of a growing number of people, perhaps even a majority of Canadians now, who are sick of the government-imposed pandemic restrictions. There is no contesting that we have seen suspensions of our constitutional rights in numerous ways over the last two years and real Canadians have real concerns about this especially perhaps when watching a football game in the US, where 100,000 fans gather together with not a mask in sight and Canadians can’t have more than five people in their homes at a time.

I am not at the stage of frustration personally to go out and protest this, but I certainly recognize that other people have a right to feel passionately enough about it to push back. And the Truckers have given many Canadians permission to say or even yell out loud, “enough is enough!”

Those are speech rights in our Constitution. Even if you don’t agree with what “those” people are saying.

When the government has broken its contract with the people, it is the right of people (and Ghandi and Thoreau would say it is our obligation) to check unjust political power through civil action. In spite of this everyone in Ottawa seems to be to finding common anger and commiserating over how much this convoy is impacting the city.

There is an impact. I do not dispute this.

I was downtown both weekends to talk to people about another issue. Gender Ideology in Schools and the public conversation that has never been had in Canada due to government-sponsored censorship and threats of civil and criminal prosecution now enshrined in law. I have deep and serious concerns about what we teach kids beginning as young as six or seven in public schools, a mythology and religious idea that we exist as humans having an identity that can be separate from the body.

I wasn’t alone in bringing a different cause into the main event. The carnival has a big-top that hosts the show and somewhere, in stories at least, there is always a bearded lady, a juggler, a preacher, a grifter playing three-card-monte and the inevitable pickpocket. That just goes with the show, and if we’re honest, we’re having a similar collective reaction to the rough and coarse truckers and their caravans as we have had historically to circus gypsies coming to town. We clutch our pearls, and we cry, “lock up your daughters!”

With the truckers here, we breathlessly claim that they as a group are responsible for “desecrating” our monuments against the backdrop of 50-70,000 individual people from all over the country, gathered to express grievances against the way the government has been handling this particular horseman of the apocalypse. We narrate that women who have suffered sexual assault are terrified to go outside; a Karen, (Karen Brown) the President of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario claims that the supremacists, misogynist truckers are brandishing racist imagery and that this is harming poor children as well as the traumatized, the racialized and the alphabetized.

When the gypsies and highwaymen come to town, there is suddenly someone convenient to blame when Bessie the cow stops giving milk. In the old stories, it was the gypsy witch and her prognostications over the cards or some potion she sold that were responsible for bread’s failure to rise, or the for the hens who stopped laying eggs. When a crop failed, it was gypsies. When someone’s house caught fire or the wheat was moldy, it was the gypsies. We get the term “getting gypped” from these negative associations; and thievery and grifting often appear in tales of people who lived life on the road, gypsy or not.

It’s a natural human instinct to be suspicious of outsiders and our human stories are filled with this prejudice, this human instinct; and so too, is our tendency to believe any and every lie and wild distortion about the atrocities those people are committing or are capable of.

We are suspicious of outsiders and territorial about OUR homes and OUR public commons. It’s a story we’ve acted out countless times in human history. The Romans called the people from the village and from the country, Paganu, the Pagans and we know the accompanying stories we hold about them: Devil-worshipping, infant-sacrificing sodomites ritually raping incautious women and drinking baby’s blood and the excretions of their pituitary glands. And they do this of course while conducting orgiastic sex festivals and incantations.

It’s arguable that societies who have held these prejudices and fears of outsiders have fared better from an evolutionary standpoint by being skeptical of travelers and highwaymen. It’s a human instinct to protect one’s community - and as a student of archetype and psychology, the patterns of emotions and the lines of division emerge as predictably as in any folktale we learned as children. I see now we have all taken our character roles in this stand-off with the truckers and if you pause, you might see it too.

This instinct, this human pattern that plays out over and over again, makes it easy to jump to stereotypes and to accept the hyperbole about the truckers from our politicians, from our news sources and from social media; even though we know these platforms are engineered to make us angry, to polarize us and to drive us to outrage. I could, like so many others, demand these racists, rapists and criminals stop terrorizing our city and go home. I refuse however, and because I speak out against this dangerous human tendency to tell the stories we’re telling which, we know from history, lead us to atrocious outcomes, I am become “one of them” in the minds of many. A defender of witches, and rapists and pagans.

I know that it’s normal to be suspicious of outsiders and it’s a normal reaction to embrace these stereotypes in fear; but I cannot stand quietly while it happens because there is a human virtue we are missing and we’re plenty capable of embracing it instead of falling collectively to this hysterical vice. We can tell a better story together. We can sing a better song.

Over history, the story that repeats over and over is that we build monstrous and false stories about groups of others in our in-group narratives. There has been a lot of talk in recent months about mass formations and mass hysterias and we, us as humankind, killed the “Pagans” systematically over centuries via playing out this human pattern; this archetype.

We hold stories about the seedy underbellies of the travelling circus, the lose morals of minstrels, the troops of actors and the Soothe-Sayers. Over-and-over we used these false narratives to drive the townspeople to frenzy. It’s a dangerous life to exist as a visiting outsider, as the new person in a small town, as a gypsy… as a Jew, as an immigrant. We, humans, ostracize these people. We “Other” them and hold them out from society, leaving them on the social fringes, marginalizing them and scapegoating them for all the ills of our lives.

Someone broke a window almost a km away, it must be the truckers; someone set a fire, it was the truckers fault. One person of more than 50,000 carried a confederate flag, a masked agitator, who was asked immediately to leave; one case in more than 50,000 carried the vile symbol of the swastika. They were not even in the main protest and were chased away, or scurried under a rock somewhere but everyone gathered to protest after was branded a white supremacist, a bigot, a racist. The narrative structure we are enacting is the same insider/outsider narrative that sent the Jews and the Roma people (the gypsies) to the camps in the second world war. Over and over again this archetype plays out. We are the good and the virtuous; they are the heathen crowds. Summon the army. Deploy the police in force. The sow won’t give milk to the piglets.

Today we live in a world hypervigilant against prejudice, racism and discrimination. We have Diversity and Equity police in our workplaces ferreting out micro-aggressors and investigating people on suspicions and secret allegations. This is not hyperbole.

We know that people’s careers, businesses and reputations in this world today can turn on single words if a woke inquisitor becomes sufficiently interested and the mob joins in the attack. We stand idle by, refusing to speak because its not happening to us. We are bullied into parroting certain narratives and we are given moral excuse to pile on to people like Joe Rogan and Whoopie Goldberg, and JK Rowling; but also onto concerned teachers of twenty-years who raise questions about K-6 kids being given books that play down the casual sterilization being conducted on vulnerable children all across Canada in the name of Inclusion.

It feels good to stand in our moral righteousness and our indignation condemning the Truckers; like woke mobs chanting for a cancellation. Yet we are acting out the very sets of patterns and behaviors that lead to the kinds outcomes we claim to abhor. We’re marginalizing a group of outsiders, making stereotypical and unfounded accusations against an entire group of people by ascribing extreme views and behaviors that group and we are attacking anyone who doesn’t overtly join the mob and condemn them with us.

We no longer extend any good faith to a person who stands so accused; we think in black-and-white terms about oppressors with power and the oppressed without. We gasp in indignation and we tut-tut about the “patriarchy” and their ephemeral “white privilege” as the cancel mob takes over or takes down institution after institution. We applaud the Justice Mob in the name of protecting the marginalized victims of “white supremacy” and “the patriarchy” while we tell ourselves that amplifying false narratives and stereotypes is a moral and righteous Justice.

Here we are again, participating in the inquisitor’s smear and lie and making the same kinds of hysterical accusations about the outsiders as we always have.

In Canada, though few realize it yet, we have a non-profit organization compiling a government-sponsored black-list where political targets are attacked and their reputations destroyed in the public commons without due process.

This is a primitive story, too much like when we once put people in stocks and threw garbage at them or when we stoned them in the down square, or when we ripped them to pieces in mad frenzies of mob hysteria. This is now business as usual for our government. I have friends on this list, libeled and slandered, investigated by their employers, losing their businesses and careers and reputations - they are on this list for no other reason than questioning the narrative we are being given. I questions it too.

Over the last few days, the life-long best friend of the Prime Minister encouraged Canadians to donate money to this panel of self-appointed moral inquisitors in the name of anti-hate. They make examples of their convictions, hanging the cancelled on their home page like corpses of gypsies hung from city ramparts to warn off people with “Unacceptable views”. These are the stiff penalties of failures to abide, examples that wrong speech and wrong think in Canada will be silenced by an organization that boasts federal government funding and endorsements.

In Canada we have thrown out the principles of actual justice, where a person can face accusers, question evidence and mount a defense. The customs and laws that enshrine these principles of rights to a reputation and to the right to live unmolested by hysterical inquisitors and by witch-hunters date back thousands of years. Moses established that it was a sin before God, one of the ten most serious sins, to bear false witness against another and the Magna Carta, over nine-hundred years ago, the foundation of our common law, enshrined these protections in writing, guaranteeing a right to a fair trial, and a jury of unbiased peers. Never mind that we have a sacred Constitution in this country that says the same thing; and that we are supposed to hold this at the forefront of our public policy and as the guide of our elected governments and our public institutions.

One of the pillars of healthy communication and conflict-resolution as many readers will know, is to seek first to understand. And we have a clear conflict at hand.

In the name of the highest values we hold as civilized humans, can we pause for a moment and simply ask ourselves: “What would make someone get in their vehicle and drive 3,000km in the middle of winter, at their own expense so they could sleep in that vehicle in minus 25 Celsius for weeks?”

How bad does it have to be in their minds to undertake that risk?

Did you get there? Or are you still fore-fronting the hysterical claims of child sacrifice, and the comparisons of the truckers to wife-beaters and sex-offenders that was published in the Ottawa Citizen. Are you stuck on the insinuations of a dangerous misogynistic rape culture that has laid siege to our city that’s making the rounds of social media?

What would have had to happen for you, as a human being, to decide that things were so intolerable that driving for a week straight through the Canadian Prairies at the end of January seemed like a good option?

Are you still at “But racists!!?” or, “But the noise!” Did your cow stop giving milk too? If so please go back and think about that question for a minute. Yes I’m scolding you like your grade five teacher. You’re not in fifth grade anymore. Engage some higher orders of reason instead of the neurochemical pleasures of outrage and self-righteousness.

One of the tropes consistently hurled at people on the right (real or perceived right) is that they have a xenophobic and racist position on immigration, and I’m sure there are people like that somewhere on the right in this trucker convoy. I’m sure most of my readers who want a reason to keep the big-bad truckers out, who are stereotyping and believing the salacious accusations and third-hand gossip about what’s happening downtown, would deplore this kind of behavior. What kind of uncivilized bigoted person would take such an egregious stance about poor immigrants, displaced by famines, disasters or by economic hardship and political necessity just trying to create a better future for themselves and for their families?

How could anyone lack the empathy to understand what poor immigrants have to go through, to leave everything behind, to risk everything they have to travel to a foreign place in hopes of making their lives better?

The stories we are acting out in our lives are stories that humans run in predictable patterns over and over again. Those same liberals shaming people with a different political view about immigration, travelers from another place, are hysterically defending false narratives and tropes about the agendas of people who came to protest lockdowns. The outsiders. The immigrants. Them.

Take a walk downtown. Yes it's absolutely loud. Sometimes the engines are revving like giant primal beasts roaring against threats. Maybe, instead of believing the hysterical narratives that others are telling you to believe in, go and see for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Listen for the signals in all the noise. See if you can understand what other people are feeling and thinking for a moment.

The giant walls of speakers are bumping downtown. I see the peaceful and joyous players crying for an end to government over-reach, which is their constitutional right to do; and a constitutional obligation of the government to provide and enforce.

They’re singing and dancing to "We Are the World" and Bob Marley's "Redemption Song"

fucking monsters