Convoy, Cranks, And When You're On The Losing End

On The Freedom Convoy And Assorted Issues

I don’t care.

Much to the shock of anyone who has ever met me, that’s a sentence I say quite a bit, because my inability to pretend I care about things I don’t care about means I end up expressing it a lot, even when others might agree, but not vocalize it. And, frankly, that’s where I am with the supposedly legitimate grievances of many caught up in this Freedom Convoy to my hometown. I just don’t give a fuck, and I don’t for a simple reason – we know what this is. It’s people who know their lives, and the world they know, is gone, and they want it back. They’re lashing out because they’re on the losing end.

And I just don’t care.

The reason I struggle to find any concern for this cavalcade of nonsense is that it will end just as it started, in nothingness. Trudeau won’t meet with them, the vaccine mandates to cross the border in both Canada and the US will stay in place, and these people will go back to wherever they’re from, having accomplished nothing except hurting some already struggling local businesses in Ottawa. It is, plain as day, a mission without end, because these people lack both an understanding of who they’re actually mad at, and what they’re actually mad about.

What is this outpouring of anger really about? It’s not actually about vaccine mandates at the border, or broader COVID restrictions, or even the election of Justin Trudeau. It’s about the world, and the fact that the people running it – or, at least Canada and the US – are the kind of weak kneed, bleeding hearts that the right has always thought to be less than them. The sorts of soft people that are always ruining things, although how and why is never made clear. It’s a struggle for these people because the world used to make sense to them, and now, it doesn’t. And it’s clear as day that people like me are amongst the reasons why.

It’s not just homosexuality, but to deny that a large part of the cultural revolution of my life has been the increase in comfort for gay partners in public, for trans people in general, and for women and racial minorities taking their rightful places in leadership roles. It’s undeniable that there has been a huge shift in the way the world works, and for plenty of people, it has been very good (if not enough). For others, those changes have radically changed the way they live for the worse – especially as the advantages for whiteness and being a man have become relatively less useful than they were in the past. Hell, just think about the prospects for someone without a post-secondary degree now, and how much less it was necessary twenty years ago, and the world is totally different now. And all this makes sense.

The crises that afflict conservatism and conservatives didn’t start with COVID or lockdowns or vaccine mandates, it’s been the long running subplot of the western world. It’s why cultural conservatives voted so strongly for Brexit, it’s why Scott Morrison once brought a literal piece of coal into the Australian Parliament to wide cheers from his colleagues, it’s why my Uncle used to do lengthy rants about “the gays” in 2009 to wide laughter from everyone else in my family. It’s a long running problem when you have a group of people who want the world to go back to a time when things made sense to them, and the rest of the country wants to keep moving forward.

It might be a sop to your triple vaxxed soul to focus on the fascists and Nazis in this thing, and it’s worth pointing them out, but it won’t get us any closer to knowing why there are so many supposedly sane people who have decided that this is a fight worth fighting and a convoy worth supporting. If you think this is solely the domain of the crazies, you’re wrong – or your definition of insane includes degree-holders with jobs in various provincial governments. It might feel wonderful to chuckle amongst yourself at the notion of people literally employed by the Ontario government blaming the Feds for the decisions of the Ontario government, but it’s not going to tell us anything valuable, and it’s not going to make this stop.

What this is, at its core, is the fight that comes when you know you’ve lost.

…

It's so hard for me now/But I'll make it somehow
Though I know I'll never be the same/Won't you ever change your ways?
It's so hard to make love pay/When you're on the losing end

The last time I wrote about this issue, it was On The Beach that I went to, but here, it’s The Losing End (When You’re On), a ballad from Neil Young’s second album. It’s fitting to be thinking of this in the same week Neil took his music off Spotify as a protest of Joe Rogan, but it’s also fitting because of how well the situation Young sings about here applies to these truckers, and their supporters.

It is hard to not understand how the world works, and for many they have had to make it some way, some how for a while now. The world is never going back to the way it was, and these people know it as well as anyone else, and to act like they’re all thick rubes is an insult to them. But they’re raging out because there’s no other answer coming. You can spend as much time as you like, but try and reconcile the views of the Glebe, the downtown neighbourhood that starts just south of Parliament Hill, with Arnprior, the official start of rural Ontario again. You can’t, because Renfrew County and downtown Ottawa want two entirely different worlds, and sometimes downtown wins, and sometimes Renfrew wins. We deal.

Now? It’s not the same anymore because what downtown wants is to keep going further, and the ideal that rural voters want slips further and further away from them. Look at every place Joe Biden did substantially better than Barack Obama did in 2012 – Southlake, Forsyth, College Station – and you’ll see a clear pattern. Places where I would have no problem showing affection for my partner are all there. Southeastern rural Ohio? No way in fucking hell would I ever show my face there with the man I love. And at some point, you can’t just ignore the gulf between the country so many want to create and the world that so many want to go back to.

Appeals for less division are virtuous only in so far as they’re meaningless, because what the (overwhelming old white male) authors of these pleas for civility and respect are actually asking for is neither of those things – it’s permission not to change. Why should the overwhelmingly vaccinated majority continue to have patience for those who won’t get the damn vaccine? Because we’re all Canadians, of course – except that same respect isn’t afforded to gay and trans Canadians when a majority of then-Conservative MPs voted against the conversion therapy ban in early 2021. Nor is it afforded to Muslim Canadians when 91 MPs voted against a frankly rudimentary denunciation of Islamophobia, especially in the context of a fucking Mosque shooting in Quebec City. And it absolutely wasn’t afforded to women when a different group of 91 MPs voted to reopen the abortion debate in 2012. But again, we’re expected to give the vocal fringe a respect they never give themselves.

At the end of the day, this isn’t an existential crisis for Canada, it’s the last days of a group who are losing control, and flailing aimlessly for some route back to it. The world these people knew is never coming back, and they’ve lost the love that small towners and conservatives always love to pretend they have because they’re on the losing end, and they’re gonna keep feeling that way again.