I’ve been out of sorts for the past three weeks and largely quiet about it. While there have been numerous positives to be thankful for during this time, it’s hard to focus when the city in which you live has turned into a hotbed of international attention.

Everywhere you go, every news site you bring up, every social media platform is just inundinating you with what’s happening with this protest downtown. There’s no point in even linking to an article about it for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. All I can say is the longer it went on, the more radicalized people were becoming.

You were always careful of bringing it up in conversation out of fear of the fights you may get into as a result. I remember during my weekly trip to the library with the kids, they had a display for the olympics and many Canadian flags up for grabs. My kids each grabbed them and started waving them around while chanting, “Canada is the best!”

If that happened at any other time, I’d just smile and tell them to keep it down because they’re in a library. However, I felt uneasy this time because this city has connected people waving flags from their windows as agitators. And what worried me is this paranoia of why I would even care what people were thinking.

It took a while for me to nail it down, but I’ve been able to follow a very concerning thread.

Two years ago, we had videos of people singing to each other from their balconies, cheering on health care workers and sharing their secrets for sourdough starter. Then, slowly, as the effects of the pandemic lingered on, something different happened.

We slowly became radicalized.

Whatever the underlying issues were that caused us to move in this direction, exasperated by endless media cycles (whether they were major networks or social media), we no longer simply disagreed with each other. We didn’t want to converse anymore.

People were either alt-right-scumbag-fascists or left-leaning-liberal-Marxist-snowflakes. But it wasn’t enough we were putting each other in these ridiculous categories, we became entrenched in our stance against them.

It wasn’t enough to yell and scream, we were now wishing death upon people. It’s frightening that in our frustration, we all got manipulated into making proclamations where we wanted to kill people (and their families) just for having an opposing view.

Friends and family members stopped talking with each other. Completely.

Why?

We can blame the government… but which level should we blame?
Municipal? Provincial? Federal?

I think all of them made absolutely poor moves during this pandemic, but I do acknowledge some of the efforts they made were quite remarkable (if someone can point me to any point in Canadian history where governments offered financial aid to people during a time of crisis, I’m all ears).

We can blame the media… but who are the ones consuming it?

Media has always had a bias. Mark Twain is even attributed as saying “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Ryan Holiday wrote a great book about how he manipulated media to his cause, which I often reference during my teaching.

Yet, people are vehemently reacting to it now like this is something new. Hence why I didn’t link above lest someone completely miss the forest for the trees in this article by telling me I linked to a “biased” point of view.

We can blame each other… but at heart, most of us are good people with deep seated flaws. Besides, when you point a finger at a person, you’re also pointing three at yourself.

We can blame ourselves… but that would require some honesty and accountability that many of us are not ready to admit to yet (or ever). I mean, how many of us are actually informed and not just reading to confirm our own bias?

It may be a combination of all of the above, but we’ve certainly lost sight of ourselves. I’m hard pressed to believe the people protesting even know what they’re protesting anymore. In my view, they completely lost the plot (in many ways).

But honestly, where do we go from here?

Do we destroy everything and everyone that is ‘against’ us?

Do we subscribe to some Machiavelli worldview where the ends justify the means and permit terrorism in the name of a particular ideology?

Or, do we take a hard look at our society and ask, “Is this who we’ve become?”‘

I’m not sure, and I’m not sure what happened.

All I know is I want the world to move on from this pandemic… but not like this.