Years from now, what I will remember most about the pandemic is not a virus but our response to it. We have become an intolerant, contemptful, rude and savage society, more inclined to cut off our relationships at the knees than to massage the joints a little to keep them moving. We threaten instead of persuade, mandate instead of respect, and gaslight, scapegoat, and insult our targets into submission.
Seared into my memory are the bold, black letters on the front page of The Toronto Star last August: “I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated. Let them die.” These words are, unfortunately, more aligned with today’s rules of behavior than an exception to them. Online and off, we are becoming a crude, insensitive, and morally bankrupt society being slowly engulfed, it seems, by an inferno of incivility.
Our own prime minister fuels the flames, modeling the very sort of hate speech his Bill C-36 is supposed to extinguish. He masterfully turned what should have been a campaign killer into a successful campaign promise — don’t think you are getting on a “plane” or “train” next to the vaccinated (i.e., the pure, acceptable citizens). Instead of electing someone who might have led us up and out of this swamp of incivility, we wanted a leader who would vindicate our rage and whose indefensible malevolence could be a model for our own.
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