It’s Canada Day.
A day that used to be a celebration of cherished values like kindness and compassion, acceptance and tolerance, quiet strength and dignity, and a work hard/play hard ethic.
Today, I am celebrating the very fine Canadian men and women I have met since the Covid narrative was unleashed upon an unsuspecting and far-too trusting public.
I was one of them.
I wore a mask and locked down, in the beginning.
I even banged pots on my balcony as a lone trumpeter played a melancholy version of the national anthem in the evenings of those first innocent days of pandemonium.
I had to unlearn the lessons of an education system and media messaging I now understand were designed to create compliant citizens, not critical thinkers.
I had to let go of the comfort and ease of trust in our institutions and reach for reasoning and truth, no matter how painful or scary.
And I had to grapple with my place in a world that was decidedly more mean and angry than the one I thought I lived in.
But the day I saw the first Freedom Convoy trucks rolling across Canada’s frozen highways, the day I saw the maple leaf flying atop overpass bridges in sub zero weather, held high and proud by bundled children and their equally bundled parents, was the day I embraced my Canadianness.
It was the day I became a patriot.
I recognize that there were those, in the last few years, who succumbed to government propaganda and sometimes gleefully joined the chorus of hateful division and messaging against the unvaccinated.
I recognize that all of us are capable of the best and worst of human behaviour, and during these times of massive mind control, we lost our way.
We lost sight of our ability to stand up for what is right and have compassion for those whose choices are different than our own.
This Canada Day is an opportunity to take responsibility for who we were, who we are, and who we will be become as men and women, and as a country.
In the not-too-distant future, how we say these words will depend on each of us…
O CANADA!
