July 23, 2021 | Woke Nation

Regular readers – people who have no real lives and are addicted to dog pictures – will recall my angst when SJWs scoffed my big flag three weeks ago. No, it has not turned up. The cops were stymied. That prized possession is gone, gone, sadly.

My crime was to celebrate Canada Day. On Canada Day. With a Canadian flag. In Canada. The theft was not enough punishment, however. The same crew took to Facebook and called me “white privileged”, “tone-deaf”, “elitist” and “racist” for having hoisted the banner. You may recall I wrote a blog about the incident, and I made note that all the people who jammed my corporate email, all those who burst into my office to berate me plus the ones leading the social media assault were female. “Young women, coincidentally,” I scribbled, because I found that interesting.

Well, now I’m “misogynist”, too.

These are disappointing times to be an old, white, male who owns stuff. Like a building on which to hang a flag. But it’s not just an issue of Canada, patriotism, Indigenous reconciliation, race or gender. It seems as a society we’re rapidly losing any sense of commonality. It’s notable that the worst public health crisis in a century – a global pandemic that killed millions globally and 26,000 in Canada in little more than a year – did not bind us. The opposite.

Social distancing rules made people leap off the sidewalk. WFH and the quest for space caused urban flight. Masking has erased smiles and normal courtesy. Society’s been upended lately and Covid seems to have exacerbated the divisions among us. Was it a coincidence that the Black Lives Matter movement exploded during the pandemic? Or that in Canada statues of monarchs and our first prime minister have been defaced, toppled and beheaded during the lockdowns?

Quarantines, restrictions, states of emergency, limits on freedom and movement – they have all ratcheted up stress. The pandemic, at the same time, has increased the wealth divide. Jeff Bezos made out like a bandit as WFH turned Amazon into an essential service. People with houses have scored an absolute windfall in the pandemic real estate boom while millions are now locked out. Generational warfare has heightened as the ‘rich’ Boomers are pilloried by the Mills and Zs. MeToo made men evil. Then Covid added race, wealth and ageism to the mix. Suddenly we got to a point where the prime minister (correctly) has a summit on Islamaphobia but (shamefully) refuses to condemn burning churches. The premier of Manitoba, my old pal Brian Pallister, was trashed for saying he’d restore the public art depicting Queen Elizabeth. The Queen of Canada.

A blog comment yesterday mentioned that a group in Nova Scotia has published an “environmental racism” map of that province, purporting to show where pollution or industrialization affects people of colour or disadvantaged groups. I also noticed a real estate board has now condemned the practice of buyers sending letters to sellers in the hope they’d empathize, picking them as the purchasers. That’s potentially discriminatory, the realtors say. In fact at least one US state is banning these ‘love letters’ entirely.

Why?

Because we’re now a woke society that disallows any discrimination based on race, ancestry, color, religion, gender, family status, age, disability, sexual orientation or identity. “It’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to write a love letter and not mention at least one of those protected classes,” says an agent.

Prejudice and hatred are wrong. We all get it. Most people try to be decent. Most succeed.

However, the more we divide ourselves up – whether by racial ancestry or pronouns – the less we have in common. Like history. Or the resolve to help the environment and fix the deficit. Or save our health care from a virus. Or the nation.

Time to stop.

Garth Turner July 23rd, 2021

Posted In: The Greater Fool

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