Blog Mirror: Just Another Day On the Prairie. Thoughts on "Freedom Day" and the spirit of the times.
I really hesitate to post this, as I don't want it to seem to be some sort of an endorsement. I'm copying it over as a link for another reason.
Freedom Day
This is from the following blog:
Just Another Day On The Prairie
The diary and musings of an Alberta ranch wife.
So, what of it?
I like this blog as the photos on it are beautiful.
And also, as a Wyomingite, and a rural one, and an agricultural one in one of my three vocations/avocations, Alberta is part of the same region I'm from, different country though it is.
Indeed, I sometimes think Easterners don't really grasp that in a lot of ways, natives of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Prairie states have more in common with the Canadian western provinces than they do with any other region of their own country. Indeed, they have quite a bit in common with the highly rural ares of northern Mexico as well, but they very much do with western Canada.
Rural Western Canadians are part of the exact same agricultural/livestock/hunting/rural culture that real Western Americans, not imports from other regions, including quite frankly the South, are from. Indeed, ranching in Alberta has the same roots as ranching in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado do. At one time ranchers went back and forth across the border as if it wasn't there. Many of Charles Russell's paintings of ranch life are actually set in Alberta, not Montana.
So not too surprisingly, rural Albertans, and rural Canadians from much of the rest of the Canadian West, have the same views that rural Western Americans do.
This isn't really true, I'd note, of Canadians as a whole. While I don't mention it often, I'm a dual citizen and hold Canadian as well as American citizenship, but my Canadian relatives are all Eastern Canadians by origin, and their views are extremely different on many things than Western Americans' are.
Now, I mean to be careful here, as I do not wish to offer insult.
When I speak of the views of Wyomingites, Montanans, and rural Coloradans, etc., I'm speaking of their views. I'm not speaking of the views of Texans and Oklahomans.
I'm not slamming Texans and Oklahomans here.
I'm noting this, because we're an oil province here, we have lots of people here, from time to time, who come from the oil provinces of Texas and Oklahoma. Interestingly, as Alberta and Saskatchewan are also oil provinces, we also have quite a few people from these regions who make an appearance as well, although they don't tend to have much of an influence on local culture and politics. Indeed, they're pretty quiet on both, and they'd nearly have to be on the latter, as of course they can't vote after being here a year. Texans and Oklahomans can, of course. I note this as during oil booms the latter groups tend to be somewhat influential in local politics, and often their local views are imported. Canadians in the US tend to be really quiet if they're not in numbers.
Canadians in Canada are not, and to a fair degree, prior to COVID 19 Canadians were expressing a fair amount of contempt for American culture. Donald Trump really brought it on.[1]
Note, I'm still not commenting on any of this.
What I will note is that open contempt tend to inspire contempt back, and people should be careful about that.
Anyhow, what I"m now noting is that Western Canada has had, for a long time, the same relationship with the Canadian East that the Western United States tend to with our East, and this entry really shows that. Note:
This Convoy is not just for the truckers mandates. It’s for the 30 million people that Trudeaus government approved to allowed to be spied on their cell phones. It’s for the family members banned from visiting family in nursing homes. It’s for the censorship on all social media platforms. It’s for all the people afraid to speak In fear of being called conspiracy theorists. It’s for the people who didn’t want to give up their freedom of choice! It’s for the people who don’t want to give up their right to bear arms. It’s for the people who don’t want to be in debt for the next 100 years.
Did you just read a Canadian post referencing a "right to bear arms".
Yes you did.
Now, this post also deals with a lot of other things, and as is typically the case, most Americans are going to be completely clueless about what's going on. We don't tend to follow Canadian news here, and we don't tend to get it. Both are inexcusable.
I do, or at least I used to. With the news being what it is recently, I've grown a bit numb to it. Well, really numb. I was aware, vaguely, that something was going on, but not that aware. I had to look it up.
I looked it up on the BBC.
The BBC's Toronto reporter notes (original font, bold text and mother tongue speallings):
After a week-long drive across Canada, a convoy of big rigs has arrived in the national capital to protest vaccine mandates and Covid-19 measures. Organisers insist it will be peaceful, but police say they're prepared for trouble.
The article goes on:
The movement was sparked by a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the US-Canada border, implemented by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government earlier this month.
Upset with the new measure that would require unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing the two nations' boundary to quarantine once they've returned home, a loose coalition of truckers and conservative groups began to organise the cross-country drive that began in western Canada.
It picked up steam and gathered support as it drove east. Many supporters, already opposed to Mr Trudeau and his politics, have grown frustrated with pandemic measures they see as political overreach.
Okay, a couple of things.
I've thought about noting it before, but because we're so focused on our own selves in the US, we tend to view the entire COVID 19 mask and vaccine story as exclusively our own. Heck, for the most part, if the entire population of the globe had died of COVID 19 it probably would have taken most Americans a couple of weeks to actually notice it.
We tend to be rather self-absorbed.
Part of that self-absorption, however, is our failure to note that a lot of big social and political stores around here are actually international ones and some of those have widespread regional expression.
There have been huge mask protests in Australia and parts of Europe, including, for example, Germany. Refusals to vaccinate have occurred in at least Australia and across Europe as well.
Now, I'll note that as I'm not hugely familiar with this story, I don't want to go too far in commenting on it. I was dimly aware of some provisions in Canada as a friend of mine had recently been to British Columbia, and I'd asked him about things, and he noted mask requirements for where he was, stating beyond that bluntly that Canadians "didn't tolerate stupidity". That's a very blunt comment, but I'd also note that my Canadian contacts also would not be critical of Prime Minster Trudeau's policies here. Frankly, I don't know that I am, either.
On that, our luck in our small family finally ran out. My daughter now has COVID 19. I'm so weary at this point, I'm not angry, and hopefully it'll be mild. She's away from home and I can't do anything about it, or even to help.
And I've watched COVID 19 rip through places I know and people I know. I don't understand the reluctance to get vaccinated at all. A rancher I vaguely knew died of COVID 19 and left a devastated widow. A bunch of people who were with him at a cattle sale where he surely picked it up got it and were pretty sick. My daughter got the disease, potentially, from being exposed to a person who didn't get vaccinated and who went here and there before that person finally had to acknowledge the infection.
None of that had to be.
Maybe we couldn't have beat the virus. But our refusals made it certain that we could not. It will go on to become endemic now. Is Trudeau being unreasonable for trying to keep American infections from spreading back across the border?
Without really commenting on it, this may be the one area where I agree with Trudeau. I haven't followed Canada's response to COVID 19 now for some time (I did at first) but Canada has had a hard time with the disease. The US started off with a bad start, but Canada somehow fell into a bad situation.
I'll also note that at this point Canadian news in the US started to drop off because, well, Canadians were suddenly less condescending towards the United States than they had been for awhile. As the weirdeness surrounding the Trump lie that he won an election he lost has caused many in the US to wonder about the future of their democracy, and many outside of the country to wonder the same thing, that's returned a bit.
That might drop off again as Trudeau went into hiding yesterday during the protests. . . shades of insurrection. . .
Anyhow, as noted, I don't know that I'm not sympathetic to Trudeau's response here to COVID 19. Truckers are entering a country where the Omicron variant is infecting many and the chances of them bringing it home. . . well, they seem pretty high.
Which will make this the one area where I'll ever say that, most likely. I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician, and I never have. Indeed, I've characterized him as a soy boy at one point.
It used to be pretty clear that Western Canadians took a much different view of a lot of Canadian politics than Easterners did, and obviously that's still the case. But for that matter, our regional political culture used to be a lot clearer here, too. Things like gun control have always been hugely unpopular in the rural West, but even here that's gone from "don't mess with me taking my pistol and rifle out in the sticks" to the "we need to be prepared to fight Stalingrad" sort of atmosphere. And, starting with the campaign which pitted our current Governor against Foster Freiss, you'd have thought that some people were running for the Governor of Alabama in the 1970s. Freiss' campaign even sported lightly clad young women in a state which has winter about nine months out of the year, which inspires a "geez, doesn't somebody have a coat for those poor girls" type of reaction rather than a "whoa. . . look at those Daisy Dukes". Underlying it all, however, the old views, by us old residents, are still there.
Globally it seems a lot of the same strains are also at work everywhere. Populism, something that never had much of an appeal here, has taken over in the state's GOP and across the nation in Republican organizations. But not just here. Populism helps explain how Boris Johnson rose to power in the UK. Populist dominate the Hungarian government, which is strongly right wing. Populists threaten to take over the Polish government. Strong populist elements exist in French politics, and you can find populist elements everywhere.
That would seemingly have nothing to do with COVID 19 and it doesn't, but what it does have to do with is politics in the era of COVID, so it gets mixed in. And there's a really strong cultural element at work here that the political left wants to dismiss and even pejoratively label, but it shouldn't. A big part of what's given rise to right wing populism is a feeling that traditional culture is being attacked. To some degree, it is being attacked.
That's serious for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the US, and elsewhere it would seem, a lot of rank and file people who are of the traditional culture feel that they have nowhere to go democratically. People who are basically traditionally Western European and Christian in culture are being told that clearly Christian values are obsolete, their inherited European values are wrongheaded if not outright racist, and they just have to lump it, at best.
A big part of that has been a radical reconstruction of domestic values, which are inherited from a Christian heritage. Christianity has always focused on families as the center of secular life, and took what was the radical view early on that marriage meant one man, one woman, until one of them died. Pagans didn't believe any of that.
That Christian belief, in part, gave rise to the success of Christianity in spite of huge governmental and cultural repression. Christian families were solid because of that belief, and Christians cared for their own in times of trouble, even caring for others where they could. They therefore survived repression, oppression, wars, and plagues in spite of being in cultures that held "don't be stupid, you can abandon the sick. . .don't be stupid, you can kill the infirm. . . don't be stupid, if you are male you can screw who or what you want, and by force if you want."
Now, we're darned near back there in signficant ways, although we certainly didn't arrive at this spot in an instant. The assault on marriage began as far back, really, as 1534. It arrived in a flood fashion after World War Two, with that war having damaged so much of Western morality, and achieved legal assistance from, of course, California starting in 1969.
European values, including democratic values, were also inherited from the Church A body that held that everyone was equal in God's eyes necessarily would spill into the secular world. Indeed, the poor and common born could and did rise to position in the Church long before that became the case in secular society.[2]
Western culture is essentially Christian in its values and even non practicing people, and non Christians for that matter, tend to hold Christian philosophical values without realizing it. One non-Christian friend of mine, but one who lives in the Western world, noted to me once that culturally, "we're all Catholics". There's a lot of truth to that.
But progressives have been acting for some time now to rip that down and are offering, in its place, a construct based on what individual's "feel", which is not a very solid basis for any sort of larger philosophy. Reality keeps on keeping on, irrespective of what we feel about it.
And at the same time, progressives have been big on "you must", including what you must think. It doesn't matter if your moral code holds one thing, if the current progressive view is to the opposite, you must not think that and you must not say that. Canada has gone a lot further down this road than the U.S.
But that very "feel" and "must" ethos leads us to where we are now, ironically, in regard to the COVID 19 virus and what we feel about it. While the science is solid as to what it is and how to avoid it, a nearly century long campaign on deconstructing our focus and changing it into one based on what we "feel", as long as we also feel to be consumers, set us up for the current crisis. And that dovetails into the "must". A group of people who have been told that they "must" think something that is contrary to centuries of their cultural values and their own experiences, because of what we individually feel, is going to lose, at some point, a willingness to accept what its being told, no matter how extremely well founded one particular item may be.
In other words, introducing these same policies in 1950, in a different U.S. and a different Canada, probably wouldn't be provoking this result, as it would have come in the context of little else being under assault.
Whether it's a 500-year attack on our central foundational values, or only a 75-year-long one, at some point we reached a tipping point. A good case can be made that for the United States that point came in 2015 and I warned at that time that a Supreme Court case in which the Court sought to redefine a traditional view of the world contrary to the long run of human culture would have future dire consequences. It seems to me that I was proven to be right. The Court, in its waning liberal days, usurped the legislatures, created a result, and those benefitting from it, as well as those who were on the political left, ran with it far beyond what was predicted, including what its author predicted. Where as that result only took one more step on a road that had mile markers at 1534, 1953, 1963, 1968, and 1969, it seems to have been a societal bridge too far. The same movement had already made large impacts across the globe legislatively, making the US somewhat unique in that it was done judicially.
It is not what a person thinks of that movement per se, but rather what occurs when a very large percentage of the population gets the sense, even just vaguely, that it's being attacked and has no place to go. In the case of the US, a large, formerly Democratic demographic, has had its economic foundation stripped away and exported, and its traditional values eroded. Much of that is a rust belt sort of thing, which is where the epicenter of discontent can be found. But it spreads out elsewhere in areas of economic distress, including the rural West, where what we're essentially told is that we ought to get computer jobs and become urban cubicle dwellers. Even our own governments aid in this process by eroding, on occasion, what local business there is.
As massive as the change is here, the post-war change is even more dramatic for Canadians. Canada was a fundamentally conservative country founded in agriculture with a strong tie to the United Kingdom. Going into World War Two, most of Canada, outside of Quebec, was extremely rural and extremely British. Quebec was divided, but the bulk of the Francophone population was not only very conservative, but rural and agrarian, the only thing that had kept it from being absorbed into the larger Canadian whole.
War, we've noted here, changes anything, and the Canada that came out of World War Two started to change pretty rapidly. Not all at once, to be sure. As late as the late 1950s, people moving to Toronto could expect to be moving to an essentially English city that closed up on Sundays entirely.
Much of that has now been swept away. Canada is an urban country, like Australia is, with urban values. The US is actually much more rural, by and large, than Canada, in spite of its much larger population. But the rural areas do remain, and the strong East/West divide does as well. What's also occurred, however, is a huge cultural shift in which Canada has become a very liberal country.
Or it makes pretense to being so.
In the homes, out on the farms and ranches, you'll get rumblings of another view. Many I know, and again I know more in the East than the West, are certainly very "progressive" in outlook. Nonetheless, I could never get a straight answer from anyone why people were enthralled with Justin Trudeau. And in individual news I see the photos of people visiting the traditional Canada, including Canadians, not the side streets of the Second City.
And out in the West, Western Canadians often seem distressed about how a society that isn't and wasn't that much different than the Western US has become so controlled in a fashion. The comment on the Canadian right to bear arms, which in Canadian law doesn't exist, is telling on that.
A lot of these same factors are playing out in every country in the Western world simultaneously. This helps explain, I think, a lot of the reaction to masks and the like. People have actually been upset with the direction of things dating back to the 1980s, or even the 1970s. They're reacting now. What probably pushed them over the edge, however, happened before COVID 19.
These are dangerous times. The assumption that democracy is an inevitably victorious force is an assumption, not an historical fact. History teaches us that when a large minority feels it can get no voice, it puts a country at risk. In those times, the people who tend to pick up the voice are: 1) demagogues (Huey Long, Donald Trump, 2) Caudillos (Franco, Petain) and would be Caesars (Hitler, Putin).
Of course, in such times others can rise to save the day, and that's more often the case.
It's clear that the United States is a lot more down this disastrous path than Canada is, but the protests show that it isn't the case that everyone in Canada is thrilled with the path its been on since, really, 1945. The same forces are at work in nearly every Western democracy right now.
The solution?
That may be for true conservatives to offer. Finding uncompromised ones who haven't sold out partially to populist and demagogues is pretty tough in the US right now, however. Canada's politics are different, so perhaps they have a different path forward.
Footnotes
1. Anyone who is a dual citizen or who has Canadian relatives probably speant some time trying to explain Donald Trump and often being embarrased for the country by having to explain Trump.
At the same time, we also would occasionally get unsolicited emails and comments from Canadian friends who were big Trump fans, but had to keep their opinions more or less silent themselves, which is also embarassing as they would tend to assume that any American they knew probably held the same view. Indeed, the assumption that everyone you know personally holds the same views you do is probably a default human assumption.
2. Indeed, the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church's prohibition on clergymen marrying came about in order to prevent the priesthood from becoming an inherited position. After the seperation of the English Church from the Catholic Church in 1534 this was changed in in the UK and in the UK itself the priesthood did become somewhat of an inherited position.
