Its one of those times when you experience something so refreshing it forces you to see how deep your empty bucket is..Tomorrow I head back to insane Ontario from a more peaceful Nova Scotia. My son and I have been here over my reading break to visit my other son at the Coast Guard College in Cape Breton, and other family and friends around the the province. It's been like medicine..It's the disorientation that has shocked me the most. For myself ,and I think for many of us the past two years. has left us breathless and at our core, deeply dismayed. We walk around tired and dazed, a little twitchy, sure that any moment the hammer is going to fall again. Again, we and our kids will be barred from restaurants and churches by big yellow signs saying “you're not acceptable”. We will be called the worst of names by our prime minister and other socially conscious leaders. We will be treated like dirt, taking up space, for one simple reason: We chose to not put something into our bodies..Truth be told, I've found myself to be far less resilient than I thought I was. For two weeks after the riot police stomped their jackboots into the Ottawa streets, I couldn't watch any movies with guns or loud bangs. “To serve and protect” mean nothing to me anymore. My mouth is still agape. I still can't believe it all..I am a second-class citizen and I can't believe that my countrymen were — and still are — fine with what our leaders and “experts” did to all of us..The warmth I felt for my country has vanished..But then I'm sitting down, talking about the past two years at Sharon's dining table in a secluded bay far off the beaten track, and feasting on a meal of ham, mashed potatoes, lots of veggies and topped off with apple crisp..“They want to control everything,” I say. And Avery, her husband, says “You can't even catch a fish without them knowing.”.After lunch, Avery shows us his three-wheel ATV, his quad, his 1986 Crown Vic with only 100, 000 on it. He rifles through the pics of his daughter's wedding (which I've already seen anyway) for the good ones of his fish catch. We watch the tide slowly going out on this point of land completely untouched by tourism. Sharon sends us off with a bag of cookies..Down the road, past Kemptville, my son and I visit Linda and Jim, where Linda, an artist, presents us with beautiful painting of a hurt owl cradled in work-worn hands. We give her maple syrup from our trees at home. We talk about the Oxen community. We talk about the fact their street is lined with multiple Canada flags. We talk about what that means..Like a box of snapshots, the list goes on, these memories of what life was and should be. The hills of Cape Breton, and the Bras D'Or Lakes. Baxter's Harbour. The ferries to Newfoundland in West Sydney Harbour. Londonderry and forests that have been swept harshly by a recent hurricane, and the hydro workers still throttling chainsaws high up in their buckets along the streets. The second hand bookstore owner in Sydney that stayed open for us because we kept uncovering great finds in the back corners of his shop, and then when we were ready to head-off, just wanted to keep on talking with us about junior hockey..Then in this warm late-October gift of a fall day, I pause and watch my son, running along the Dominion Beach in Sydney, where the three of us have pretty much stripped down and plunged into the shock of the cold Atlantic. He's 18, my son, no longer gangly but running like Captain America on these Sydney sands. We visit the Coast Guard College, where he proudly shows us around, and we are reminded of the Coast Guard's proud history. He shows us how they do drill in the gym every morning. I marvel at his pride and resiliency in being back there. He's determined. And, as he and his peeps have done recently, in helping with the community cleanup following Hurricane Fiona. He is anxious to serve..I want to stay. It all is just what the doctor ordered..And it all has reminded me I have a choice to make in trying to move forward and find my feet again in our dystopian reality..I know I can continue to get mad, embroiled in what I see in the CBC or on Youtube. I can fear the whole world is coming crashing down on us. That the WEF and the paternalistic forces of globalism are at our door to stomp out democracy and usher in a tightly controlled environment and through enlightened edicts in order to transform us all into a different kind of both socially righteous and economically compliant species. To stomp us down with their billy sticks for everything that “feels violent”, even bouncy castles and shouts of “Freedom!”.We can go that route. We can keep on praying for a politician to save us from it. And we can continue being disoriented and traumatized by the mass virtue-signalling cackle of it all..Or we can do what the politicians and experts haven't wanted us to do for the past 30 months: Get outside, sit down across a kitchen table with other human beings, look them in the eye, and tell our stories..Totalitarians hate communities. They hate them because they can't control them. They seek to isolate people and make us fear each other. Why? Because then they alone can dictate what is reality..No matter what backgrounds we come from, when we come together unmediated, person to person, and enjoy coffee, Moosehead Beer, or King Cole Tea and Dunster's Donuts, we share our lived reality. Unbranded. Uncommodified. No lab coat or mask between us. As people..Not just headlines or case counts, or ideological positions..These are our neighbours. These are our touchstones. They see us and remind us we are not crazy, and that this is what's real, far from the pages of the soul-twisting CBC, the lies of the latest flags, the here-today-gone-tomorrow cliches, and the posturing debates of our dysfunctional parliament..We're all tired of confrontation and madness, and we want to hide away with a good book or the latest revealing COVID study. But we must resist that isolation, at all costs. We must hold on to each other..We must see our neighbours and our shared stories as our lifeblood and our sanity.
