Livid

Covid Era Stories #16 – by Christina S.

To this day I am livid.

Tell me about grasping a hot coal¹. Tell me about turning the other cheek. I am well aware that my rage hurts me and no one else. I have made attempts to process these fiery feelings - the clenching contractions, the flushing heat, and even the deep-seated fear that underlies it all. But I remain a wounded animal, raw and vicious.

I’ve played both sides of the social game. I have tried to win minds, and I have cowered and choked on unspoken words. I’ve been gutted by the voices of friends, dripping with scorn as they lectured me with their narrative-approved pseudo-science.

I could not show my papers, so I could not gather together with my fellow humans in the hubs of urban life. I could not board planes or trains. My Prime Minister called me racist, misogynist, anti-science. When protestors embraced freedom in my nation’s capital, I stayed home from work, watching live-streams on split-screen for weeks on end. I danced my ass off at protests, side-by-side with wizened women from Eastern-Bloc backgrounds. But in February 2022, the trucks rolled home from Ottawa, undercut by cynical and unconstitutional lawfare, and my fury multiplied. I considered undertaking a hunger strike in protest against the passports. But reading the room, I doubted anyone would care.

I kept my job in Vancouver but I fled to the mountains. I moved far up into the woods, and dealt with the long commute. I hiked and snowshoed and backpacked with furious intensity. I listened to the cackling owl-song, and watched the towhees hop, and felt the fog sidle up to the trees, but could not escape the presence of the bustling, oblivious, and hostile city at my back.

I am incredibly lucky. I was not injured, and I did not lose any loved ones. Instead the pain is in the constant, caustic pressure of consequences. Is my Dad’s escalating dementia and fragility downstream of his jab? What about the turbo brain cancer in my colleague’s sister? The miscarriages murmuring through the grapevine? The breast cancer here, the colitis flares there? The persistent, months-long cough in so many of my friends? This pain is amplified by the realization that my society would rather undermine these questions than answer them.

I hope to forgive it all. I hope to forgive the friend who stays silent but wants me to speak out. The government that froze bank accounts. The police on horseback who trampled protesters. The few remaining hospitals that still won’t give an organ transplant to the Covid un-vaxxed. The judges who threw legal principles to the wind and accepted ‘expert opinion’ as gospel. The health agencies that failed to properly screen the injections. The governments that quickly unpublished their inconvenient data dashboards². The public health officials who made me a second-class citizen with their dulcet-toned propaganda, and withheld vaccine exemptions in even the most dire of medical cases. The media who lied - about origins, about mortality, about transmission, about efficacy, and about the good, honest citizens who stood up against scientism and tyranny. I want to relinquish my anger towards all of these entities, I want to release my fear.

For a brief period in early 2022, the Canadian flag filled me with pride. But nothing in the years since has given me any affection for my home country. These days, folks fly the flag as a display of their “Elbows Up”³ anti-Trump sentiment. But compared to the “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” that is celebrated to our South, the Canadian “Peace, Order and Good Government” now rings dystopian in my ears.

And yet I am grateful. The pandemic woke me up. It made values and principles real to me as they had never been before. It taught me to look for integrity, and to aspire to it. It taught me better critical thinking. It helped me grow more backbone. It helped me understand the foundational importance of family. It taught me to be my own doctor first. And it sure as hell taught me who my friends are.

My rage is not all-consuming. My life now is rich and deep and broad in ways I could not have imagined before 2019. But I must remain honest about the feelings that persist, and about my ferocious grasping after a reckoning. They may be with me for decades to come.

1. The full quote, attributed to the Buddha, is “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

2. For instance, the Alberta government quickly disappeared one of their dashboard graphs when it began showing a high incidence of infections right after vaccination.

3. Popularized by Mike Myers, and inspired by hockey legend Gordie Howe, “Elbows Up” is a rallying cry of Canadian nationalism and defiance against perceived American threats such as tariffs and 51st state rhetoric.