CommentsCOMMENTARY - Sometimes reality hurts so much that it helps to escape into fantasy.
But the problem with fantasy is that, unless you choose to live life in total isolation, as facts evolve you have to continually rebuild your fantasy.
The saddest people in the world have to be those who lack self-worth and have turned their lives – hopes, fears and fortunes – over to charismatic leaders.
Thirty years ago, after their world imploded due to the ethical malfeasances of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, the religious right went after the makers of the film The Last Temptation of Christ as a ploy to regenerate cashflow from the faithful.
Today, the separation of money and their minds has spread to other wannabes, all with online screeds to scare their followers into giving more and more to allow them to live in luxury and keep extending their reach.
Today, this has become a mainstream problem with these beneficiaries magnifying people’s sense of not being able to control their own lives to oppose mask mandates and vaccinations, equality for others and universal healthcare.
Today, social media acts as an echo chamber for people who advocate threats of violence against those who oppose their worldview. In other words, throw tantrums like spoiled children. And because they are not called out, assume they can continue to misbehave with impunity.
Today, the real challenge is how to handle those cock-eyed crazies who keep scuttling out from behind Fox News crackpots like cockroaches. How to zap their brains back to some kind of reality, vacuum them up, or come to some other accommodation.
Today, there is the allure of attracting press coverage, their interlude of fame, however fleeting and however wrapped around in outright lies.
Which is how a discredited wingnut and conspiracy theorist succeeded in mobilizing a couple of big-rig driving fanatics to put together the Freedom Convoy, a movement that has little to do with the concerns of Canadian truckers, 90% of whom are vaccinated.
And everything to do with the virulent racism, hate and violence spawned and fertilized by the ex-President who-shall-not-be-named.
Which makes it all the more credible that their financial support is predominantly funded by shadowy American, and possibly Russian, anarchy-fomenting fringe groups, to the point that GoFundMe froze the account.
And now the conservative blogosphere has seized the opportunity to further stoke fears and build on everybody’s frustration with the never-ending pandemic restrictions, driving those who feel less and less in control of their own lives into striking out, hurting others.
It hasn’t helped that there was a lack of appropriate preparation and response by local authorities – who in Ottawa would believe some of their fellow Canadians (in a convoy that started with, not 50,000 trucks over 70 kilometers but 17 full tractor-trailers, 104 tractors without trailers and a few hundred passenger vehicles, swelling on its arrival to between one and two thousand vehicles) would act like MAGA maniacs – allowing the narrative to spin out of their control.
BTW, the record was 480 vehicles across 7.5 kilometers in Egypt in November of 2020.
The Convoy leaders represent nobody but their own self-interest and self-aggrandizement – frat-boy parties, desecrating public monuments, threatening the safety of law-abiding residents along the way and in Ottawa, disrupting commerce – and attracting coverage by the world press chasing the next viral social media meme.
Echo chambers that further feed their egos.
Claiming vaccine mandates for truckers were contributing to supply chain disruptions and fueling inflation led directly to the closure of border crossings which actually did disrupt the economy north of the border… and made international heroes of those causing disruption.
More visuals.
This promptly encouraged other disaffected radicals, first in France and now in California, to emulate their law-breaking demonstrations.
This behavior is not legitimate political discourse. This is not even civil disobedience. It is the posturing of spoiled children magnified by an irresponsible out-of-control reactionary media chasing clicks.
That a protest spawned from such small beginnings should have such an exponentially huge effect is terrifying. What does this model portend for the future health and prosperity?
If you agree this type of behavior is not acceptable, you are living in the real world.
If you think the Ottawa police and politicians were in denial, living in a fantasy by ignoring the threat of the approaching Convoy, you are living in the real world.
Unfortunately, unless you and others are willing to take action to protect that real world, you will become marginalized, become a minority in a society built on memes, not reality.
But to take action, you have to first recognize that reality and acknowledge what is going on.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)