We all share the same cauldron inescapably

 

We can all see and feel and viscerally experience storm clouds on the horizon.

Nevertheless, those storm clouds are somewhat darker and more ominous that many in positions of power and responsibility would, perhaps could, have anticipated. The capacity to anticipate and prepare for what’s coming, within the institutional structures, the governments, the civil services, and the so-called “above-ground” culture is, or maybe already has been, outstripped by the digital revolution. Using the United States as one model, it seems that the arms and legs of governance, the Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court, and the battalions of civic bodies, are all in a frantic state attempting to keep their “hands” on the tiller of what has been considered public order for centuries while the winds threaten to capsize the ship of state.

The pandemic is mutating and spreading faster than our “sensors” can detect, collect samples, examine those samples in certified labs, and then disseminate the appropriate information, including health care guidelines for schools, businesses, and governments to manage the level of threat. This dynamic is rolling out across the globe, within various governmental structures, ideologies, economies and national security establishments. Ironically, while we are being bombarded by 24-7-365 news and public information, in real time, on devices we carry in our hands and often have plugged into our ears, the originators of much of that information are struggling to gather, filter and spread the amount, and the severity of the information to a multitude of audiences.

A pandemic, a recession, an income-poverty gap, a suffocating planet, a revolution in technology as well as a heightened consciousness of the abuses of power and the spiking of violence at the street level, the hate crime index, the drug dealing index, the cyber-criminal index, and even the corporate ethical responsibility index….these are all being conflated in very different ways depending on the people doing the curating, the location of their work and the potential impact on  their friends and enemies. We may have democratized access to information and the capacity to enter into the “public square” through twitter, Instagram etc. At the same time, we have literally and metaphorically blocked many of the previously dependable channels for the flow of both information, goods and geopolitical ambitions and plans. Our individual capacity to digest information is on overload, as the rush of details swamps our filtering processes.

Consumer consumption, (that’s what consumers do!) is higher than ever, while manufacturing of many of those consumer goods has been “out-sourced” by producers bent on achieving maximum profit at minimum cost. So instead of the Dickensian sweat shops, in the west, we have exported those deplorable working conditions to nations prepared to permit such abuse, in the name of corporate and investor profit. Instead of a world order that emerged following the second world war, we have the rise of previously “quiet” nations like Russia and China and India and Brazil all of which appear to be on a “fast-track” to achieving a new degree of status and stature depending on the specifically selected levers and theatres each has chosen to engage. Distribution and shipping, the supply chain, coping as we all are with pandemic incursions into existing labour and also into potential new hires, complicate and frustrate consumers. Expectations, on the street and family level, have been disappointed.

Prices for food, gas, pharmaceuticals, and all platforms for entertainment are rocketing through the what was considered tolerable. This morning in Canada, I paid $1.58 for a litre of gas….multiply that by 4 in order to approximate a gallon ($6.32 Canadian) and there is literally no single person or family not being heavily impacted by these prices. Public reports of price spikes on food, housing, transportation and normal living expenses abound,

The mandates for masks and vaccines,  absolutely necessary public health preventatives, have been unevenly tolerated for months, along with the public policy encouragements/urgings/mandates for vaccines….and the nerves of the people of the world are fraying.

Signs of this fraying are on the streets in Ottawa, in the streets of Kyiv, on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, and spreading to other locations in acts of defiance, anger, revenge and rebellion that are not so pale imitations of the January 6^th 2021 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Signs of the fraying… and we all have to take ownership of this fraying, we are all frazzled, anxious, a little frightened, and more than a little unnerved….are everywhere.

Drivers passing on double lines, and on hills and on curves, impatience with government leaders even in places, like Canada, where protests have historically been peaceful (is that another gift of the indigenous people of our country?) and then there is the ‘other side’ whereby the clerks in the supermarkets take extra time and pay extra attention to “how are you today?” questions, underlining the shirts that ask customers to “be kind” and “be patient”…

Just the existence of such shirts is a tell-tale sign as to where and how we are living….and as one cashier put it last week, “When someone asks, ‘What’s new?’ I want to ask them what rock they just came out from under.” For her the only ‘new thing’ is a proverbial “same-old” pandemic and rising prices, and more pandemic and more rising prices…with no voice or agency to make a difference in either, in the big picture.

“In the big picture,” where the “big” decisions are taken, (like mandates and vaccine passports, and masking for school students)…where most ordinary people do not participate. So, for the very first time in a very long time, if ever, ordinary people are moved to get off the couch, out of the kitchen and off those bar stools, and go out into the public town halls and, even for a small minority, to drive a tractor-trailer 3000 miles to plug the streets of Ottawa, “until all mandates are lifted”. The blindness and rage of such a manifesto, however, is that all or most of those mandates are designed and imposed by provincial authorities. Those regarding border crossing truckers from the U.S. do come from Ottawa, and they match similar mandates from Washington.

Immediacy, and something called efficacy, a measure of what makes sense because it “works” underlies much of the public protests. Perceptions, stirred by latent frustration, anger, fear and a loss of hope and optimism are prompts to action by many who had never before even carried a picket sign. Incongruities, like rules and regulations that appear to make little to no sense to an audience, designed and delivered by health care officials, “on the fly” using their best data at the moment, all of it migrating on the back of a mutating virus for which we are all unprepared offer a public movie script of the classic collision of incompatible forces.

Immediate and “free” access to digital devices offers a handy valve through which to vent and to organize like-minded others who seek to exert their “opinion” forcefully, immediately and threateningly. The 90% of truckers who have compliantly received vaccinations and simply try to go about their daily routines are not adequately or ethically represented by the less than 10% of their peers making all the noise and air, and private space and street “pollution” called a “siege” by the Ontario premier in declaring a state of emergency.

So far, the violence in Ontario has been restricted to “things” and spaces and intimidation of citizens who have nothing to do with the protests. And that has been and continues to be unnerving. Attempting to meet with the Governor General, who, according to their manifesto, is envisioned as ruling with a public committee of the protesters, while also embarrassing the prime minister and his government are hardly a path to relief from all mandates. Nevertheless, the “siege” continues, at last report, on the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor and Detroit, in  spite of a court-ordered injunction to disband. The protests have been unnerving to those ordinary people who continue to grant grace to scientists and doctors and the public figures who echo their best advice. Rather than focussing on the irritant of “lost freedom” as the protesters are fixated on, the rest of us are trying to stay safe physically and mentally, as the evidence is gathered, lab-tested, and the public figures attempt to balance what they think/conceive/imagine the public can and will tolerate as the pandemic lingers.

Balancing public “health” in the narrow sense of whether or not individuals are “infected” with the broader “public health” of the body politic in the first pandemic of this magnitude, both in spread and lethality, in a century, is and will continue to be a challenge for the best minds and the most articulate and sensitive public leaders. And while that responsibility rests on the public figures, ordinary people are left digesting the perceived success or failure of those political decisions. While children are left wondering if they will be attempting to learn remotely or in a classroom, the body politic has been rendered an epic-sized classroom, with distant learning coming through the television and personal screens. Returning to being a “student” as the “professors” are also trying to keep up with the evolving curriculum, filtering their shifting date through the lens of their learning and best practices, was not a prospect many who already may have had negative experiences with formal school in their youth envisioned or willingly accepted.

Pile those “school-room” images on top of images of distrust and ennui fostered and nurtured by an American president and administration determined to “deconstruct the state itself” and the North American continent is being transformed from a relatively stable, predictable normality to something verging on not merely chaos, but anarchy. And, as the civil servant of a small city in Ontario observed, ‘the small minority of pickle-ball enthusiasts is making far more noise in demanding facilities than their numbers warrant.’ The proverbial ‘tail’ in numbers of protesters has clearly taken control of the ‘dog’ in making far more noise and disruption than either their numbers or the validity of their anger warrant.

We see this kind of imbalance every day on every newscast, depending on the ‘newsworthiness’ of the event. Loud trump-supporting women in the Republican party have garnered far more media attention than their numbers and the validity of their argument warrant. The former president, himself, garnered far more media attention than his political standing and positions taken warranted, especially given his iconoclastic, insurrectionistic and even anarchistic motivations. And those motivations and his vacuity were both on full display at the very beginning of his escalator ride in trump tower. Cozying with dictators merely satirized the predictable and reliable public role and persona of American presidents, and the underlying motive of insulting the ‘establishment’ not only in personal terms but also in political action terms, lay then, and continues to lie at the heart of the former president’s modus operandi.

Manipulating public opinion, through whatever platforms are available both to disseminate propaganda and to vacuum cash from unsuspecting and innocent and even ignorant and willing ‘victims’ was and continues to be a national “scam” so far escaping the claws and the grasp of the American legal/political protections. And manipulating public opinion through the same platforms has birthed the “freedom convoy” and, until the assets were frozen, funded the protests.

Tragically, as the freedom convoys interrupt public confidence and supply chain flows, embarrassing public figures in North America and elsewhere, on the geo-political scale, Putin amasses hundreds of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders. Combining the military threats with the threats to public safety and security, is to beg the question about whether the tail and the dog have not reversed traditional roles. Is the tail now in charge of the public square? Is protest, as a vehicle of political persuasion and control, the new war theatre, supplemented by the digital platforms for cyber warfare? Anne Applebaum wrote, several months ago, in The Atlantic, “The bad guys are winning.”

Disaffected truckers, angry at mask and vaccine mandates could pass as the tail wagging the dog in the North American context. Whereas Putin and Ji Xin Ping dominating the world stage, solid in their opposition to NATO, constitute a formidable axis, in a potential conflict in more than one conflict zone, (think Ukraine, Belarus, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and potentially the Balkans). Are Iran and North Korea to be considered allies of their’s? And, if bullying and throwing inordinate weight around to get one’s way is the model for the trucker insurrectionists, they have mega-models in trump, Putin, Ji Xin Ping and Kim Jung Un. Cyber currency, as well as digital platforms are among the new weapons for all those opposed to domestic and world order.

And the sad fact is that the mind set of the iconoclasts, the anarchists, and the insurrectionists is to “damn the consequences” while the mind set of the Democrats, and the Liberals in Canada, the Conservatives in Great Britain, Macron’s party in France and Germany’s Bundestag are all conditioned to attempt to resolve differences through negotiations and the applications of the law. In the cliché vernacular, that is like taking a machete to a missile fight. The winners and losers are predictable from the beginning.

Ontario Premier Ford has attempted to find a middle path, by declaring a state of emergency, supplemented with legislation that would make those who defy the law subject to substantial fines of $100,000 and jail terms of one year. Will that be enough to neutralize the siege in both Ottawa and on the Ambassador Bridge? Time alone will tell.

Is Ford’s siege a parallel push-back to the imposition of serious sanctions on Putin now, before the first shots are fired inside Ukraine?

Given that the Ontario story was the lead story on the BBC World News last night, it is inescapable that the information revolution makes the latest moves on any continent immediately accessible to the whole world.

Neither the conflicts nor the issues themselves will be contained in any specific theatre. And we are all imperiled on the horns of the worst and most heinous behaviours everywhere.

Do we have the requisite power and will to counteract whatever is coming?