FIRST FREEDOMS PODCAST
Let Freedom Roll: Freedom Focus with Barry W. Bussey
We should not be surprised that it is the Canadian truckers who finally said enough is enough. These are our modern-day drawers of water and hewers of wood whose backs were pushed up against the wall. They ensure that when we go to the grocery store – or the hardware store, or anywhere else for that matter – the shelves are full. Yet most of us have no idea what goes on behind the scenes: when we pick up that package of fresh spinach, we usually give no thought to the trucker who left his home one early morning, kissing his precious children goodbye as they slept. He climbed aboard his rig that was topped up with fuel and supplies the night before. The coming light of dawn shone upon his rig as he rolled up to the American border. Many solitary kilometers lay ahead of him. For the next five days he would travel to Monterey County, California, where he would pick up a load of freshly picked spinach bound for the grocery stores of the greater Toronto area.
He is, in fact, one of scores of trucks every week that carry only spinach. He is but one in a complex maze that makes our economy run.
It is a complicated business: his reefer must be clean and at the proper temperature to carry the spinach back during the five-day return journey to Toronto. Timing and fuel prices are everything. He must ensure he has the right documentation for his trip and the handling of the cargo, along with the proper authorizations necessary to cross the border. There is little to no room for error.
The spinach drivers represent only a small number of the truckers on our roads. Nearly every aspect of our lives is dependent on their labour. When we reach for that spinach, it did not just come there by happenstance. Fresh spinach in January in a Toronto grocery store is a modern-day miracle. It represents thousands of people engaged in the fresh produce trade that makes it possible for average Canadians to live far above the lifestyle of the richest European monarchs only a hundred years ago. As a society, we are so privileged that we have lost all comprehension of just how good we have it.
The vaccine crisis brought by the Ottawa bureaucrats, led by the most polarizing Prime Minister that has ever sat in the PMO, has unleashed a catastrophic blow to our finely tuned economic miracle that is built on the backs of the tens of thousands of truckers who deliver our spinach, our building materials, our automotive parts, our medical supplies, and everything else that we buy or use on a daily basis. These men and women who draw our water and hew our wood are now being chastised, and labelled as terrorists by the same political operatives who created the problem in the first place.
The Prime Minister’s subsidized press has, of course, condemned the truckers whose resistance has now turned to one of the most dramatic protests of Canadian history. These truckers are being dismissed in the mainstream media for daring to demand accountability from a government that has raided the financial storehouse of our grandchildren and demolished the economic miracle that once was a prosperous Canada.
We are now at a pivotal point where Canadians have to choose whether to pursue freedom, or be subject to a dictatorial regime that demands control of our very own bodies.
On Twitter I saw this comment from Andy Lee, whose twitter handle is @Hannah_Bananaz:
This is not just about truckers.
This is about our parents who died trapped alone in nursing homes. This is about children who have never played with other children. This is about lost lives and livelihoods.
This is for them, and more.
This is for justice.
Indeed, the rolling of the trucks across Canada symbolizes the people’s frustration with draconian and seemingly unending measures inflicted on Canadians. It is not a convoy of or for the unvaccinated but a convoy of overburdened Canadians, weary to the breaking point. And yet, after two years of fear and division, the convoy represents more than frustration: it is about hope, unity, and courage.
People across the country are lining the highways and the overpasses, preparing sandwiches, waving flags, showing support to the truckers who openly challenge the government and media narrative.
Yet, not all Canadians understand the fuss. Perhaps the critical ones are those who have not felt the pain of the government restrictions. Some people, after all, have actually profited over the last two years. Without personal loss they seem to have trouble empathizing with those who lost jobs, or whose income was interrupted because they unexpectedly had to look after children sent home from school; who saw businesses crumble that took generations to build; who were unable to worship at church; who were not permitted to travel to see their families because they were denied a seat on a plane, train or ferry; who, despite the evolving science that confirms the inefficacy of the vaccines, were branded by the Prime Minister as racist, misogynist, and anti-science as he wondered if we should “tolerate these people.”
Well, “these people” and their allies are on their way to Ottawa. They are joined by a huge gathering of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. These are people who have, deep within them, a burning desire for truth and freedom. They are tired of the empty platitudes of the political suits walking the halls of Parliament; they are tired of the Ottawa toadies issuing edicts from behind their laptops; they are tired of the judges that refuse to respect the rights of “these people” as contained in the written and unwritten constitutional principles of our legal heritage of freedom.
There is growing, in this country and on our North American continent, a sense of admiration and respect for those who are willing to speak truth to power, whether political or pharmaceutical. Hearts of gratitude are turned to those men and women in their truck convoys, those drawers of water and hewers of wood that form our economic backbone. This massive truck convoy is rolling toward Ottawa and changing the tide of perpetual fear and “othering” that has caused such division in our country. Never in the field of Canadian politics was so much owed by so many to so few.
Our hearts go out to these truck drivers for their courage in confronting government tyranny. Like the Ottawa river, the convoy keeps rolling along. Let it roll. We could not stop it if we wished. The Prime Minister cannot stop it. No one can stop it. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days without the Prime Minister and his Ottawa minions who have lost their way. Let it roll. Let truth and freedom roll.
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