Pop 89: We Could Be the Country that Talked to Each Other

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

I spent too much time in front of the computer last night, scrolling for information about what’s happening in Ottawa. I admit I knew about the caravan, people from my own village have joined it, but I did not know the degree to which the presence of hundreds of truckers has added to an already pervasive climate of fear in Ottawa.

I know better. A quick scan of news media posts reveals a confirmation bias that everyone involved in the protest are dangerous, rude and unstable. I trust my friends who claim to have seen or “heard about” swastikas and confederate flags, but I question their sources. I know, because I was once one of those sources.

In April of 2001 I entered into the maelstrom of the G8 summit that the government, arrogantly and myopically, held in the heart of my town, Quebec City. Those of us working and living in the area were required to acquire passes to permit us to come and go from our own homes and places of work. And when the big boys came to town to cover the story, we were expected to relinquish our desks and studio.

I convinced one embedded reporter, a friend from my night job as a blues singer, that he might want me to be his guide. There’s charm in the narrow stone lanes running higgelty-piggelty throughout the old city, I told him, but they can also get you lost.

The second-last day of the summit the protests hit their peak. Walking to meet my friend for a coffee to prepare for the evening’s foray into the heart of the protest in the old city I felt an eerie sense of cognitive disconnect as I approached the cafe. People were sitting outside, laughing and smoking and sipping espressos, ebullient in the first warm day of Spring, while just two blocks away people were chanting, a cloud of tear gas hanging over them.

But I realized something else was making me uneasy. The parking lot on my right, usually empty on a Sunday, was now full. A phalanx of riot police, stood at attention, so still and silent I’d barely noticed them. They were decked out like Star Wars soldiers. They bore no markers of identification. (At what point in history were police no longer required to wear badges? I asked my friend when I sat down.)

Around sunset, the two of us made our way down a small side street in the upper town. He wanted to to the heart of the action where rowdy group of protesters were drumming and chanting, oblivious to the riot police slowly following us as we followed the them.

“Just so you know, we’re being funnelled in,” I said, pointing ahead of us. “There’s no escape route. This is a dead-end lane. It stops at a stone wall. I suggest we duck down here before that cop shoots his canister. There’s a staircase to base-ville behind that church.”

He wasn't quite sure he wanted to follow me. He’d never been tear-gassed before.

“Well, I have,” I said. “Salut and bonne chance!”

I can say now that I no longer work for any particular news agency that I saw the protesters as having legitimate concerns. Even though they knew that may not change the behaviours of corporate interests in bed with government, they could change the conversation to include the rest of us. They came out in droves. Grandmas pushed strollers up avenues, yogis meditated on the steps of the basilica, profs and students skipped classes.

The problem was, in the midst of the protest march (trivialized as a parade by Chrétien) a handful members of Black Flag upgraded it to a riot, setting fire to everything from street signs to couches to cars. And guess what made the news?

My profession did what it is mandated to do - garnered ratings by posting pictures of the exception to the rule. The fires and the fights and the threats and the cursing were all rewarded with attention from my profession, an institution increasingly centralized, increasingly dedicated to its own ideological certainty.

I am a reader. I read primary sources and long articles and personal eye-witness impact statements. I read because a media at the mercy of the image will always go for a confederate flag or a swastika. Will always capture the ranting loon over the reasoned (read: boring) voice. And, even more disturbing, will portray anyone who does not resemble them as white trash, low class or redneck.

I read about local people tired of the noise. I read about immigrant women bringing truckers food. I read about people sleeping in cars. I read about nurses and doctors told to remove their ID when leaving the hospital. I read about nurses married to truckers in the caravan. I read about rosary prayers and native drumming. I try to discern whether what I’m seeing is feelings posing as fact.

I read the words of people trying to express their frustration and despair and worry over when they will work again and what will be told to do next with our lives and our bodies. I have to remind myself that I prefer peace and calm over inflammatory language and smug certainty. I don’t have to agree or align myself with others to accept them for where they are at. I have to accept the uncomfortable ambiguity of the moment and the paradox of our lives.

Humanity at its most disconnected builds a platform or spoils for a rumble. Ranting and fighting gives us a hit like any other drug. Buying the lie that we need to compete to survive isn’t helping. Daily, new research in the fields of everything from forest floor ecology to the psychology of empathy to the transformative power of language reveals that co-operation is the key to survival.

Neither you nor I have the power to declare the concerns of others justifiable or invalid. Because their concerns are, and should be, OUR concerns. I don’t want my country to be one that can’t talk to each other. But if there is no room for all our fellow countrymen and women in the national dialogue then there is no national dialogue.