Making Sense of Stuff During Ontario’s 2022 Pseudo-Lockdown

My brain’s been mush all week and it’s barely been half a day since Ontario’s latest step in the Pandemic Containment Rumba started.

Coping right now looks like me trying to find solid answers to hold onto. Very few of them are making it through my cognitive filter right now, so the best I can do is come up with statements of what I believe to be true.

This is the work, and the way I know it’s the work that needs doing is that my resistance is acting up like a motherfucker. Every time I get traction on something, my brain notices a mess that needs cleaning, remembers a call I need to make, or suddenly decides that it’s lunchtime for the fifth time that morning.

So here goes…the generalized, uncited, disordered, non-expert co-signed stuff that I feel I can say for sure right now. This is completely my interpretation and opinion, because that’s all I can offer at any given time anyway.

Take what works for you, leave the rest. I’m not interested in arguing with you one way or another, but I’ve no way of stopping you from saying what you want to say in the comments, if anything. I’m not likely to engage because ultimately, this is just idea vomit on my part: if you really want to get your hands in it, that’s on you.

Here’s what I’ve sorted so far:

• In this province, possibly the country, and definitely my city, we’re led by what the French call “les Incompetents”. There’s no one, NO ONE, in leadership who hasn’t dropped the ball of taking care of the population well during this crisis in a big way.
• The leadership is riding the crests and valleys of the times just the same as we are. We can’t look to them for everything. They really don’t know what’s coming next.
• The voters put them there, so we’ve ultimately ourselves to blame.
• In Ontario, we get a chance to rectify that mistake this year on both the provincial and city levels. We should act accordingly.
• “We” is a relative term. Who is “we” exactly? More to the point, who isn’t we?
• Social media platforms and algorithms feeding back the same type of stuff to us have weaponized us against each other. This has been going on since way before 2020, but when the Pandemic put most of us in our homes two years ago, I just knew fuckery would ensue with disinformation and radicalization. No surprise.