Trudeau: “This Sucks”
The Prime Minister is attempting normal. But this isn’t normal.
I was pottering about the house yesterday in the early afternoon. CBC’s 24 hour news network was on the TV in the background. I had made some tea and toast and was allowing myself some idle time, swiping around aimlessly and reading things on my phone.
Suddenly, something cut through the soft murmur of the television. It pierced through my periphery attention span, and tugged me out of whatever I was looking at. It was Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. He was speaking to the Canadian people and emphasizing, annunciating the words, pausing dramatically — it’s what you say to someone when they can’t accept a difficult set of circumstances.
“This sucks.”
It’s something you say when there aren’t other words to be found to better express your sentiment, which is why it’s jarring to hear coming from the Prime Minister.
More to the point, we know this sucks. We’ve known it for a long time, deep in our bones. It’s at least part of what’s driving anti-mask protests, which, in reality, are protests about so much more. They’re protests against reality itself. Ludicrous and baseless assertions about medical science and infectious disease control crash up against wild demented tales of satanism and child sacrifice at these meetings.
Not that I’m excusing anti-mask protesters. The confused mish-mash of ideologies and beliefs they express hides their one point of coherency: they all just want to stir some contention up and be as obnoxious as possible about it. Like a child who is being difficult for the sake of being difficult. Work together and get through a pandemic? No, they can’t do that, of course, because Bill Gates is a pedophile!
Obviously.
But, yeah, our lives since the COVID-19 pandemic began have been a surreal, frustrating mess. People are tired of it. They have a name for it, Covid fatigue. This isn’t normal and Trudeau is giving Canadians a paint-by-the-numbers empathy routine, like we’re being asked to work through the weekend. That’s something that sucks.
What we’re dealing with it something more than that. A hyperized version of burnout — living under too many work and home demands, too often, for too long, until one has a breakdown.
And yet — we’ve all still been working to our usual capacities these past 8 months have we not? Meeting deadlines and being subject to performance reviews? Employers felt ashamed to demand too much from employees in the first few months of the pandemic but that mood shifted by the middle of the summer. The extra pay and bonuses started being clawed back.
We can’t afford to stay in a state of arrest forever, can we? The economy couldn’t hack it. But neither can the people. Not if their lives become a dull, monotonous routine, day barely distinguishable from each other. Trapped in homes with nothing but the unrelently demand of the workplace to stimulate us. Being tied to a non-stop barrage of tasks and work chores — things that are boring and tiring — just for you can afford to pay for the place your trapped in.
This doesn’t just really suck, the winter that stretches out ahead poses one of the greatest challenges many people will have face in their lifetimes. Empathetic messaging from our prime minister isn’t going to be enough. This sucks, yes, but what we need to know is how our government will help us get through to spring.
