Ponder the "Freedom Convoy" of Canadian truckers that has clogged up Ottawa. Ponder its original intent - to protest vaccine mandates (I stress: mandates, not vaccination itself - I’m pro-vax, anti-mandate) in a population that's already 90% vaccinated. Ponder its popularity among the pro-liberty set.
Now ponder the reaction from the government and from the Left (but I repeat myself). Rare bits of misbehavior are magnified, sinister association with "alt-right" is being talked up, and angry outrage at the temerity of this riff-raff is being stoked.
Oh, and the government is basically telling them "we're not going to let you tell us what to do."
While government does need to balance the spectrum of citizens' needs and wants in setting policy, government is supposed to be responsive to citizens, rather than reactionary and contrarian. Yet, the latter is what we see all the time now, when constituencies that aren't of the favored sort speak up against government excess and maltreatment.
What is it the truckers are asking for? To be left alone in their toil - to be allowed the bodily autonomy that is deemed sacrosanct when it comes to certain other matters, but is considered a sociopathic and borderline-traitorous attitude when it comes to COVID.
Yet, despite growing evidence that the vaccinated can transmit COVID as easily as the unvaxxed, and that lockdowns have provided only marginal reductions in health outcomes while imposing massive (and not even fully-reckoned) adverse effects on society (we may never know how many avoidable deaths the lockdowns caused), our leaders continue their single-minded duopoly of mask-and-vaxx mandates. Air travel passenger are still being required to mask up, upon penalty of arrest and no-fly exile, despite evidence that good cabin filtration/circulation, not masks, is the real remedy against transmission.
A generation of children is suffering substantial harm from remote learning and perma-mask mandates, despite COVID being far less risk to them than the common flu, but every protest against these mandates is being treated as a terrorist act rather than as the exasperation of rightfully concerned parents.
We all know politicians hate admitting error, but here we are talking about evolving and growing knowledge more than incorrect decisions, so it should be easier for them to say "we can move past mandates, based on current best knowledge, vaccination rates, and acquired immunity." The pandemic’s rapid onset left many guessing as to best practices, and early on, an abundance of caution was warranted. As knowledge improved, some ideas, such as wiping down your groceries, were abandoned. But, we’ve apparently hit a wall, where politicians want to be proven right more than they want to do the right thing.
It's an unforgivable arrogance. Made even clearer by their own mask hypocrisy. Just these past couple weeks, we witnessed CA governor Gavin Newsom and LA mayor Eric Garcetti flaunting their own mask rules at the Rams-49ers playoff game (a game they watched from a luxury box, of course), and "I'm the real governor" Stacy Abrams posing maskless in front of a horde of masked schoolchildren (need I even mention the relative risk factors here?).
Garcetti, when called out, risibly asserted that he 'held his breath.'
Yeah, and Bill didn’t inhale.
When do the politicians start to listen to the people they supposedly serve?
Moreover, when do the people who reflexively pull the voting levers for "their" team start taking power back from the political machines that decide the starting lineups for those teams, and whose anointed electees dismiss the rights of the people so casually? It is only the threat of electoral loss that induces such to actually listen.