By Patrick La Roque
We’d been raking the last leaves from our yard and had moved to pulling out the few dead remnants left in our garden (tomatoes mostly), when Heloise ran up to us with an iPad in her hands: “Joe Biden has won!”.
I didn’t react with any real joy or relief; just a sort of workmanlike acknowledgement: good, that’s done then. Like a checkmark on a long list of todos. It was only hours later that my senses finally caught up to the opposite reality of those words: he was out. We still had a chance at normalcy and kindness.
Maybe.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau (yes, our current PM’s dad) famously said, during a meeting with Nixon in 1969:
“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt,".
Sleeping with an erratic and enraged animal has been mind numbing these past four years. Witnessing such a profound derangement of every norm we took for granted—on human and political scales—has maintained us in a constant, unrelenting state of unrest. It’s been economically and psychologically exhausting. And now, despite the outcome, we’re forced to witness just how close we are to a complete destruction of the world order, as authoritarian levers are, predictably, being pulled one by one: the claims of electoral fraud and vilifying of the press and media; the firing of top administration officials and military leaders, replaced by loyalists; the complicit cabal of talking heads spewing conspiracy theories night after night, feeding the fables and frenzy of the misinformed.
There is no courage, no humility, no decency. No sense of duty. Only the raging fear and cowardice of a beast facing its demise.
...
I did a quick calculation this week: it’s been 255 days since I set foot in Montreal. We mostly exist within a 1200m radius of our home, in the suburbs. Sure we drive further on occasion—Jacob works at the supermarket twice a week—but beyond this, the circle is rarely broken. The circle defines our mind space now.
In this year of dwindling horizons, I’m desperate for a ruffling of wind in our sail.
For new and old shores to appear;
for sacred illuminated lands;
for hope,
injected in poisoned bloodstreams.
