There will be a thousand wounds to heal after this pandemic. In families, in circles of friends and in society. I don’t know how we’re going to get over it, honestly.
Posted at 7:31 p.m.
I’m old enough to remember the 1995 referendum. The Yes had lost a few hairs.
And the next day, well the next day was Halloween.
I’m kidding, but you know what I mean: life went on. There were clashes, mostly political and metaphorical. Grinding of teeth. Probably brothers-in-law who haven’t spoken to each other for a while.
But I don’t remember, post-1995, heartbreaks similar to those we are currently experiencing, I don’t remember scars so vast and so deep, affecting so many people. We were used to it, maybe: the Quebec-Canada tug of war, we had been living it for decades. We used to.
The pandemic is a different beast.
First, and perhaps foremost, is social media, which exposes us to the lives – and ideas – of others, hundreds, thousands more. Their excesses, their whims, their rage.
In 1995, unless you called your distant cousin whom you had lost sight of to ask him which side he was going to vote on, you had no idea if he was Yes or No…
With this pandemic, we know that this distant cousin thinks the pandemic is a flu, that Big Pharma sells vaccines that are useless, that those who believe in this whole circus are sheep, that our leaders deserve the gallows…
Yes, the pandemic is a different beast. Mind you, maybe the referendum debates would have been more heated (oops) if Facebook had existed in 1995.
One day this pandemic will end. This virus which has killed thousands of Quebecers will eventually become endemic. As the Spanish Flu became endemic, a much less deadly nuisance a century later than it was in its original form…
The pandemic will end, but the gap, I fear, will never close. The rifts between us will remain, I suspect they will last for a long time. I don’t know how we’re going to reconcile all these beautiful people who don’t want to listen to each other.
I include myself in the lot. Politically, I am quite ready to listen to all sorts of points of view. Federalist, sovereignist, social democrat, right-of-center: I don’t care. But I’m not ready to listen to someone who tells me that “the vaccine doesn’t work” because it “doesn’t prevent transmission”: that’s not it, the point, the point is that without vaccines, our hospitals would have become a field of ruins.
I don’t see any bridge that can bridge that gap, the one that separates reality from parallel realities, facts from alternative facts. Dialogue? I don’t see any space for dialogue with people who believe the Earth is flat, either. And who tell me that I sow division because I say that the Earth is round.
Discussing the end of the vaccine passport? Sure. About the eventual end of mask-wearing? OKAY. On the relevance of leaving McDonald’s open while the Jonquière pastry chef has to close… Obviously. But, no, there is no dialogue possible if you tell me that the mask can poison your children and that you, your immune system is strong, strong, strong like the Hulk, to the point of not needing vaccines, never…
Do you know what will remain, also, what will last?
Misinformation.
We have heard it, the misinformed discourse, in recent months: it is not a pandemic, it is a “plandemic”; the virus is no more inconvenient than the flu; the vaccine does not work; the vaccine is dangerous; the vaccine kills, but the media (all media) and the states (all states) hide it…
People believe these follies, hard as iron.
I’m not even talking about the corollary of these false beliefs, a rhetoric of tribal warfare with death threats now being handed out like candy, promises of a Nuremberg 2.0 trial for traitors: elected leaders, public health doctors, journalists…
I’m just talking about the facts, the basic facts. We have discovered with this pandemic that thousands of our fellow citizens believe in falsehoods that wear the guise of truth, created by seductive disinfo machines.
A huge audience has been created since March 2020 for these myths where everything is simple, where nuance, uncertainty and the gray area do not exist. And that will be the great legacy of this pandemic. A universe where false equivalences are queens, where you can carve out made-to-measure facts.
This pandemic will eventually end. But the cogs of misinformation will keep turning. Even stronger. Too profitable, financially and politically. It generates cash, it arouses militant inspirations. We are going to invent other facts to mobilize with angry clicks people who will have been used during this pandemic to put the media on the same footing as a stranger on YouTube who seems to know his business…
I’m sure there will always be more rational people, more people who believe in proven, established facts. I’m sure there’s a huge market for it. As proof: the tremendous news on the good financial health of The Press, supported by thousands of donors (thank you!), for example. The same is noted at Duty.
It is my only hope: we are less noisy, but we are more numerous.