After the protests and counter-protests in Huntsville and Bracebridge on September 20 [ and October 21], I was surprised by an image on social media.
The image was yet another sign saying “HELP THE CHILDREN” – a common slogan in last month’s protests. But it also read “STOP THE JABS”, an anti-vax message. This person, sharing their own sign, was one of the organizers prominently featured on YourTV Muskoka’s coverage of the Bracebridge protests.
Huntsville was no different – the person who hosted the Huntsville school walkout had previously run a book signing event calling the pandemic a “fraud”. And according to their Facebook, they are taking these actions because they want to “defund and destroy” our “corrupt” hospitals and schools.
We’ve already seen comments in local media like the Doppler declaring that these protest groups harbour hate, or ignore the real mental health problems faced by our youth.
But these messages also attack the integrity and professionalism of teachers, nurses, and doctors. Whether it is medical workers accused of delivering fake vaccines, or teachers now accused of indoctrinating youth, these attacks share a distrust in expertise. This distrust leaves a hole that can only be filled by misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Health and education require a basic foundation of trust – something that starts in our own community. Our friends and neighbours do not adopt sinister agendas when they go to work in the morning. Instead they use their hard-earned experience and education to deliver for us, by winning better outcomes for our families in healthcare and in school. We’ve also seen time and time again how they are willing to fight for better conditions in our public services, which benefit everyone.
This reality isn’t compatible with the world of conspiracy theorists.
So when I see signs that accuse teachers of being complicit in a plan to harm kids, I just have one thought to offer: Muskoka, we can do better than this for our workers.
Jeff Robertson
Huntsville, ON
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Vaccines are safe, simple and they work. It is all based on statistics of course so there may be an outlier data point anywhere but in general you ignore vaccines and best medical procedures at your peril.
Trouble is, with a virus, “your peril” becomes “everybody’s peril” and your failure to help with the situation puts others in a riskier position. We are a nearly free country in Canada so the choice is generally yours but consideration for others should be part of your decision process.
This idea that we cannot trust our doctors, teachers, scientists, elected officials, (the list goes on) is so destructive. Blind trust is one thing and being at least somewhat informed is generally a good idea. But the trust we are willing to put into one another’s education, expertise and best intentions is what keeps our world running in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed. What do we do without this trust? Fend for ourselves, doing absolutely everything for our own families, or very small communities? One could see certain idealized advantages to that, but the truth is that sharing the load is what has allowed us to make the societal progress we have.
Trusting others to teach our children frees up time for parents to contribute to the world in other ways; helping, healing, building, discovering, inventing….it also comes with the added benefit of combined knowledge. Children can learn a wide variety of things from a wide variety of perspectives. Compare this to the relatively narrow breadth of knowledge and experience a single person only has to ffer.
Trusting our doctors and our scientists is really the only sensible way when it comes to making medical decisions, solving problems or learning more about what’s important to us. A second opinion never hurts, but generally, these people are carrying (and carrying forward) vast amounts of knowledge which took many people before them centuries of experimentation, research and discovery to accumulate.
We’re lucky to live in a time and place where people are able to devote their lives to developing expertise. Lucky also that we can turn to them for the knowledge we need (and they to us when our specialties are the ones required). How some people can ignore the benefits of such a system and dismiss another’s knowledge without a second thought is beyond me.
Jeff, this is so well written. You speak to an unwritten victim in all of this. The health and education workers who chose their careers because they have a genuine desire to make people’s lives better. They’ve been accused of so many horrible things with very little evidence. It must be so frustrating for them.
I know a lot of people in both of these fields and I don’t know any of them that fit the mold of what these protesters are describing. I don’t know one teacher who is trying to indoctrinate any children, and I know a lot of them.
Thankfully, there are a lot more people that see the world the way you do as opposed to those who feel that all of these professionals are out to harm us.
There was a comment on here recently by Barry McCochiner that caught my attention.
He highlighted the disparity of numbers between the two protests. Hopefully that is a sign that our community sees the big picture and at the majority versus don’t buy into conspiracy theories.
Thank you for your thoughtful letter Jeff.
Jeff Robertson, well stated and a sane perspective. Thank you.