CHARBONNEAU – Freedom convoyers have replaced hippies as protestors
(Image: Stuart Hampton, Pixabay.com)
IT USED TO BE that hippies took to the streets with grievances. Now it’s freedom convoyers.
The nature of hippies’ complaints were easy to identify. Freedom convoyers not so much.
The Conservative establishment had no trouble making fun of the hippies with their flowers and beads.
Al Capp, creator of the cartoon strip Li’l Abner, had little sympathy for student protesters. His strip ran for 43 years until 1977. He didn’t hide his disdain for protesters. One panel of the strip featured slovenly protestors carrying signs that read: Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything (SWINE).
Capp never missed an occasion to ridicule what he perceived as the loutish loafers. In the ’60s, he had a famous confrontation with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where he introduced himself as “that dreadful Neanderthal fascist.”
As for me, I thought that hippies had legitimate concerns. In the 1960s, they protested against social injustice, poverty, the unfair treatment of African American citizens, lack of freedom of speech, corporate corruption and the Vietnam War.
Now it’s progressives that find freedom convoyers to be out-of-touch with reality. The source of grievances can often be found in QAnon with fabricated claims.
In Kamloops, they show up on the highway with large Canadian flags with imported American sensibilities of allegiance to the flag. They are the ones who seem wildly indignant.
It’s hard to pin a label on them.
I use “freedom convoyers” because they usually demonstrate against perceived threats to their freedom not to be vaccinated and the support of convoys to overthrow governments if necessary.
Most recently, freedom convoyers protested the screening of a documentary about the career of provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.
Dr. Bonnie Henry has been a target of freedom convoyers for her defence of public health, including mandated vaccinations. In the warped minds of freedom convoyers, the right to spread disease trumps public health.
The organiser of the film in Victoria began to get nervous when she heard that freedom convoyers were coming from Vancouver and it looked like trouble.
“We’d been getting some emails, trying to educate us,” said festival director Kathy Kay. “And I guess about 2 or 3 p.m. Thursday, we got a call from somebody who said there were 30 people coming over from Vancouver. That’s when we thought something was going to happen.”
The director’s suspicions were confirmed when about 50 demonstrators slowed up and tried to block the entrance. A line of police officers guarded the theatre entrance. At the end of the film, volunteers and the audience were escorted from the theatre by police as protesters heckled film-goers as they left the building.
While freedom convoyers support conservative causes, Conservatives shy away from supporting them because of their wild support of disinformation.
I wonder how a latter day Al Capp would label them?
I imagine a cartoon with a ragged bunch of freedom conyovers, frothing at the mouth, carrying signs that read: Freedom Ragers Always Undermined by Disinformation (FRAUD).
David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Do you support the right to protest and assembly, or do you not? Or perhaps you only support the right to protest and assemble, for causes that align with your own views? Or perhaps it’s only “approved protests” in “approved areas” that you find acceptable.
Imagine the kind of society we would have if it were the latter? Dissent, and the right to freely express it, is one of the few things that separates us from the fascists, authoritarians and autocracies of the world.
How quickly some people forget that it was the dissenters and protesters of the past got us where we are today.
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Actually the complaints have much in common which was/is about questioning government(s) making questionable decisions. While I wouldn’t identify with most of them “freedom fighters” I wouldn’t necessarily use them all as cannons’ fodder either.
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Mr. Charboneau you need to ask who created this mental apathy. Its simply a transfer of tax money from those who run the welfare state in Canada a multi-billion dollar system of government programs — many introduced in the 1960s the Hippie Years that you write about— Jobs are created to transfer money and services to Canadians to deal with an array of needs including but not limited to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, immigration, aging, illness, workplace injury, disability, and the needs of children, women, gay, lesbian, and transgender people who then pay taxes for this.
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