Juno News - October 30, 2020


The coronavirus is tearing us apart

Mentioned
Doug Ford
Canadian government only wants to stand up for free speech ＂with respect＂ Choosing Free Speech Over ＂Respectful＂ Speech

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

210.93

Word count

798

Sentence count

50


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the impact of the new restrictions on Halloween in our communities, and why we need to be doing all we can to make it safe for our kids to go out and get some candy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 There's something going on in our communities right now related to the pandemic restrictions
00:00:09.800 that I think is really sad. I think it's really tragic. I heard through the playground gossip
00:00:15.880 that there was one mom who was saying, she was talking about, are you taking your kids
00:00:19.660 trick-or-treating or not? In Ontario, where in many districts, Doug Ford is saying, it's
00:00:24.180 not safe. Don't do the trick-or-treating. I don't buy that at all. But it's been interesting
00:00:28.440 to hear people talk about how they're planning to navigate it. And this mom was saying that
00:00:32.420 she thought, yeah, I'm taking my kids out. It's no big deal. And then the houses that
00:00:35.980 are handing the candy out, well, we'll get the candy there. The ones that the lights are
00:00:39.400 off, we won't do it. We won't knock on the door, just like usual. But some people on her
00:00:44.120 street were saying, well, we're going to be looking out for people going trick-or-treating
00:00:47.580 and then we're going to be whatever, pointing at them, naming and shaming, telling them go
00:00:51.500 away, go back inside and so forth. And you think, how sad, how awful that that is
00:00:58.340 happening in our communities right now? Sort of the erosion of civility and a strong sense
00:01:04.960 of civic togetherness. And that's what the pandemic has brought now that we're at the
00:01:09.640 point where we're dealing with restrictions that don't make sense. You know, back in the
00:01:13.200 spring, it was hashtag, we're all in this together. And you remember, people went out
00:01:16.480 to bang the pots and pans at a set time to acknowledge the greater challenges that nurses
00:01:21.840 and healthcare workers were facing. Now, they're not doing that anymore. Instead, people are really
00:01:27.340 at each other over this. You hear about all these encounters where in a grocery store,
00:01:32.240 someone's not wearing a mask, so you got to chase them down and video record them and yell at them
00:01:36.640 and so forth. Look, I follow the rules. They're not that onerous. I wear the mask. But if I see
00:01:41.120 someone not wearing it, it's, oh, who is this criminal? We got to call the cops and hold them
00:01:46.000 down until they get there. Actually, some troubling stories in Australia about that pretty much happening,
00:01:51.640 you know, forcibly placing masks on people, law enforcement doing it, wild stuff. And this also,
00:01:57.700 so much distrust with our neighbors, you know, these rules, he's not following those rules. Okay,
00:02:04.140 we got to, we got to call in the law on him. And this, this also sense that if you had a neighbor
00:02:08.480 returning from being abroad, and there's the 14 day quarantine, well, maybe you want to keep an eye on
00:02:13.860 them. And if you see them leaving the house, you could call the cops on them, and they could get fined and
00:02:17.740 so forth. What sort of world are we living in? And a person remarked to me a few weeks ago, they grew
00:02:22.960 up in a Soviet state, and they are very glad to be living in North America living in Canada right now.
00:02:28.040 And they said, they're kind of feeling a little stressed out, because the things that are happening
00:02:32.340 right now remind them of what it was like to live in that Soviet satellite country. They do not like it
00:02:38.180 one bit. And this whole looking at your neighbor askance, judging them being, you know, unsure what to
00:02:44.240 make of their movements. Can you trust them? Do they trust you? Are they going to call a
00:02:47.700 cops on you? Should you call the cops on them for these very minor transgressions? Look, the thing
00:02:52.920 we're learning about the virus right now is more facts and evidence. And finally, the government is
00:02:56.900 showing their data, it suggests that it's spreading by indoor gatherings for prolonged periods of time
00:03:02.760 when you're not wearing the masks, you're coming close together, and so forth. So let's certainly
00:03:06.460 avoid all of those. And we have the protocols, the restrictions for all of that. But this stuff about
00:03:11.700 kind of policing each other's movements during Halloween, or whether or not you're walking down the
00:03:17.120 right way in the grocery aisle, and it leads to fisticuffs. It's just so sad that we're seeing
00:03:23.040 that we're actually having to do this to each other, to our communities right now. And I think
00:03:27.220 it's all the more reason why we need to pause and reassess all these different rules as frequently as
00:03:32.520 possible to say, do we really need to be doing all of this? Did we really need to say, Halloween's not
00:03:38.900 safe, bad trick-or-treating? I don't know. Because a lot of the tensions out there that we're seeing in
00:03:44.280 society, we gotta ask ourselves, is it worth it?