Trucking for Liberation of The Netherlands - September 1944 - near Arnhem

Reflecting on Trucking

I was born just before the tyranny of Nazi occupation came to a bloody end in my part of The Netherlands. For more than four years our city and province had to put up with Nazi controls, propaganda, threats, arrests, executions, and even army officers quartered in our home.  My pastor father’s secret house telephone system connected to a radio hidden in the church ceiling next door enabled him to listen “illegally” to the BBC radio news. Potential penalty:  death!   There was nothing in this occupation that was for the benefit of my family and other Dutch folk.  It was all loss - thousands died and were killed, especially, of course, Jews and others marginalized by Nazi ideology. The aim was to increase Nazi interests - terror and tyranny for control and power.

Thank you, Canadian and British soldiers who fought valiantly and heroically to end the brutal occupation.   The Nazi occupation was a real and evil loss of freedom.  Canadian soldiers gained for me and other occupied peoples the right and the freedom to demonstrate and advocate for the well-being of diverse peoples oppressed by regimes and dangerous systems.

So now in Canada we are confronted by a libertarian crew driving oppressive trucks. They are willing to hold residents of cities hostage so that they can have their way of demonstrating.  They’ve occupied Ottawa and its citizens. They want the Public Health agencies to be silenced by governments foolish enough to remove all the safeguards that protect against Covid. Some in the crew “just want freedom” calling for toppling the elected government – about as maturely as a four year old howling at weary parents to have his way.

Libertarian Denial of Human Need

In whose interest is this call for “freedom”? Just what kind of freedom do they have in mind?  Would their “freedom” quest be satisfied to be on an island where they are self-sufficient and have no impact on anyone else and they can do whatever they want?  Total libertarian individualism hasn’t satisfied many in the millennia of human existence.  Some hermits may have tried, but even they had to rely on supplies and services,  burial or cremation by others. 

No human can do without others. Infants without others die. They must have someone to care for them – to love them to life. Children learn the ways of life from others – the more is better so that they turn out to be whole. Young adults seek human community for companionship, friendship, and sexual relationships. Even self-made individuals have to recognize on whose shoulders they are standing.  Throughout our lives humans depend on others – one way or another.

But we also know that humans don’t just rely on others they also affect others.  Most often for good – parents, teachers, medical people, advisors, emergency service people, friends, loving partners, and  countless others intentionally give of themselves for the well-being of others. Our lives are enriched.

Too often others have bad or dangerous effect – you can fill in that list.

To impede bad or dangerous behaviour, guidance takes the form of rules, commandments, regulations, proscriptions, edicts, laws, and other forms of control are necessary.  The Ten Commandments are among the best known rules for living – but that hasn’t stopped too many from stealing, dishonouring parents, coveting things and others, serving false gods, etc. 

We have international declarations extolling human rights and proscribing criminal warfare, laws to stop illegal financial processes, and health mandates to protect well-being.  Since that isn’t enough, we have for Canada a wide-ranging criminal code, provincial laws about vehicles and health measures, and we have municipal by-laws – all designed to protect residents from the “bad” – from people who would in varying measures negatively affect the lives of others.

Anarchy's Opportunity for Dictatorship

Would we have “perfect freedom” if we dropped all those various types of “guidance”. Of course not!  Anarchy would be the result – no person or code would “rule” (-archy) – lawlessness.  People and organizations with power might like that as a great way to fill the void with their self-interest.  Would-be dictators love anarchy crises as a chance to grab power. Most intelligent people understand that with anarchy suddenly everyone becomes vulnerable.

For example, the rule in Canada is to drive on the right side of the road and to stop at red traffic lights and stop signs.  Agreed, these controls can be a nuisance at times, but rational people will conform because the risks of injury and death become too great when disregarded.  Similarly, we agree that attacking people is unacceptably dangerous behaviour, so we charge those who do so with various degrees of assault – a criminal offense. Thank goodness. 

Do we agree that having sexual relations with another while knowingly not informing them that you are contagious with syphilis, or are H.I.V. positive, or have tuberculosis  or other contagious disease causing sickness or death is also a criminal offense?  Of course, the Criminal Code covers that negligence and people have gone to jail when convicted.

Freedom in Community

Freedom has to be balanced with community responsibilities?  Dictatorial rule doesn’t care about community well-being. It’s goal, as we have seen from the U.S.A.'s 45th President, is power, control, obedience.    Associating with others, especially vulnerable others, requires responsible limits to freedom. So when you know or don't know whether you carry the Covid Omicron virus and you won’t get vaccinated or wear a mask or limit your social intercourse – how liable and responsible are you?  If someone is infected and hospitalized or dies as a result of your unwillingness to observe the most basic of preventive measures, should you be held liable?  Should the person infected or the deceased’s family charge you with negligence and launch a civil suit for contributing to their loss of a beloved’s life?  Should you be charged with criminal negligence? Or just carry the guilt associated with you negligence throughout the rest of your life?

You don’t have to be a Christian to empathize with and respect others. It’s a core human value and fundamental for most world religions .  But if you have any appreciation for Jesus’ Way – and White “Christian” Supremacists don’t - you will know where Jesus chooses to be.  He calls for boundless empathy for the neighbour - compassion, caring, respect, and love!!  Jesus’ Good Samaritan – an alien – goes freely out of his way to help the mugged settler into safety and healing.  Jesus says simply:   you are freed as a human being “to love God above all and your neighbour as yourself.”  Would you want another’s infection, virus, communicable disease?  Would you want vulnerable loved ones in your family to risk health and life itself, just because you won’t accept some responsibility for curtailing the impact of the virus?

By word and deed, Jesus’ core Gospel and convictions of world faiths is “treat others as you want to be treated.”  Anything less than that is failed religion.   No one who claims to be “religious” is worth listening to if “freedom” is valued over compassion, caring, and love.   From beginning to the end of life, love is the principal sign of the divine presence (see Bible’s 1John 4:7 and many other texts).  When freedom risks embroiling other with negative effects, then LOVE MUST TRUMP THAT VERSION OF FREEDOM. 

Bottom line:  humans are made for community.   In community we care about and for each other’s well-being even when it may be an inconvenience and a wearying necessity. Covid will end or it will decline so that we learn to live with it. Neither this wearying pandemic nor other life-dangers give us “freedom” to disregard, abuse, threaten, terrorize, intimidate or infect our neighbours near and far.

Whom to Trust?

At this point I trust Public Health officials and informed government leaders more than the motley crowd occupying Ottawa, shouting expletives, displaying Nazi signs and racist flags, threatening politicians and police, harassing medical staff and visible minorities, blocking access to services and hospitals,  disrupting innocent residential life, killing small businesses.  I have no time for truculent bullies using trucks as weapons to occupy and control city cores, intimidate residents, devastate businesses, shouting - in effect - for Covid to be given free rein in communities.  There is no real "freedom" in this.  It is all loss.

 I have gratitude for the 90% of truckers vaccinated supplying basic needs for people and industry.  I have time for peaceful and short term demonstrations fostering fairness and human well-being.    And I have great respect and gratitude for the Canadian and British military truckers who risked all to liberate me and my family and natal nation in 1945.

The intimidating truckers using their trucks as weapons to occupy our city today have nothing in common with those liberating military truckers and the others who continue to respect and serve.