Having suggested that, at bottom, there are two main strategies for dealing with depression; avoidance and mitigation, last weekend I found myself in a situation number 2.
You see, I was born a free Englishman. No, not in England, in Canada (the “dot-ca” at the end of this little website’s address should give that away). But let’s not quibble, Canada is the inheritor and descendant of 815 years of freedoms as codified in the Magna Carta.
I take the natural born rights of the Englishman seriously. I put my hand on the bible and swore and oath to defend them, fully expecting to die as the Russians came through the Fulda Gap.
Well, the military career I had planned on never happened (I may have mentioned that somewhere along the way), and we know that Russian communism collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions without ever crossing that line.
Sadly, the totalitarian impulse did not die with it.
No, instead it has been elected, re-elected, and re-elected again, and again, and again. Its most recent incarnations being Flubber from Etobicoke and Castro’s broken condom, who determined that what Canada really needs is a domestic passport.
When I was a teenager, “Papers please” (spoken in a German accent) was used as a punchline, or a sarcastic rebuttal to anyone proposing some form of government overreach. We saw East Germany, with their internal passports, as both a joke, and a cautionary tale.
And now our illustrious failed substitute drama teacher and would be President of the Politburo has announced they are to be national policy.
It wasn’t good enough to have the fathead fuckwit from Etobicoke try it on the Ontario populace last spring, only to be shot down by the police themselves. No, our snowboard instructor in chief’s head is so full of moldy pudding that he thinks 815 years of British law need to be brushed aside, just because.
As he is turning the screws down on our rights and freedoms, completing his fascist fuck of a (putative) father’s dream of ending WASP Canada as a free nation, I find have to raise my children to live in tyranny.
Can you say depression trigger?
This was an absolutely unavoidable depression trigger. Seeing the country I once loved elect a man determined to end doctor patient confidentiality, in order to create a domestic passport, sent me into the spiral. Now I’ve got a month to find a free country to move to, or to accept life as a second class citizen because I am NOT providing confidential, privileged, doctor-patient information to go out for dinner.
I found myself once again thinking:
I don’t want to be here any more. I want off this planet.
Without avoidance, that means mitigation.
How to lessen the effects of moving from a free(ish) nation to a totalitarian hellhole, complete with domestic passports and second class citizens being marginalized and scapegoated, without ever changing my address?
With difficulty. More on that next time.
