Dr. Julie Ponesse is a professor of ethics who has taught at Ontario’s Huron University College for 20 years. She was placed on leave and banned from accessing her campus due to the vaccine mandate. She presented at the The Faith and Democracy Series on 22, 2021. Dr. Ponesse has now taken on a new role with The Democracy Fund, a registered Canadian charity aimed at advancing civil liberties, where she serves as the pandemic ethics scholar.
We stand at a precipice where we face the danger of losing our humanity forever.
Years from now, what I will remember most about the pandemic is not a virus but our response to it. We have become an intolerant, contemptful, rude and savage society, more inclined to cut off our relationships at the knees than to massage the joints a little to keep them moving. We threaten instead of persuade, mandate instead of respect, and gaslight, scapegoat, and insult our targets into submission.
Seared into my memory are the bold, black letters on the front page of The Toronto Starlast August: “I have no empathy left for the wilfully unvaccinated. Let them die.” These words are, unfortunately, more aligned with today’s rules of behavior than an exception to them. Online and off, we are becoming a crude, insensitive, and morally bankrupt society being slowly engulfed, it seems, by an inferno of incivility.
Our own prime minister fuels the flames, modeling the very sort of hate speech his Bill C-36 is supposed to extinguish. He masterfully turned what should have been a campaign killer into a successful campaign promise — don’t think you are getting on a “plane” or “train” next to the vaccinated (i.e., the pure, acceptable citizens). Instead of electing someone who might have led us up and out of this swamp of incivility, we wanted a leader who would vindicate our rage and whose indefensible malevolence could be a model for our own.
“True patriot love in all of us command.” Apparently not.
Maybe I should have seen it coming. Maybe I should have tried harder to prevent our nosedive into incivility. I didn’t. I thought we had learned the lessons of hate and intolerance, bigotry and dehumanization. I was wrong.
Instead, I am left wondering, when did we become so publicly and unapologetically savage under the guise of well-signaled virtue?
[Interesting Read]
