What illusions of freedoms remain for us Canadians?

Last evening I watched The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I will finish watching the final LOTR movie this evening. I am moved by these magnificent films more than ever now. Made twenty years ago, this stunning achievement of motion picture art now seems as if it were the crowning symbolism of the 20th century fit to grace the memory of all our world, all our hopes and values. It was a tale of hope, hope that dark powers of tyranny would be overcome by goodness, courage and integrity.

I was a professional film actor for a time at the end of the last century and the very early years of this one so I treasure my collection of DVDs all the more and I appreciate all the more the incredible art and craft that made these films. After 20 years these films, really one long film, seem to be the last movies. Nothing so magnificent and meaningful could be made today. We have diminished. The Lord of the Rings is a sort of golden treasure fit to be put away in the tomb of our hopes and values.

I thought the movies would go on forever. I was wrong. The movies lasted from about 1916 to about 2016 and now the motion picture as an art is dead. This is appropriate because our civilization is falling. Really it has already fallen. In another 20 years there won’t be a society that I would recognize or want to live in, if things continue along this path. And where do I see anything on the horizon that could change the course? Nothing.

“The world is changed,” whispers the queen of the Elves, “I feel it in the earth, I feel it in the waters, I smell it in the air. Much that was is lost, for there is none now living who remember it”

I dreamed last night that I accidentally possessed two large gold coins I kept along with two old Canadian pennies in my wallet, our defunct pennies I valued as historic relics of our Canadian history. A man, tall and shadowy, comes to me and says he’s from the British Royal exchequer and that my gold coins are rare and valuable. If I give these coins back to the Royal House I will be given fabulous wealth in exchange. I was led by secret ways into a secret vault where shadowy men in frock coats are waiting. I give them my gold coins and without a word spoken they give me in exchange a few more defunct Canadian pennies. I’m told they are rare because they are old, 1919, 1955 … I accept this trade and anticipate examining my pennies like a child who imagines his collection of old pennies is a treasure.

In my dream I was promised that I would get value for giving away my bright and beautiful golden coins. But I get nothing but a sham. The royal shadows I revere so trustingly cheated me as if I were a naive child.

Canada. Oh Canada. Isn’t that what we have, us Canadians? A defunct dream as worthless as our defunct pennies. We are giving away our freedoms and our values and our rights and the entire beautiful fabric of Common Law. In my dream I was Canada, I was the embodiment of what the majority of my people are doing now by giving in and giving away the rights we still have. But our rights are nothing but ink on paper if we do not practice them.

Any of us who are ordered by the police to confine ourselves in one of Justin Trudeau’s secret quarantine hotels can just decline and walk free because that’s the law. But few or none are doing that! Almost every person accosted at airports and ordered to submit to a swab jammed high up into their noses and ordered to confine themselves and pay thousand of dollars for their own imprisonment are just going along and telling themselves that’s the law, when they could just decline! Justin’s Covid rules are not the law, our Constitution is the law. But everybody is throwing our laws and our Constitution and our Charter guarantees away and meekly obeying orders.

That’s the real Canadian values, isn’t? Doing what you’re told. Trusting authority because it labels itself Liberal. I’m hustled along in the crowd. I’m no more upstanding than anybody else, really. I’m so liberal and so meek. I was liberal all my life. Canadian values.

I repent. I was wrong. I was a fool and this is the world I helped to create. I’m so sorry.