You will have prom. You can’t have prom. Wait—prom is back on.
Graduation is on. Wait, no, there’s a press conference—graduation is off. Wait, on, but with extra rules.
Even though it’s June, when health officials generally agree viruses have faded by then.
It’s a regular April school day, but at the 2:45 bell, the announcement is: there is no more in-school learning this year. One grade 12 student told me, “I didn’t get a chance. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to my teachers, or to my friends at school.” Masks on. Stay apart. Fresh water fountains covered, you can’t get water here. Not just for a few days, or for a week, no fresh water. For several months. In one Nova Scotia school at least.
Masks off now. But you are not allowed to say anything that isn’t in line with the newest thing. Like you are all of a sudden the problem if you don’t automatically guess a stranger’s pronouns correctly. Or you’re supposed to look the other way and act like it’s perfectly normal for a fellow teenager to take off furry ears and paws to participate in gym. And you can’t ask what’s going on or you are anti-something.
Best years of your life. Jabbed. Or unjabbed and excluded. Neither are allowed to assemble, to say what’s on your mind. To just talk. Normally. Best years of your life, they say.
Learning losses, they talk about now. They, being health and learning professionals. The unjabbed non-compliant types weren’t allowed into university or college anyway. Best years of your life.
You can’t go with a bunch of friends to the beach for a bonfire. You’re not allowed out together. Not even OUTSIDE. Can’t go to church. Even if you are an athlete who got vaccinated, they cut back the number of games. And then said you couldn’t play outside of your region, or county. So who were you going to play?
Acne, bad enough, became inflamed acne under toxic masks. Your teachers offered garbage bags or recyclable bags full of testing kits. Take as many as you want, they said. Sterile testing kits from big plastic bags. Thrown into backpacks. Some kids took extra to sell. One class had a teacher say, “Who here is vaccinated?” September 2021. Because breaching privacy doesn’t exist anymore. You didn’t have any, they took it from you.
You are 19, 20, 21, or 22 now. You just want it behind you. To get on with your life. But it affects you. It affects where you went to university or college, and what that fun experience was supposed to be like, versus what it was actually like. You were treated badly. Oh, it wasn’t that bad, you say. With your positive attitude. But it wasn’t good, or ethical. And adults you respected went along with it.
You know who did this. The same people offering easy mortgages to people new to the country with little or no credit history. That’s nice, but you should be treated nicely too. Not instead of you, and by the very bank you opened your first account in, maybe. Maybe you can barely afford rent, school, and food. You may be losing your belief that you will ever own a home. And now possibly a tax on a home your parents own? Less and less for families. More and more costs and stress.
And you’re only 20, maybe 22. And you are sharp. You read, watch, observe. Seeing the stress of the adults around you. Seeing your grandparents getting lied to, and information withheld, by the news channel they’ve trusted their whole life. It’s wrong, betraying that trust.
You know who is responsible for this disaster. And many of you will not be voting to keep this unapologetic party in. You have some influence now. No one apologized. But many of us are sorry. It was wrong. We are sorry, so many of us fought, and continue to fight for the right thing, the good thing.
We can break the heartless habit of the last 10 painful, expensive years. Some of you who experienced the sudden loss of loved ones, and of freedoms, and of basic Canadian opportunities. Can you/we make it right with an election? Not entirely, obviously. But we can make sure that they don’t continue on their merry way at your, our, expense. Literally, at our expense. And we can hold the new ones accountable relentlessly. Because that is required too. This vote is not one and done. There’s a mess to clean up. We can do it together even though it’s a lot. It’s worth it. What Canada used to be, is worth it.
Your future, at your young age, is worth it.