When something happens in a faraway land, it is tragic. When it happens in your neighbour’s community, it feels different. And when that neighbour starts telling you they are taking over your house and you have no choice, you had better stop pretending this is theoretical.
Listen carefully. We are hearing the same warnings over and over from content creators, journalists, historians, and political leaders. Maybe it feels repetitive. Maybe people are getting numb. But repetition becomes necessary when the lesson is not sinking in.
George Orwell wrote in 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
I know we are hearing this quote a lot lately. That is not because it is fashionable. It is because it is applicable. So please read it again and then again.
If you need evidence, look at what happened in Minnesota yesterday. Then listen carefully to the words that followed from leaders in the United States. The gap between reality and narrative is no longer subtle. It is deliberate.
Another Orwell line should be ringing loudly right now: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” And yet we are being told that two plus two equals whatever number is politically convenient. Whether it is job numbers, accountability, violence, or blame, facts are not being debated. They are being overwritten.
This may be the most chilling Orwell quote of all: “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” Read that again.
Because the chaos and distraction we are living through are not accidental. They are not about solving a border issue. They are not about safety or order. They serve one purpose: to keep people in a constant state of disruption and fear.
When human beings are traumatized, even on a small, personal scale, our ability to think clearly is impaired. Multiply that by millions. Make it daily. Make it international. This is not just political turmoil. It is collective psychological stress. And when people are overwhelmed and emotionally flooded, they stop being able to discern. They stop being able to focus long enough to demand accountability. That is not a side effect. That is the point.
Not everyone has read George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm. Not everyone has read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But you do not need to have read dystopian literature to recognize it when you are living beside it. What is happening in the United States does not stay in the United States. Canada is not a spectator. The democratic world is not a spectator.
What happened in Minnesota was horrific. Alex Pretti should not be reduced to a political caricature or erased by a false narrative. Alex Pretti was a caregiver. Alex Pretti’s life was defined by service. The image of Alex Pretti standing in his scrubs beside a flag-draped coffin on a gurney at a VA hospital, honouring one of his patients, should be seared into our collective memory. That image tells you who he was. The lies that followed tell you who others have chosen to be.
I do not understand guns. I have never understood the obsession with them. But when the right to bear arms is invoked to justify fear, escalation, and death, how do its loudest defenders reconcile that with the outcomes they normalize? How do politicians distort the truth and smear a dead man without recognizing they have crossed from ideology into moral collapse?
Back to Orwell again, this time from Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” That is always where this road leads.
I tried to look at this objectively. I took off the anger and asked myself what I might be missing as I watched the videos from yesterday. I found nothing that justifies what we saw, or what we were told afterward. Nothing.
So I will end with this.
To my United States readers, and to my Canadian readers who support what the U.S. is doing right now, I am asking you, sincerely and urgently, to rethink where this road leads. The constant crisis and constant fear are not making anyone safer. They are making all of us less human.
For the sake of democracy. For the sake of truth. And yes, for the sake of humanity itself, please pay attention!
Nancy's Notes 