When will the Ottawa honkers go to fight and honk for Ukraine?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/03/2022 (1616 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Funny how the Ottawa “freedom convoy” vanished from the news as soon as Russian president and part-time poisoner Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. In my case, I added “Ottawa” to my list of blocked words on Twitter, mentally left our capital city, and entered the Ukrainian stream of mashed flesh and flowing blood that signals genuine tyranny.

But if those dim, deluded honking Ottawa idiocrats thought they were going to get away with a criminal record, seized freedom trucks, job loss and some alterations at the family home when they got back — funny, the keys didn’t work — they were ill-informed.

For we have new expectations of Ottawa freedom fighters. Drive to Ukraine, singing the Rocket Robin Hood theme song: “Band of brothers marching together, heads held high in all kinds of weather. With fiery blasts, our roaring rockets rise, beyond the air, beyond the skies!”

I don’t know what to call ye Ottawa occupiers of yore. Truck Nuts? Hairy Undercoats? Jethros? I don’t know what freedoms they felt they had lost: to boil an egg as damn hard as they pleased or to tint their spackle?

And then came Putin, with his sneer of cold command, speaking of the big freedom, which is the freedom to be alive. It’s not just that he doesn’t mind the Ukrainian dead, the new Holodomor, it’s that Russians mean nothing to him either. They’re a means to an end, as they were for Stalin.

This time the sound wasn’t yee-haw honking. It was air raid sirens, explosions that made boulders bounce, the cries of the injured and dying, the sound of children crying as their parents sent them across the Polish border, the roar of tanks, the clanking of bottles as Ukrainian women assembled Molotov cocktails as personal weaponry.

I recall the iron pots used as helmets by the desperate Ukrainian fighters on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013, charging ahead knowing they would die.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warns his audiences that he may not survive the day. It’s hard to imagine anyone Putin wants dead more. Bring me Zelenskyy’s corpse, he must be saying to minions across Kremlin rooms with their weird increasingly long furniture. “Boundless and bare, the lone and level tables stretch far away,” as the poet Shelley put it.

I was urged by editors not to mock the Ottawa occupiers’ matted facial hair and tragic pant choices — it’s time for men to understand what women endure — but mockery is no bad thing, I think. Better to mock cruel people than to rage at their foolish self-absorption, anti-Semitism, and anti-urban sadism.

Readers have heard all that before. Best find a fresh angle to target underinformed Canadians who think Trump had a point they couldn’t articulate. Canada has no First Amendment, do you understand that now, Kody? You know where it says on the pill bottle, “Do not operate heavy machinery.” That means you and your tractor-trailer.

There is embarrassment to burn right now. The U.K. did little when Russia poisoned British and Russian citizens on British soil. It invited Russian oligarchs to build gargantuan London homes with dirty money. Art galleries and museums happily took their coin. Britain grovelled.

The West didn’t arm Ukraine energetically, even after the Crimean occupation. They weren’t ready. They didn’t think ahead. It was expensive. Putin wouldn’t do that, surely.

Three layers of Canadian government did the same thing in Ottawa. Trucks? A convoy? For what? No, couldn’t happen here.

What is freedom? Snouty parking in Ottawa or the right to be alive as in Kyiv? During the pandemic, my idea of freedom shrank. I, in my warm comfortable house, would hold an imported orange in my hand and think myself fortunate.

I boiled it all down to an object and a moment. And I was grateful, as would many be in Ukraine right now.

Heather Mallick is a Toronto-based columnist covering current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick