I am from ottawa, and my family is all there, but I live in another country now. I had gotten into the habit of calling home nearly every day to check in, especially because there are high risk people in my family that I have been worrying about for 2 years. Long story short, my parents are now in full fledged screaming support of this protest and I haven't spoken to them since this began. They keep sending me text essays about how great the truckers are and how much they hate liberals. My mom has a truck as a facebook profile picture, and we mostly use messenger to talk - after 10 days or so I asked if she would change it because it kept making me feel like there was a wall there that I couldn't talk to her over...and she didn't reply except to change her picture to a different truck. She's been nothing if not dedicated to making everything in her life about hating Justin Trudeau for like a decade now so I guess I can her admire her conviction. Hopefully I'll use those genes for something less bigoted.

Anyway, this sucks. My parents have always been very scary politically - like in a "I was scared to vote differently than them growing up in case they found out" kind of sense (hence the living far away now). But, most of the time their obsession has largely been focused on American Politics that didn't actually ever influence us. Now, they are calling the antivax protestors underdogs who must be supported and heard, while my little brother, my dad himself, and several other family members would have been in very serious trouble if they had caught covid. My dad was very very worried about covid, but now that Omicron is 'weaker', he is vaccinated, and there is a right-wing cause he can join, he has teamed up with the antivaxers - the people who would have happily seen him and my brother catch covid and die at any stage of this pandemic if it meant they could continue to believe vaccines are evil.

It's been heartbreaking. They are losing friends and family and they don't even care. It's like hating liberals is more important to them than anything else in their lives. fuck me for giving a shit I guess!!