Life has become cheap.
Blame it on late-stage capitalism. Blame it on right wing dehumanization of those who disagree. Blame it on the long arc of the waning social contract fading into cliche.
The end game seems muddy, but there is a sinister point to the erosion of our worth as human beings: the fraying of our public health infrastructure or the ongoing collapse of valuable immunities as two examples. For those cheerleading the end from the so-called heartland of Alberta and other right-wing strongholds such motives are almost certainly rooted in a fairy tale.
For my own part, I was raised to (falsely) believe that turning to a doctor or a hospital for a pain or a problem was not only a kind of bodily weakness, but worse, a moral failing. Walk it off. There was always some kind of home remedy or off-script use for a pill we already had in our cupboards for whatever ailed me. This, of course, is a personal anecdote, but it has shaded for most of my life my impression of what many people in rural Alberta are likely brought up to think of medical science.
I earned a science degree, changed my tune and even later wrote for many years on vaccine skepticism with my keyboard warrior vibe attempting to shine a light on the misinformation that was just then starting to swirl and coagulate in parenting blogs and during those nascent years of social media rot. The theme often missed by those more formally reporting on the subject was that same narrative of self-deluded independence and the ranking of human worth, that the systems we had collectively struggled to achieve—public health care, herd immunity, prescription drugs— were somehow rigged against common sense. But it was never really about autism or microchips, no. Rather I have come to believe it was about bolstering the narrative of paranoid self-reliance for those screaming the loudest about it all.
The narrative of the right wing oft stumbles into is one that can be thought of a kind of self-deluded tale of epic self-reliance. It is the fallback illusion to bookend every argument, tangled up in metaphors of rugged independence and well-used bootstraps. Pick a quarrel with someone, anyone, who fancies themselves a prairie renegade fending off the struggles of the western frontier here in the twenty-first century, and one is almost guaranteed to seen trot out the delusion of the selectively self-made.
We’ll go in on our own and take the risk. Our life is a roll of the dice so long as we are the one’s rolling it, and yours? Of course yours is worth far less.
Looking south, as we witness extrajudicial government executions in the streets of America, watch the anti-science pivots of unqualified medical officials, and feel the repercussions of a rah-rah-america education system that even at its best seems to care more about fealty to a flag than to facts, we need to remember that this is all part of the same story. It is the tale of the dollar store rebels and their playtime independence. It is about giving up on a system that had fed them, defended them, and even provided unfettered access to the very information technologies that threatens to kindle the fires that could destroy it all.
It is the same fairytale told amongst the rising tide of Alberta separatists who put this delusion of a unquestionable personal strength forward as some kind of valid argument. It is not valid, no. And it is not valid because it insists that worth of the one person—or of a single family or tribe, community, or religious group—holds more value than any another. It ignores the might of all of us together. It ignores the true ideals of what it purports to defend, while simultaneously tearing it to shreds.
But life has become cheap… but only so long as it is someone elses.