Chapter 132

Now, here’s the thing. I am not disclosing my own political beliefs because, as I mentioned previously, I believe it is my right to not talk about it. We have anonymous ballots for a reason and that is because, if an individual doesn’t want to tell you how they vote, they shouldn’t have to. However, with this said, I am open to talking a little about trends with you.

I am a millennial and that means that when I was in high school and university, we got a very liberal experience. Our generation got talks about sex and all that from a rather progressive government and educational system and when we went into university, we were just in time for a pretty strong feminism movement. 

The strong feminism movement and the pro-choice policies of the liberal party pushed a lot of the universities towards a very liberal way of practicing. When I was in optometry school, the dislike of the Trump administration had pretty much solidified Canada as a liberal country opposing the US’s political spectrum. All of this is to say, the universities of Canada were pretty liberal going into COVID. 

Now, let’s say you worked at a university as a professor and there was a new tenure position that just opened up. They have a spot for one professor or lecturer to get tenure and you are competing against a lot of people. You’d think that you would make yourself likeable in order to gain favor with the agenda of the university. And if the university was very liberal, you should probably adopt some liberal ways of thinking too. Or at the very least, not antagonize liberals everywhere. 

This was the position my mom found herself in. During COVID, there was a spot for tenure and she tried her best to fill it. However, she couldn’t stop herself from talking about politics. She was a bit preachy and published a few articles online about right wing politics and next thing you know, the tenure position came and went. Of course there were other considerations but in all honesty, when every little bit counts, why bring politics into the mix when it only hurts your standing? This kind of gives you an idea on how far down the rabbit hole my mom was going. 

This was not surprising to me in the slightest because a few weeks prior to that, my mom was given the option of resuming some of her smaller classes if she got vaccinated. Working more courses is great for tenure applications and more classes also equals more money. There was a lot to gain from this and it seems silly to let your political beliefs get in the way of your career. However, as you can imagine, since she was an avid anti-vaxxer, she declined to get jabbed by a needle. She claimed it was her rights she was defending by not getting jabbed and despite my insistent pestering, she stuck true to the cause. 

As the season changed and Spring turned into Summer, my conversations with my mom got less and less frequent. Her being more active on right wing forums, meant she wasn’t chatting with me much anymore either. Echo chamber or not, I initially thought that my mom having found a place among like minded individuals was good in that she wasn’t as lonely anymore. I sort of convinced myself that a group to be a part of is still a community of sorts no matter the subtext. 

Sometimes, they would even bring up some good points too. Like when my mom made an argument about how the left wing seemed to have tolerated Black Lives Matter while ignoring the Stop Asian Hate movement because apparently they were at odds with one another. Being Asian and knowing fully of the things that happen in our communities, I know that Stop Asian Hate definitely needed more spotlight. The fact that the two movements were incompatible with each other seemed to have said something that I did not resonate with.

All of this is to say, I didn’t try very hard to mind her social life because I thought it wasn’t all that bad. Furthermore, even if I did try and pull her out, I don’t think she would have budged. I’m not as high tier in her value systems as her moral duties remember? So all I could do is check up on her once in a while and see if she was doing okay. But here’s the thing, being in an echo chamber usually radicalizes you more and more. Slowly but surely, her life became more and more consumed with politics to really talk about anything else. 

At some point, my uncle and my cousins and I had a chat. My cousins and uncle were in Vancouver and pretty distant. They were also pretty politically neutral and all got their vaccination shots because it was a way for them to keep working during the pandemic. They thought nothing of a simple jab in the arm. When my mom caught wind of this, she bombarded them with political anti-vax rhetoric and claimed that her family had fallen victim to the media’s propaganda again. Unfortunately, around this time the extended family would also start pulling away from her. 

Mom was too adamant that vaccines were all a scam and that she knew a totalitarian government when she saw one. She said this was just like communist China when she grew up there and that she needed to fight this oppression. Her son and soon to be daughter-in-law, both who work in healthcare, were not credible sources to be listened to either. She was on a morality war for freedom and there was no reasoning with her. 

Where do you even go from here?