I found it more than a little beguiling this past week when a portion of the southern media took issue with an incentive the Hamlet of Arviat had come up with to encourage more people to receive the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19.
The goal is to try to close the gap on the number of inoculated people needed to reach herd immunity and offer protection to those in Arviat unable to be inoculated.
It appears some found it quite questionable, more than a little controversial and almost downright objectionable.
The cause of their ire was the hamlet's incentive to put the name of everyone in the community who agreed to receive the injections into a random draw that would see five lucky people receive $2,000.
Now, as this big, supposedly controversial incentive was taking place in Arviat, real controversy was taking place in three major North American cities.
And, while all eyes were on the fallout caused by supporters of then American President Donald Trump as protesters forced their way into the US Capitol building – where the United States Congress meet to write laws for the country – large crowds were taking to the streets in Montreal to protest the curfew their government put in place to try and stem the ever-rising number of people being infected with Covid-19 in that city and province.
Meanwhile, in Toronto, many residents no longer felt safe on the streets of their own city after Toronto police arrested three participants in two separate anti-lockdown protests in the downtown section of the city on the afternoon of Jan. 16.
That very same day, Ontario saw 3,056 new cases of Covid-19 and a record 420 patients in intensive care units.
Videos began surfacing on social media showing hundreds of protesters gathered at Nathan Phillips Square and Yonge-Dundas Square defying public health measures and denouncing the provincial stay-at-home mandate.
According to the mandate, no more than five people are allowed to gather outdoors. And that can only happen if they wear masks and stay a distance of six feet – or two metres – away from each other.
The world has become a very, very angry place, where the dark shadows of insurrection and anarchy are beginning to crawl out of the sewers and be seen gathering in open city streets again for the first time in a very, very long time.
And as has happened each and every time in the past, no sooner do those who preach sedition and anarchy slither out of the darkness and into the light than people immediately start dying.
Life as we've known it in this wonderful country for all of our lives is beginning to balance precariously over a chasm that falls into to a deep, dark and very dangerous place.
The 'Backwards Sams' and 'Silly Sues' who are always front and centre in these manipulative environments are fond of telling everyone as disdainfully as possible that 98-to-99 per cent of everyone who gets infected with Covid-19 in the United States survives.
What they avoid saying in public is that 331,002,651 people lived there in the middle of 2019, according to UN data.
In fact, the United States population is equivalent to 4.25 per cent of the entire world population (you can see why they prefer to turn the numbers around).
When you hear these purveyors of hatred speak about the SARS virus simply helping nature decrease the surplus population, they are talking about the elderly, the very young and the infirm among us... of every race, creed and colour. It matters not to them.
And what we're seeing begin to happen right now in North America during this pandemic is strictly academic – if you listen to fools, the mob rules.
Food for thought.