(I'm posting this as a separate topic from the U.S. Politics one because it includes elements of Canadian politics.)

The U.S. Republicans may not deserve to regain power, but the Democrats definitely deserve to lose it. They've lost my vote.

I mean let's take this sudden wave of blue states deciding to lift masking requirements. In just the last three days, California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Delaware (yep, President Biden's home state!), New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have all suddenly announced at least some lifting of masking requirements, with even more likely on the way. Is it just a coincidence that this has happened all at once in the same week -- have blue state governors just discovered polling shifts or something -- or could it be that that bridge to Detroit from Canada is now being blocked by the Freedom Convoy and there's a certain desire on the part of the party currently governing our country (apparently save for the Biden Administration itself!) to, you know, do what's possible to end that situation as quickly as possible and avoid the phenom being fully replicated Stateside?

According to the Washington Post and every other mainstream media outlet out there, I'm supposed to be furious about this. I'm supposed to be terrified of the Canadian working class peacefully striking and honking horns for my right to FINALLY go face-naked in public months after getting my third shot for same virus well within the same year. They're terrorists! They're Nazis! They're disrupting normal life! *sighs* That's...just no. No they're not. This is why Biden is fucking 15 points underwater now in the average of national polls and still dropping. Or it's the latest reason anyway; the administration keeps supplying more. The fucking Freedom Convoy is the happiest news I've heard in years! I haven't been this happy with any one North American (or at this point North American-originated) social movement since the Women's March of 2017 and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Thank God, man. Something had to give for this considerable Covid overreach to finally start winding down and coming to an end and I couldn't be happier with the results so far. I hope it continues and expands and fuck anyone who's against it! I'm absolutely miserable these days and the primary reasons are corona fatigue in general and the prohibition on going face-naked indoors months after getting my third shot for the same virus well within the same year and a full month after the relatively mild omicron surge (omicron now being the only relevant strain of the virus in the U.S.) peaked in particular. Nothing will get my previous conditions back -- nothing will make me an "essential worker" who deserves higher pay, tips, and words of respect and appreciation rather than an "unskilled" one again who who can suck it in people's minds. But maybe I can at least get to breathe normally while I'm otherwise miserable for a change in the foreseeable future!

The press can preach until they're blue in the face that only Republicans are dangerously authoritarian, but the public clearly feels otherwise and maybe the fact that they just...won't...let...go of their visceral need to control my everyday lifestyle decisions as a perfectly healthy and responsible 39-year-old working person under even the best of virus conditions unless and until faced with extreme financial prodding from my social class and an upcoming election season wherein the same will hold them accountable more directly sums up the essence of why.

Enough with Covid restrictions! Enough with this crackpot open borders experiment! Enough defunding the police and ending bail! Enough selling out our friends and allies abroad! Enough calling yourselves feminists while aggressively seeking new legal restrictions on the rights of women and calling those of us who protest misogynist slurs! Enough -- for God sakes, enough -- capitalizing the B in black, the B in brown, the W in white, reflecting the fact that the color of people's skin is the now the most important thing about them in your mind! And enough of the "respectable" press only ever quoting one side of any argument and constantly denigrating the unwashed masses for disagreeing with them on just about everything at this point! The return of Republicans might be a far from ideal answer, but it's the one that's available and Democrats, I'm sorry, have to be penalized for the living nightmare that has been the last year. I voted for someone as boring as Biden to get rid of Trump and all the thrilling "excitement" that came along with his presidency, get life back to normal, and then forget he was there for four years, forget about politics. More than a year later, I find that I have been unable to forget about politics or go back to leading a halfway normal life and that my cost of living this rather abnormal life is starting to exceed its value to me. I call that a failure.

I hate the whole modern world right now practically. I hate everything from Covid restrictions to social media in general to bitcoin and practically all news media but Fox News and just...want...life...to go back...to normal!! That's what people are going to vote for this November. Democrats can either be a part of that or they can lose their jobs like the rest of us. That's the reality of the matter. Sanity is chasing the Democratic Party. The question is how long they're willing to evade it and at what cost.

EDIT: There was a cheerier version of this post I started with that was pretty much just "YaY Freedom Convoy!", but this is how it wound up. Sorry. I'm basically just trying to say that I'm happy about the movement and its results already and angry about the way its been treated in most of the media.

When you've somehow managed to upset Canadians to this degree,

having them react in this manner,

you didn't just cross the line,

you've started to erase it.

So now, you can simply 'get trucked'.

And we're not even mad yet...

Hold. The. Line.

Just an appetizer as to the confiscated trucker fuel being poured on the fire, in meme form, and why it'll only grow in support until something breaks.

I’m from the UK but agree wholeheartedly with all the sentiments expressed in the OP, well said.

Guess I can be intimidating. Didn't mean to be!

I am definitely in favor of the Convoy though. That is no joke. Sorry if that wasn't obvious, I'm just a visceral writer a lot of the time and fatigued by this crap and my worldview doesn't align neatly with the ideological poles I guess people are used to seeing dominate online political discussions. The OP was probably my most "right wing" screed ever, hence my choice of title.

I mean to me it just really, really seems like the age of Covid restrictions was never going to end without something like this happening, and it seems to be rapidly drawing to a close now here in the neighboring United States as a clear result. Incidentally, since I authored the OP all of yesterday, we can now add Nevada as well to the long list of U.S. states that have announced plans to phase out at least some, if not all, of their masking requirements just this week. ...Well anyway, I'm just glad that there's finally an end in sight and I think the Freedom Convoy will go down in history as the event that brought the age of Covid restrictions to a close in this country, if not in its native Canada as well.

That's not going to happen. The world is in constant change and past times will never come back. That doesn't mean that covid restrictions will never get away, they certainly will. But the world will never be the same as in the 90s, 2000s or 2010s. Everything is changing and there is exactly nothing you or me could do about it.

It's generally a healthy approach to accept such change. What is normal and what is not isn't something that is set in stone. So just adjust yourself and don't expect the whole world to adjust to you, because that is simply not going to happen.

There is so much to unpack in the OP.

Some parts seemed satirical and other parts were just maniacal.

Or maybe that’s just the two beers I’ve had tonight.

In all fairness I think the OP was quite clear regarding what they meant by normal ie the end of covid restrictions. You’re quite right that the world won’t adjust to any single person on this planet however there is absolutely nothing wrong with venting and expressing emotions, whether positive or negative. It can be highly cathartic to vent and to learn that others feel a similar way; see Twitter for very clear evidence of this. 

OP isn't talking about music changes, clothing trends, or any other shift like those that naturally evolve over the decades. We just wants the ability to go out of our homes without a demand for masks and without having to prove you took *insert how many shots makes the asking person happy* shots of the "vaccine" that "protects" the < 99% that have a bad reaction to it. And those numbers are based on the ones the reported sickness, not including the many millions that got Covid but had no reaction or just thought they had a cold so they never bothered reporting it to anyone. 

A mask-less, non-judging-about-vaccine-status future is not a ridiculous thing to want or ask for considering we had that just a couple years ago. OP isn't asking to go back to a different decade, just to go back to sanity.

I think I recall Canada being a particularly strict country when it came to protests. Didn’t they send in their military to destroy the native North American protests? I’m assuming they won’t have double standards against these guys.