A Mirror on Bleakness
Reactions to witnessing a "Vaccination Centre" in St. Jerome, Quebec
[Adapted from the Zero Anthropology Telegram Channel]
After all this time (about 18 months), with all the debates, analysis, studies, reports, divisions, and anger...I finally saw my first “Vaccination Centre” today. I have seen open-air testing sites before, but not where people actually get injected. It was inside a mall in St-Jerome, Quebec. The mall was languishing badly before 2020, but is now even less populated by stores—there are only about five left, in a mall that could house ten times that much. In what used to be a large thrift store, the “Vaccination Centre” is now housed, like the parasite that killed its host. I was not alone in visiting.
We paced slowly, back and forth across the front of the centre, which is covered by glass from floor to ceiling. Two minor security guards were at the entrance. Everyone inside was masked; everyone outside was unmasked. The irony was lost on those who place such faith in a (non)vaccine that they still need “protection”. One would have thought that they were all wearing a vote of non-confidence. Brains have been disconnected from senses and both have been delinked from perception.
Inside, to the left, were banks of tables with computers where people entered and were processed. In the centre was a row of stalls where injections are conducted, with the walls high enough to block public view. To the right, rows of chairs filled with seated people as they stayed for the required monitoring time.
The stalls, about six feet long, arranged perpendicular to outside viewers, closely resembled the stalls through which cattle are marched from stockyards into slaughter houses. I realize that in writing this, it resembles a predictable and stock trope, but I could not help seeing the symmetry between the two forms.
Not expecting to see such a place, ever, I had no idea what my reaction would be.
I was sickened. I choked up like I have not done since my mother in-law’s funeral in 2019, when I came face to face with her body. I felt a knot of nausea grow in my stomach. My neck muscles stiffened. I was in disbelief, being just a few feet away from that evil, that mRNA.
I got closer, and kept moving back and forth along the length of the exterior, with the security guard becoming ever more suspicious. People inside stared back at us, with “what are you looking at?” expressions. I hope they would see us as their mirror: that if we stared at them, it was because there was something problematic to be stared at.
We had to leave as I started getting louder. There it was—the fetish, the centre of all attention, the tool of oppression that was used to frighten, divide, threaten, and punish Canadians. I would have liked to destroy the centre.
And the centre is active, while the mall housing it has been killed. How many will connect those two dots?
I assume I am perceptive enough to confirm that in the hinterland "regions" of Quebec, only the skeletal remains of culture, community and economy persist, and the bleakness you speak of is by now ambient. Our MP, who happens to be the federal agriculture minister, nevertheless thinks in her infallible "right honourableness" that bringing more "Agrotourisme" into the "Agri-food sector" will correct all errors that have thus far accumulated. That and drones, AI, machine learning and ever more technology, all in the name of the myopic and misguided increase in "efficiency" and "competitiveness". Somewhere along the way, the health and integrity of actual living people in actual communities got overlooked. And the worst is, just like the jabs, people seem to be all in for this plan.
Ah - St Jerome! - I have driven though many times on my way to Mt Tremblant (Am I still prohibited from entering "Canada" - or only with the proper device and app and two weeks in quarantine?). You don't have to get far outside the major cities to see "languishing" commercial property. Rural Canada has long been in some sort of pilot depopulation project; and with tourism close to shut down now for a third season it must be extremely grim. That small photo at the bottom, just has that look I have seen countless times well before the "dots" of the current operation were in place. (Last time I was in Elliot Lake, Ontario, some vandal had effaced the final zero of the ".... Population 11,000" sign!)
Is this some sort of public, civil service operation? - In the US testing and vaxing has been largely privatized and, to an extent, de-professionalized. Most everyone rushed down to one of two mega drug store franchises for "their" shots. The training and medical experience of those administrating same was entirely murky. Testing was more a mix of storefront operations and, earlier on, mega state run "testing centers"
I think eliciting "what are you looking at" responses is a valuable strategy of resistance for a number of reasons. Mostly because one intent of the operation was to get people to stop looking at each other, stop connecting, stop talking and smiling. (Signage in elevators showed two persons with their backs turned to each other.) At this point, I am always directly looking a people still wearing masks; generally intently but with a neutral expression. My small contribution to enhancing self-awareness and self-questioning among those so terribly deceived.