On Thursday of last week, I braved the cold and drove out to a bridge over Highway 401, where the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy 2022 was going to roll through. An unknown number of trucks formed the Toronto leg of the convoy at Vaughan Mills Mall to cheers from hundreds of supporters. They were going to merge with truckers coming from Niagara, Sarnia, and Windsor in southwest Ontario.
I was not alone on my bridge where the curb lane was entirely occupied by parked cars and scores of flag-waving Toronto families and individuals rejoiced in the hope to expedite the end of discriminatory vaccine mandates. While I was not able to identify an actual convoy, there was a lot of supportive honking coming from vehicles on the highway as well as from those passing behind us on the street.
One of the participants brought and “played” a horn-shaped plastic cone that I immediately recognized as a vuvuzela. This noisemaker achieved global fame during the 2010 FIFA soccer worldcup in South Africa. The sound of the vuvuzela is vaguely reminiscent of a low-frequency truck horn and echoed the intermittent greetings from down on the highway.
The truck horn has become an auditory symbol for the ongoing freedom protests. It is beautifully put on display in a video titled “Freedom Convoy 2022 Sights and Sounds” by the community of Steinbach, Manitoba. The video is taken from the western route of the convoy, which engaged a massive amount of vehicles, in the ten thousands. The contrast between the prairie and western provinces of true-north-and-free Canada as compared to the miserable urban southern Ontario could not be more stark than in the numbers of, and reactions to, the convoy.
Following on the theme of crowd-sourced noise in football stadiums, I was also reminded of “la ola”: the wave of fans raising arms and cheering in a mass formation cycling 360 degrees around sport arenas. Apparently, the wave was invented in the Oakland Athletics (American) football stadium in 1981. I seem to recall it as la ola from watching (on TV) the 1986 soccer worldcup in Mexico shortly thereafter. Thinking of the recent Toronto Queen’s Park rally, it could be quite impressive and fun to organize a wave around the statue where the speakers and organizers congregate.
This brings me to an additional idea for the Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa. Visitors and residents are talking about the constant sound of the trucks’ air horns at Parliament Hill and across the city. Some are understandably getting tired of the noise; others enjoy its deeper meaning and uplifting qualities. This leaves me wondering whether the organizers could create a sound wave across the city by getting truckers to honk for five seconds every minute, depending on their location in a circle around Parliament Hill.
Picturing a clock face centred at the Hill, a trucker stopped at the blue marker between hours 4 and 5 would observe his/her smartphone clock and sound their horn during the :20 to :25 second interval each minute (e.g. during an organized 15-minute event).
I imagine the sound of freedom circling around the city, a bit like a siren alerting residents to the imminent danger to our open, liberal democracy that the Freedom Convoy 2022 aims to stop.
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