Don’t mess with the man in black, Randy

Jeff Green | May 05, 2021

We are all used to Randy Hillier lying about COVID, the charter of rights, and how sober his sons were when they arrested at the Arrow Pub in Perth. He found another line to step over when he started retweeting comparisons between COVID restrictions and the policies of the Nazi regime.

My father was once playing golf with another Jewish man who came to Canada from Poland after WWII. The man asked my father what city his family had emigrated from. When my father told him, the man turned white and had to sit for a minute.

“In 1940, they rounded up every Jew from that town and shot them,” the man said.

No, Randy, a requirement to wear masks in stores to protect people from COVID is not comparable to mass murder, by any kind of analogy. And yes, I find it offensive, an insult not only to Jews but to every culture that has had suffered from the scourge of hate that results in genocide, and there are many.

But these kinds of comparisons are not surprising from someone whose grasp of history allows him to claim, as he did in January of last year, that relations between settlers and indigenous peoples In Canada over the last 150 years, were “collaborative, not coercive”.

No Randy, being taken from your family and forced into residential schools, is not an act of collaboration with a person or their family. It was not even coercion; it is kidnapping with genocidal intent.

I thought, after all this, that I was used to Randy’s hyperbole. After all, his main goal is to rescue himself from political oblivion, and it is working right now, although to what end we don’t yet know.

I wish him well in the court case that he has been so eager to bring about. I wish him well with the integrity commissioner also, where municipalities and potential political opponents have been rushing to report his conduct to. Those are the proper venues for him.

It might seem trivial, after all he has said and done and tweeted over the past couple of years, but last night I was freshly offended by a tweet.

Randy said that Ontario under the Ford government reminds him of the “Johnny Cash song, ‘What have we become?’ I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel I focus on the pain. the only thing that’s real’. How can a Premier and a Society want to inflict to much Hurt on one another?”

First off, Johnny Cash did not write that song, which is called Hurt. It was written by Trent Reznor and recorded by Reznor’s band, 9 Inch Nails. Johnny Cash recorded a powerful version of it for one of the Americana albums that he released not long before his death.

The song, and a lot of Johnny Cash’s power as a songwriter and a performer, came from his understanding of the pain that comes from being alive, and from facing the spectre of death that is around every corner.

Another one of Johnny Cash’s lines, one that he wrote himself, goes like this “I keep my eyes wide open all the time.”

What that line means to me is that Johnny Cash did not flinch from what he saw, whether he was looking down the road or in the mirror.

In my biased view, Randy Hillier is not living up to that high standard.