The surprising unsung heroes of 2023

The surprising unsung heroes of 2023

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — It’s that time of year again to reminisce about the people who shaped the world. And it’s not who you might think.

Time Magazine named Taylor Swift its Person of the Year. Understandable, since she was the literal incarnation of capitalist meritocracy, having single-handedly injected an estimated $5.7 billion into the U.S. economy in a time of economic uncertainty, according to the Washington Post. Say what you want about her music, but there’s no denying that she embodies the values that the rest of the world admires about America. She’s living proof that drives dreams of wild success through talent, hard work, and a winning attitude. For every person inspired to put those values into practice, it’s society as a whole that’s better off.

But missing from such lists are the unsung, everyday heroes who stood out in 2023. So, here are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling.

Truckers: This really should have been the second year that truckers were included on every such list. Canadian truckers launched the Freedom Convoy movement in January 2022 against the Canadian government’s mandated unequal treatment of Canadians based on anti-Covid jab status, and blocked the Canadian capital and borders until their demands were met — even as the finance minister announced the blocking of the personal bank accounts of donors to the movement. But in 2023, it was European truckers from Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary who made headlines in defense of their countries’ economic sovereignty as they blocked their respective borders with Ukraine to protest the supranational European Union’s policies of loosening restrictions on allowing Ukrainian products and services in their own countries to their own competitive economic detriment. At one point earlier this month, the line at one of the border crossings was reported to be 127 hours long — a fitting tribute to heavy-handed EU bureaucracy.

European farmers: When the EU decided that Ukraine should be able to get its grain out of the conflict zone to feed the poor folks in Africa and Asia, somehow it wasn’t able to facilitate that without dumping all over itself, like a toddler, much of the grain coming through Europe. It was Eastern European farmers in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, who reacted to their own product being devalued by imposing unilateral import restrictions. Helping Ukraine doesn’t mean that the drowning victim gets to pull down the rescuer so that both sink into the economic abyss.

In the Netherlands, farmers turned out by the thousands to protest their government’s push for conformity to EU climate directives by whittling down the size of their operations (and livelihood) to what the big-brained bureaucrats in Brussels deem an acceptable number of cows whose farts and waste risk destroying the planet. Shortly thereafter, the movement had given rise to the Farmer-Citizen Party, which became the largest party in the country’s senate and local elections. By November’s general election, the establishment prime minister had been swept out of office in favor of a right-winger.

And German farmers blocked Berlin with tractors in December, refusing to accept Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s efforts to compensate for misguided spending by conveniently citing climate change to kill subsidies on the diesel fuel that runs farm equipment.

Schoolteachers: It’s a miracle that any educator in the Western world can teach at all these days— or that they all haven’t just given up and left the profession. So those who manage to survive a minefield of wokism on a daily basis and actually manage to turn society’s next generation into educated critical thinkers, are absolute heroes. Seems that you can’t even teach math these days without entertaining or indulging the notion of it being sexist, racist, or classist. Then there’s the daily challenge of trying to figure out which pronouns each student decides they identify with on a given day. How does one even have an educational debate or discussion of controversial issues anymore?

Here in France, where teachers have recently been stabbed and even beheaded, they’re now regularly exercising their right to withdraw as a result of threats from parents as the result of doing their job. A Parisian middle school teacher was recently accused of Islamophobia for showing a classic 17th- century painting to her class that happened to feature fat cherubs that happened to be nude. Teachers at another Parisian middle school doing media analysis of the Israel-Gaza conflict referred to approved class material that qualified Hamas as a “terrorist group” — the official position of the French and EU governments — and sparked parental outcry. Imagine what an actual debate about the use of the term would have unleashed. Yet such controversial and provocative debates ideally are supposed to be the whole basis of an actual education. Anyone who can navigate this mess, keeping a legitimate educational mission intact that doesn’t veer into indoctrination, despite all the establishment pressures to do so, deserves an award.

Here’s hoping that 2024 sees more of this kind of everyday courage that has the power to shape the world just as much, if not more, than the actions of a handful of celebrities. And if you’re one of those people exercising your free speech rights in an era of creeping censorship, then consider yourself among these heroes, too.