Random Socially Distanced Thoughts
Perhaps it’s the Roman Catholic in me, but for whatever reason I am occasionally gripped by an inchoate need for purification through speech, a sort of confessional moment if you will, in which I divest myself of a few wayward thoughts in order to regain my equilibrium. This is one such occasion. Bear with me. Better yet, given that, if you are reading this, you are likely also needing such a cleansing these days, why don’t you join me in the confessional box? We’ll all be able to carry on with life more comfortably tomorrow, I assure you.
If aliens landed on Earth today, and asked me if I belonged to the planet’s dominant race, could I answer truthfully without blushing for shame?
I read this headline the other day: “16,000 dead from COVID-19 in U.S. nursing homes.”
My first thought: Go ahead, Americans, tell me you needed to burn your constitution and formally establish the legitimacy of totalitarianism in your supposedly great nation because you “have to protect the elderly.” Go ahead, contented slaves, accuse me, along with the rest of the tiny and shrinking band of semi-rational beings to which I belong, of lacking compassion for the elderly because I reject your whimpering pleas for Mother Government to protect your empty shells from that object of fear that you deludedly call “death” — as if those who reject the very preconditions of human life have the right to fear death.
My second thought: That figure, 16,000, is entirely made up. You have no idea how many people have “died of COVID-19” in nursing homes, or anywhere else — because your government is not counting COVID-19 deaths. It is merely counting deaths, and then systematically stamping as many of them as possible with the label “COVID-19” in a bald-faced attempt to manufacture justifications for mass panic and massive tyranny. And you — I am speaking to the overwhelming slavish majority, the ones so eager to crush their neighbors’ liberty in a fit of low-minded selfishness — have bought the lies from day one, because you didn’t give a damn about the elderly, or the country they built, but only about your own insignificant material heartbeat. You would have sacrificed your elders by the thousands in a mindless rush to protect yourself. You did.
A Trump administration apparatchik whom the media, in typical propagandistic style for the reality TV age, refers to deferentially as “Dr. Birx,” insists that she finds the current mass protests by Americans demanding an end to police state regulations in their state “devastatingly worrisome.” Yes, I guess she would. What a nuisance these slave rebellions can be.
Oh, I’m such a cynic today! Of course her “worry” has nothing to do with hating disobedience from her inferiors. It’s about…you got it: the elderly.
“It’s devastatingly worrisome to me personally because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our [sic] lives,” Birx said. “So we need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.”
I see, that’s what “we” need to do, because if you make grandpa sick, won’t you feel guilty? Nice. Public shaming: the standard last resort of progressive authoritarian social control, right before they drop all pretenses and send in the tanks.
And if you allow totalitarians like America’s Schoolmarm, “Dr. Birx,” to seize permanent control of the land grandpa fled tyranny to reach in a desperate grasp at freedom for his family, or to tear to shreds the constitution grandpa risked his life to defend on foreign battlefields, won’t you feel guilty?
China is in the process of fully instituting its online “morality score” system — public shaming for the Google age — whereby the government uses algorithms to monitor and assess every citizen’s behavior, purchasing patterns, correspondence, and attitudes, and uses the resulting quantitative evaluation to determine whether you need a visit from the police or perhaps a lock on your bank account.
Do you have any doubt that this sort of system is coming soon to a nanny state near you? Our only realistic hope — and I mean this quite seriously — is that modern democratic governments are peopled entirely by incompetents like Dr. Birx who could never get such a system up and running properly.
Oh, and this:
“As states reopen we really want them to follow the gating criteria, but we also made it very clear to the American people this is what you need to continue to do to protect yourself,” Birx said. “You need to continue to social distance, you need to continue to practice scrupulous handwashing, you need to know where your hands and where they have been and what they have touched, and make sure you don’t touch your face, and I think most importantly if you have any preexisting condition, through Phase One and Phase Two of any reopening we have asked you to continue to shelter in place.”
And in further news from The People’s Daily Star, the government is strongly recommending that you brush your teeth after every meal and avoid between-meal snacks; and in a special request from the president’s recreation czar, you are reminded not to eat cookies right before dinner if you want to be allowed to go out and play this evening.
Shut. Up. (And “Amen.”)
