When the Ugly Truth Just Isn’t Funny Anymore
Throughout these months of trumped-up mass hysteria over the Pandemic that Ate a Planet, the progressive paternalists and their slavish multitudes have masked the dishonorable motives behind their drive to lock down entire nations and shut down entire economies — power lust in the case of the paternalists, mortal fear for their own physical existence in that of the slaves — with one overarching lie: “We have to do this to protect the elderly.”
I have argued on so many recent occasions, and in so many ways, that this pretense at an “altruistic” motive for this civilizational suicide is the biggest crock since the big bad wolf said, “The better to see you with, my dear.” I will not bother reciting all those arguments again — you are welcome to comb through the last few weeks’ posts here in Limbo to satisfy your curiosity.
And if you take the time to read those previous posts, or have already read them, you will observe that I have generally preserved my sense of humor about even the ugliest truths at the heart of all this. It’s fun, and spiritually cleansing in a way, to take a moment, even in the midst of examining the totalitarian collapse of formerly great nations, and the parallel deterioration of the human soul in this age of nihilistic atomism, to laugh at the pettiness of human selfishness, the absurdity of today’s universal dread over a few nasty alley cats in the yard, as though they were a pride of hungry lions, and the lengths to which people will go to rationalize their cowardice and disregard for the lives and wills of their fellow men and civil society.
But there is one glaring fact at the center of all this political inhumanity and inhuman amorality that keeps creeping back into the foreground, seemingly every day at this point, and that quickly puts the lie to all the “This is for the elderly” nonsense in a form so blunt that I simply cannot find a scintilla of humor in it, no matter how dark I am prepared to go for a chuckle.
Nursing home residents the world over are getting infected with the coronavirus in waves, and their “caregivers” and “caring governments” are abandoning them trapped in those disease factories to die a collective, lonely death, denying them family visits, and leaving them no hope of escape.
Ancient men and women are being denied visits from their ancient spouses as they lie in hospital beds or other quarantined accommodations, dying. And their spouses, in turn, are being refused the chance to sit together with their lifelong partners for a few more days at the end, supposedly to protect them from the virus.
In general, old people are being refused the human contact and physical attention that they, most of all, need in their weakest, most vulnerable days, and also the days when they might long the most for a chance to be with someone — not a generic nurse in a spacesuit, but a loved one whose touch they would recognize even if they were in a coma — for a few hours. A loved one to whom they might say something important that they needed to say, or from whom they might feel some emotional connection, some hint of normality, as they struggle to fight off the sirens calling them from Beyond, urging them to give up.
We are denying them this comfort, the sunset solace or deathbed peace, in favor of sealing them away for months of “social distancing” and, if they should actually get sick, with dispiriting quarantine in unfriendly, antiseptic (or filthy) conditions.
“This is for the elderly” my ass. This is for our collective cowardice, and for the authoritarian dreams of a few wicked men, our owners. (I almost wrote “would-be owners,” but this is no time for telling ourselves pretty stories.)
