How many have you killed?

Among the many pernicious effects of the worldwide panic over The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, few are as disturbing as the ease with which public authorities and media propagandists have been able to turn ordinary citizens against one another, effectively raising a universal lynch mob prepared to publicly destroy their neighbors at the drop of a virus-infected hat.

Here is a news report from CTV that perfectly reveals the tenor of our global moment. Some students at Western University in London, Ontario chose, as university students will do, to socialize at the beginning of the fall semester, frequenting restaurants, night clubs, and house parties — and even, as the news article specifies, “sharing drinks and e-cigarettes in some cases.” (I know, I know — how will you ever sleep tonight after hearing of such inhumanity? Friends sharing things! The mere thought of it makes me a little nauseous.) More than two dozen of these socializers have subsequently tested positive for COVID-19. (Personally, I blame it all on those hideous sharers.) In response to these flagrant violations of the university’s social distancing guidelines — “guidelines” being our new universal euphemism for inviolable and arbitrary restrictions on individual choice — Western is banning social gatherings on campus and promising “significant penalties” for students who violate these “guidelines.” Meanwhile, the city of London has officially declared a new “community outbreak,” publicly pointing the finger directly at the evil students, aka at the community’s own children.

The city’s supreme commissar came straight to the point, expressing the community’s official position and detailing the lynch mob’s marching orders in no uncertain terms:

“To those who are part of the problem, I cannot put it any more plainly. If this continues, you are going to kill someone,” London mayor Ed Holder said Thursday, warning that those caught breaking the rules may be subject to fines.

“Should daily case counts remain this high for a sustained period, community spread is near certainty. And it’s a matter of when not if somebody dies.”

“If this continues, you are going to kill someone.” “It’s a matter of when not if somebody dies.” If you violate community “guidelines” by meeting others in public — let alone sharing things with them (ugh!) — you are a problem, and you will be dealt with. You will be held directly responsible for “killing someone” — you will be identified morally as a killer. Today’s global Maoist shame culture does not get any more explicit than that. 

But let us follow that line of moral reasoning for a moment, and accept its premises at face value. Twenty-two-year-olds who attend social gatherings, unaware that they have the coronavirus, and then subsequently learn they had it during those social events, are to be held responsible for any spread of the virus in their community, and in particular for any deaths that may result from their careless act of socializing while infected with a virus that is known to cause life-threatening illness in a small but significant percentage of cases.

So I have a few questions for Mr. Mayor, Ed Holder, as well as for the president of Western University, and for every government health official, head of state, governor, prime minister, CNN addict, compliant sheep, or Twitter moron around the world who shares — yikes! I mean subscribes to — Mayor Holder’s shame culture premises.

Question 1: When you were twenty-two years old, did you ever attend a crowded house party, restaurant, sporting event, college class, holiday dinner, or church service, and then discover, a day or two later, that you were coming down with a case of the flu? (How about when you were thirty-two? Forty-two? Fifty-two?)

Question 2: Have you ever attended any of the above social events even while already knowing that you were a bit under the weather, and suspecting that you might indeed have a touch of the flu?

Question 3: Have you ever had yourself tested for the influenza virus before attending any such event, especially during flu season, when, during every year of your adult life, you were eminently aware, as we always used to say, that there were “a lot of things going around these days”?

Unless your answer to questions 1 and 2, above, is an honest, unequivocal, and verifiable “No, never!” and your answer to question 3 an honest and verifiable “Yes, every single time!” then in fact you have no idea whether, or more truthfully how often, you have contributed to the community spread of the influenza virus. And even if you try to feebly half-defend yourself by saying, “But I never visited my grandmother’s house with the flu,” you nevertheless had no way of knowing how many of the young people you risked infecting might subsequently visit their vulnerable grandparents, which would thus leave you morally culpable, according to your own premises, as applied in the case of coronavirus. And as for your own grandmother, the truth is that you may have had the flu dozens of times in your life without any symptoms, and hence without ever realizing it, such that unless you got tested for the flu within hours of each and every visit to Grandma’s house, you actually have no idea whether, or how often, you visited her while infected.

And yet we all know, and have known for most of our lives, that the seasonal influenza virus causes hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide each and every year, without exception. This year’s novel coronavirus will never cause even a tiny fraction of the total loss of life we have suffered on this Earth due to annual flu outbreaks. On your own premises, Mayor Holder — which are at present every world government’s premises, every mainstream news outlet’s premises, the WHO’s premises, and the vast majority of the global population’s premises — you have behaved far, far more recklessly, immorally, selfishly, even criminally, than any twenty-two year old university student. For you have continued such carelessly infectious, outbreak-fostering behavior repeatedly, throughout your entire adult life. How dare you accuse those undereducated, poorly raised youngsters of being negligent killers, when you yourself have committed the very same offense — not once, and not just this year, but many times every damn year for decades. 

The flu is a highly infectious disease, for which there is no known cure, and which takes the lives of thousands of your fellow Canadians, tens of thousands of your American neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of global citizens every year, Mayor Ed Holder — and you have always known it. And yet every single year, you attended hundreds of potential flu spreader “hot spots” — classes, parties, sports events, family gatherings, city council meetings, crowded restaurants and malls, and on and on — when you had no way of knowing whether you were carrying the flu virus into any or all of those locations. Furthermore, how many dozens of times over the years — be honest, Mr. Mayor — have you attended such non-socially-distanced events or locations when you knew you were ill, when you knew you were feeling unwell, when you knew bloody well that you had the actual, universally-recognizable, highly contagious, and globally deadly flu?

Loose lips sink ships, Mr. Mayor. Be careful whom you go around accusing of being a killer. On your own premises — the world’s own premises today — there is no young college student one thousandth as morally culpable, one thousandth as outright guilty, of spreading a deadly virus, as any of you fully adult, oh-so-respectable, morally self-righteous two-bit totalitarians. 

It is not they who are the real killers, Mayor Holder, and all you Mayor Holders around the world. It is you who are the killers — serial killers in fact. You have been wantonly, recklessly, knowingly spreading a deadly virus through your own communities habitually, regularly, annually, for your entire sickening lives.

That is my honest judgment of all you Mayor Holders of the world, based on your own moral premises. Consider yourselves lucky. If I told you my honest judgment of you based on my moral premises, you would come off a lot worse.