Learning Your Place
Perspective is everything, some insist. In any case, this bromide is never more applicable than in a time of universal enslavement. For then, perspective is indeed “everything” — the perspective of an ant looking up at the godlike shoes clomping around its tiny world, capriciously determining its fate at their leisure, almost absentmindedly, and certainly without a moment’s serious consideration of any ant’s interests or preferences in the matter.
Just now, I read the following news headline at MSN (and the very fact that this sort of headline is given the status of “news” is telling in and of itself): “Gates, Fauci give timelines for return to normal life.”
Wonderful bit of perspective there, wouldn’t you say? A corporate progressive of the World Controller type, whose only claim to having any say in anyone else’s life is his own financial or vanity interest in this or that outcome, and a lifelong government apparatchik of the petty paternalistic powermonger type, are declaring their “timelines” for your “return to normal life.” That is to say, they are stating, with all the authority of people who have no legitimate authority whatsoever, their preferred timelines for your future. This is what they want to do to you — and if their partners, their fellow giant shoes, happen to agree with them, then this is exactly what they will do to you. You will have absolutely no input in the matter. You will keep your mouth shut, keep your mask on, and obey their preferred timelines for your life, for the life of your family, for the character of your elderly loved ones’ final months of life, for the nature of your children’s education, for the size of your national debt, the condition of the world economy, the permissible forms of commerce, and the limits and/or punishments assigned to everyone’s daily activities.
You are an ant. They are the big shoes. These important men with their “timelines” for the world’s return to “normal life” — that’s Normal 2.0 of course, the “new normal,” normal with shorter tethers — are school nerds puffed up on revenge fantasies of sticking it to all the popular kids who made them feel insecure growing up. “We have a timeline for your return to normal life,” they declare, as though your enslavement to their whims may casually be regarded as the rule — as though the current “abnormal” life in which we are all trapped were caused by anything other than the paternalistic whims of these same controllers and apparatchiks.
That is to say, “normal life” is now exposed for all time as the life of an anthill, a colony of tiny, insignificant beings forever forced to keep one eye on the big, big shoes above our heads, hoping they will spare us this time, hoping they approve of our actions today, and hoping they will not destroy all our construction work yet again, as all their kin, the careless and self-aggrandizing big shoes of this Earth, have done, over and over, throughout the sorry history of our species. By “our species,” I mean ants, of course. We are not yet worthy of being called human beings.
