Or, at least, the world as we know it. There’s no going back. If you haven’t already figured it out yet, returning to the “pre-covid normal” is as impossible as returning to the “pre-9/11 normal.” It’s not going to happen. Too much has changed. Too many assumptions have been challenged. Our fellow citizens have all shown their hands. We know who people are now. Before we could pretend. Somethings in life don’t get do-overs and this was one of them. For better or worse we’re in a new epoch. One that seems to be rapidly accelerating to nowhere in particular.
Every week is the same. People on the right, shouting, once again, that “people are finally waking up!” “They’re sick of the Covid bull-crap!” & “Joe Rogan has them broken!”
The fact that people have been chanting almost identical slogans for over two years now never registers. Everyone has the memory of a goldfish. “In six months this’ll be over,” said the same man six months ago, after having forgotten he said similar six months before that.
On the left it is no different. “If a few more people just took the jab, this would be over!” Apparently they are under the delusion that compliance with polio or small pox vaccines was essentially 100% and that such is also required in our time before we start to notice the pandemic fading away. Well, I’ve got news for them. If either polio or small pox were abolished by vaccines (debatable), it certainly wasn’t with 100% of the population taking them. That’s an insane position. If your plan requires nearly every single individual on a planet of seven billion to participate, it’s a very, very, stupid plan. You’d have better luck getting the whole world to step out side and sing kumbaya together on any given Tuesday. The constant shifting of the covid goal-posts seems lost on them, just as the fact that even the basic premise of “herd immunity” now seems a fantasy of the past. I presume they will continue jabbing and boosting and boosting and jabbing, until perhaps the end of time, since winning a war against a respiratory virus (if we’re even correct about how it spreads, which is arguable, given our inability to do anything about it) is a fool’s errand.
Beyond that, the social fabric of the country, frail as it was before, is now in tatters. People have shown themselves to be willing participants in any tyranny if only they are made scared enough, and the faith of all religions has been pointedly and definitively called out. Catholics say they believe the Eucharist is really the body and blood of Christ. They don’t. We know that now. If they did they would not have so swiftly abandoned him and closed their doors. Protestants fared no better. Neither did the Jews. Perhaps a small smattering of the Muslims kept their faith in time of crises, and good for those that did. By and large it can be safely said that nobody believes anything. Their deeply held beliefs about human rights or the sacrosanct idea of bodily autonomy were tossed out the window as easily as a McDonald’s fountain drink might be on I-10. And with just as much reverence. Their religious convictions were tested, and found wanting. Their desire and ability to love their family members of differing views was found non-existent. Americans serve only money and worship only power. That’s been proven now. You can’t walk that back.
Moreover, the threats that have persisted in political discourse for decades like an attic ghost rattling his chains were shown to be idle. The dogs bark, yes. But they have no teeth. Before covid, a sizable chunk of American men liked to take photos with their rifles and talk about “1776” and “taking on the government” if it got out of line. Well… they didn’t. They rolled over just as readily as the antifa kids and the leftists did when told to worship big pharma, their former nemisis. Corporations may not be people, but quite obviously those on the left are content to make them their masters. As long as Nike makes its logo into a rainbow once a year and enforces medical decisions on its workers, a blind eye will be turned to the slave labor used to make its shoes. Police officers have shown they have no greater conscience than any other citizen. Any law they will enforce, with violence, for fear of losing their pension. The talk in the before-times of “not enforcing unjust laws” was just that, talk. Everybody was bluster. When it mattered, nobody had a spine.
And so.
Now it gets to be over.
I can’t say I’m really surprised.
I had long suspected there was no “there” there, inside the people of the United States. Now it has been confirmed. Worse, they’ve confirmed it to themselves and they know it. The fact that they are cattle is obvious to them. If their employer wants them to get a shot they will do it. They have no choice (in their own minds). They are slaves. In the future if it is mandated that they give blood or have other jabs or donate their kidneys, they will do that too. Their bodies are for sale. They are, in effect, prostitutes, only prostitutes are far more honest about the transactions they make. Can a people like this ever be free? No. They can’t be. Moreover they will not want to be. With every step forward of the iron boot they will cheer and ask for more. Australian women will make tik toks from their concentration camp, and everyone will clap and think it’s cute. Children will be forced to grow and develop in a world without smiles and everyone will applaud. Digital papers will need to be shown to access public buildings, and to buy and sell. Listen… Do you hear the peasents cheer? They are owned, and when the cattle grow too fat the farmer knows to cull.
As I write this many of the shelves are bare at the grocery store. A thing that used to never happen, and be considered a sign of a collapsed or collapsing state when it happened elsewhere. Gas prices are soaring, medical care is, in some places, non-existent. People cannot be present to hold the hands of their loved ones as they die. Grandparents are restricted from being there at the births of their grandchildren. People have so given up on the economy and “success” in the regular world that the only hope they have is scamming one another into buying jpegs of apes. Truth be told, in almost all cases they aren’t even buying pictures of apes, but an “NFT” on the blockchain that contains a url which points to a picture of an ape. But almost none of the people buying and selling them for the price of a Lamborghini know that. Young people do not form families. They exist in a state of perpetual adolescence and, when they do pair bond, do not produce children. This seems to be both a matter of personal choice but also a product of biology. Many suffer infertility problems, far more than is to be expected. Something in the water perhaps. Microplastics or hormones in the food. Whatever it is it is not natural, a sign of a sick society. If you ran a zoo and found none of the animals breeding you’d think something was wrong. When the same happens to ourselves we’re told to think it’s great. Empowering. This is it. It’s over.
I don’t know how long America has. I don’t know how long “The West” has. But I do know that it’s over. The state we’re in now is analogous to a man with a terminal wound. How long it will take to bleed out is uncertain, but the femoral artery is not in good shape and there’s not a surgeon in sight. I suspect there will be oscillations, just as their are when a man is dying. Moments where he gets a good breath and the color returns to his cheeks for a minute and you can think, “Hey! Not so bad.” There will also be moments of writhing in pain. And of screaming. Panting and extreme weariness that will make you think the ending is closer than it is. I give it ten years. Fifteen maybe. Twenty at the far end though that number seems absurd. If the authors of “The Great Reset”, which isn’t a conspiracy theory, have anything to say about it, then something will be quite different by 2030. What exactly isn’t clear.
I don’t even think you can be mad at them. The people doing the Reset, I mean. Such people, and whatever entities may be driving them, are simply decomposers. They are like the bacteria or the vultures that feast on corpses. They’re cleaners, effectively. Cleaners of the dead. They have no power over a population that isn’t broken, like the West is. Broken morally, spiritually, and in most cases physically. The truth is America was already dead. We just didn’t notice until the decomposers moved in and began to eat. Our moral center was gone. We had no heart. No reason for existing.
So.
We’re not going to anymore.
Again, I’m not sure what form it will take. I only know the patient is dying, I don’t know how long he will take to go, nor if he will go quietly or put on quite a struggle. In a way though it doesn’t matter for the prognosis is the same. But what can you, as an individual, do for you and your family to get through it?
I don’t know.
The sad reality is probably not much. When a tower collapses who lives and who dies is largely up to chance. It wouldn’t hurt to take a page from the Mormons and have a little bit of food in storage though, or maybe to get a gun if you don’t currently own one. Pray, of course. Pray a lot. Most of all though, I think the best thing you can do is probably adjust your mindset. Stop thinking this can be “saved”. Stop waiting on a hero. Obama didn’t save you and neither did Trump and neither will Biden. You won’t vote your way out of this death spiral. You won’t violence your way out of it either. America is circling the drain. Not much you can do but acknowledge that and try to cut ties with it, much as you are able.
The ship is sinking, start looking for life boats.
I'm all for seeing reality for what it is, and I don't disagree with your profoundly depressing and accurate assessment... and yet... I also believe that faith -- mine, yours, anyone's -- is all we have left. And rather than thinking that faith is somehow the booby prize, I would suggest that it is the most powerful force we possess. It's faith that sends more protesters into the streets, more lawyers to launch lawsuits, more whistleblowers to step forward.
My hunch is that it's your faith that drives you to write. It's certainly mine. If we can believe with all our hearts that good will prevail -- while seeing with clear eyes that which is NOT good -- we will find ourselves in a new world, one that we created ourselves through persistence and resilience and yes, faith. Admiral John Stockdale, imprisoned and tortured for eight years in the “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War, said this:
“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Your take on the world is brutal and necessary, and I thank you for it. So is your faith. :-)
Unless revival.