AND THE EARTH DID NOT SWALLOW THEM
A few years ago, an eccentric friend took me to forage wild mushrooms. We found two circular fourteen-inch-diameter mycelia under oak trees. We picked them and ate one.
Not gonna lie: I was a little dubious about doing so. But we survived, divided the uneaten remainder and each brought some home. We sold the other, whole mushroom to the chef at a local, high-end restaurant, The Frog and The Peach, for $75. Cash.
Similarly, the excellent, tragicomic 1987 movie, Hope and Glory portrays a British family that flees from air-raided London to farm country in order to avoid German bombs.
As the others stand in the kitchen, the family’s father enters the house and heads to the breakfast table one day toting a large, rusty, generic tin can of breakfast jam. He found the can washed up on the shore during his morning walk. The can is marked as a German military ration. The jam finder surmises that it came from a German vessel that the British sank.
Given wartime rationing of such tasty, frivolous foods, Dad takes his seat and apprises those standing around the table of their collective good fortune. But instead of being happy and eager to eat some jamma from heaven, Mum anxiously demurs, saying that the jam might be a stealth German weapon. Perhaps it will explode when it’s opened or poison them if they eat it.
They argue briefly about whether or not the Nazis would bother to leave explosive or toxic jam cans on the British coast. The teen daughter adds that eating a German product would be disloyal to The Crown. The family is swayed by these concerns and pleads with Dad to promptly remove the can from the house.
Exasperated by his families’ fearful unwillingness to share the can’s contents, Dad exclaims “Jam is Jam!” as he slams the table and the startled group jumps. Then, as everyone looks on with trepidation, he takes out his pocketknife, stabs and then saws the can open, and repeatedly, defiantly and contentedly stuffs oversized spoonfuls of jam into his mouth.
See Hope and Glory | Full Movie | CineClips (youtube.com), at 54:30.
This scene foreshadowed and perfectly symbolizes Coronamania. Dad’s flummoxed facial expression as his family frets about the jam resembled mine on many occasions during the past four years when I saw locked places, mask wearers, test lines and jab ads and heard the many deeply stupid things people said. People stopped doing things they loved because of wildly irrational fear, groupthink and some goofy conception of patriotism.
Unfounded fear prevents people from doing various fun stuff: riding roller coasters, getting out on a dance floor, talking to strangers, traveling to unusual places, swimming in the ocean, trying new foods, jumping into water from cliffs or asking girls/women out on dates. But if you do these, and other mildly challenging activities, or engage in various forms of mischief, you realize that you’ll survive; you might even like these things. If fear paralyzes you, you’ll miss life’s best experiences.
For many months, most people treated normal life as perilous. But as Coronamania dragged on, people gradually resumed their old, ostensibly “risky” behavior: they walked in both directions in store aisles, used public transportation, ate in restaurants, watched sports games in full stadiums, visited family members and neighbors and exercised at gyms, etc. Masks became rarer. People rejected the boosters. Test centers closed.
As increasing numbers of people gradually returned to normal, the Earth did not swallow them. No viral catastrophe ensued.
Ultimately, this diffuse, fragmented return to normal showed that those who gave up normal life and feared a vastly-overhyped virus incrementally and very belatedly figured out that the lockdown/mask/test/vaxx critics had been right all along: none of these gimmicks ever made sense or worked.
But the fearful will never admit this. Because they lack humility. And they can’t concede that latter day jam-eating, i.e., normal life-living, “non-experts” like me spoke the truth—which they had labeled as “reckless” or “conspiracies”—while their beloved experts, politicians and media told them lies, which they gullibly accepted as gospel.
Yes indeed. Part of me misses those days as I got a second chance to feel like a rebellious teenager, walking through store aisles maskless, hoping someone would say something. They never did though. The only time I got pushback was when I got kicked out of a favorite brewery by a "manager" guy/hero who could not bear my maskless presence ordering beer, risking the lives of all around like some sort of anthrax hand grenade. Not on his watch! None of the other staff ever said anything until this guy showed up one day, saw me, and got all hot and bothered. It was worth it though, for the memory. And I made him earn it, pretending I couldn't hear him until he lowered his mask. LOL. Fun times. I guess there's always a silver lining.
The worst thing about the “Jamdemic” isn’t that it mysteriously appeared out of nowhere.
Nor that most fell for being scared to death of it.
Not even the several blatant examples of lunatic behaviors that I can never unsee.
The human cruelty that poured forth unchecked.
The loss of friendships/relationships.
The unnecessary and mostly ignored deaths and maimings.
The capture of trusted experts.
Our handcuffs that our authorities never had to wear.
Force feeding of unsafe and ineffective snake oils.
Destruction of individual sovereignty.
Nay.
The worst thing is happening right now in the aftermath. It’s called…
Apathy.
Nobody, not my friends, neighbors, family or coworkers wish to acknowledge the Jam’s underlying innocuousness and the folly of being afraid of it.
Some still test for Covid at the first sniffle.
One loves cockily repeating that IVM is “horse paste.”
My elderly inlaws are taking their requisite boosters. Still alive.
Those that know better are seeing the perpetrators living their best lives while most of society refuses to acknowledge the unnecessary suffering they caused.
The idea that the truth will come out is bleak. That the purveyors will be punished? Bleaker.
They seem to have won, no?
Undoubtably they’re taking notes. Sifting through the data. So the next generation most certainly will throw the unopened can of jam in the trash. Safe, where it belongs.
I resent that I have these memories. I didn’t want them nor did I ask for them. But, it is what it is. So I will eat my delicious jam, alone, sad, that virtually all of my brethren still refuse to join me.