MOCKING CORONAMANIA

Having, over the past 20 months, not seen many people they used to see, I wonder if people are experiencing, or will soon experience, a Rip Van Winkle Reaction to the rediscovery of various extended family members, friends and activities. It’s as if we’ve been socially/experientially asleep during the Scamdemic, and will find it disorienting to have lost a 20+ month slice of normal life. Those you haven’t seen for that long will look different: older and perhaps heavier. So will you and I.

Yesterday, along with a smiling, unmasked photo someone had taken of me at my outdoor workplace that morning, I sent an e-mail to about 40 people I know, many of whom I haven't seen in the past two years because they live in Covid terror:

For those who haven't seen me in two+ years and might pass me on the sidewalk and not recognize me.  Sorry for removing my mask.  I put it back on right after the photo, I swear!  And if my arm looks swollen, it's from my third shot.  

World is a man-made mess, but a sunny, cool morning spent working with people I like.  Two functioning legs, arms and hands. Nothing hurts.

Thanks be to God. 

I hope you are happy.

Only five recipients replied, each congenially. I guess that means that many of the other 35 didn’t like my message. 

This doesn’t surprise me. I know sarcasm doesn’t play well; I seldom employ it. But Coronamania has been so absurd that it warrants, invites, and even requires, satire. I don’t worry about alienating some people. The Scamdemic has been the kind of experience during which you learn about others’ character, mental health and critical thinking ability. You weed your garden. You plant new seeds.

Truthfully, I was just messing with some of that message’s recipients.  I wanted some addressees to dislike my message.

During Coronamania, many people have validated and internalized others’ Covid fear level, because doing so is seen as "empathetic" and "nice." Some have told me they’re deliberately accommodating others’ fear. Others may be doing so reflexively. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen movie, Zelig, in which the title character pathologically takes on the personalities of those around him in order to fit in and gain acceptance.

In sports, coaches or commentators sometimes sometimes say a team is “playing down to another team’s level,” i.e., playing poorly and out of synch because that’s what their opponent is doing. Should everyday people dysfunctionally descend into the viral fear abyss of those around them? Empathy isn’t always good; it can be misplaced and damaging. Acting as if Covid fear is rational enables more fear among the fearful. It’s the adult version of affirming that maybe there is a monster under your bed. It’s like buying beer for an alcoholic friend.

In the 1970s movie, Midnight Express, the protagonist/minor drug offender, Billy Hayes, finds himself in a series of squalid, brutal Turkish prisons. In a chilling scene, Hayes is stuck in a dark, windowless room with other prisoners who parade silently and listlessly in a tight circle all day. One of the marchers, an admitted child rapist, approaches Hayes and, while circling, begins to speak in a British accent. He tries to persuade Hayes to accept his fate and to march passively among the catatonic shufflers. Hayes’s self-appointed counselor assures Hayes that all of the circle walkers, including the counselor himself, are appropriately imprisoned because they’re “bad machines.” Then, he condescendingly assures Hayes that “You’re (Hayes) “a bad machine, too, like the rest of us. You just don’t know it yet.”

I’ve felt like Hayes for parts of the past twenty months: living among fear stricken, agoraphobic, masked and “vaxxed” up conformists whom Fauci, the Media and Democrat politicians have both spooked and pacified via endless lies and fearmongering. This would be sad, though tolerable if the cowering herd allowed the well-adjusted to live as we wished. But by requiring universal lockdowns, masks and vaxxes, the Covid Asylum crew, and their political sponsors, have wreaked vast, irremediable, psychological, social and economic damage, especially upon the young.

Since March 15, 2020, I've made as few accommodations to Coronamania as necessary.  I’ve gone outside every day. I attended anti-lockdown protests (with disappointing turnouts) and have very seldom worn a mask. I traveled interstate when it was “forbidden” and declined to quarantine upon return. I made a sign displayed on my front porch that said “OVERREACTION” and another for my car that said “FLATTEN THE FEAR.” I’ve worn “FREE HUGS” and “FRANKIE SAYS NO VAX” t-shirts. (See avatar, above). I’m about to lose my job because I agree with Frankie.

I also painted this on a large piece of plywood that I exhibit on my front porch.

From Day 1, I saw “two weeks to flatten the curve” as a phony, ineffective, harmful, and politically opportunistic strategy. I conveyed that message to anyone who would listen or read. But many naively believed that locking down, masking, contact tracing and, later, vaxxing were necessary and effective. They called dissenters “selfish,” “flat earthers,” “Red State Trumpers” and other epithets parroted from Twitter.

The vaxxes’ obvious, emerging failure—which the government and media now strain mightily to conceal—should cause more people to question how many more lies their “experts” and “leaders” have told, or errors they’ve made, in the past 20 months. Why does anyone still listen to Fauci or Walensky, et al.? Why is Fauci not in some prison, walking in a circle with his brainwashed acolytes?

Neither government officials, the news media, nor the Covophobic will ever admit they were wrong. But they’ve been consistently, thoroughly wrong, as well as deeply dishonest. They’ve repeatedly cooked the infection and death toll books. The “mitigation” measures they required: lockdowns, mask mandates, arbitrary social distancing, contact tracing and vaxxes have all failed. Their slogans are vapid and hollow. They’ve continually moved the goalposts regarding how and when this ordeal ends. They demand everyone to submit to shots that don’t prevent infection, don’t stop viral spread, are temporally linked to much injury and death and have unknown long-term effects, even though the vast majority of the population is at near zero risk.

Lockdown and vax supporters are either ignorant or dealing in very bad faith. In the first instance, their enablement is socially devastating. In the second, their deception is contemptible.

These preachy purveyors of disingenuous, agenda-driven, damaging misinformation for the past 20 months and the Covid Crazy Choir members who supported these strategies deserve only defiance and derision. These are necessary counterforces to all of the terrorists’ misinformation, and the irrational fear of their naive victims.

Coronamania only ends when we say it’s over. Please say “It’s over!” derisively, with me.