THE SCAMDEMIC WILL MAGICALLY END IN 2022

People ascribe magic to a calendar. And life is full of train metaphors.

On the first day of kindergarten, in order to teach us the months and give her class a sense of identity and community, my teacher cut a locomotive and twelve train cars out of construction paper of several colors. She glued a small photo of each of the fifty students—there was a morning and an afternoon class—in the train car labeled with the month of his/her birth. She connected the train cars, chronologically, left to right, and fastened them to the wall above the blackboard. The train stayed there for the whole school year. I learned the months real good.

Since then, I’ve conceived of a year as a train with an engine and twelve cars. Bound up in that schema is the notion that there’s a big difference between January on the left side of the front wall and December, on the right. But of course, this is arbitrary and misleading. With a December birthday, I soon learned that classmates born in January had birthday parties shortly after mine because they were born shortly after me; they weren’t really born all the way at the other end of the train.

The larger point is that there’s not any magic in putting up a new calendar and giving a year a new number. One day follows another. One year blurs into the next. Nothing says that one year needs to be much different from the one that preceded it.

Over the past week, various people have wished me a Happy New Year, adding “Let’s hope it’s better than the past year.”

People said the same thing to me at the end of 2020.

As if watching an illuminated ball drop on TV and tacking up a new calendar had some intrinsic, magical power to change things. As if you can remain misinformed, passive and compliant entering 2022, and the Scamdemic will go away.

Throughout the past 22 thoroughly theatrical months, most Americans have ascribed magical “Pandemic(!)” ending powers to some plainly arbitrary measures. They naively believed the relentless government and media messages that if only we would:

—lock down for two weeks (to “flatten the curve!”)

—wear masks (“because my mask protects you!” or something like that)

—disinfect everything (even though the virus doesn’t spread via surfaces)

—walk in one direction in supermarket aisles (because your mask doesn’t really work)

—stay six feet apart (see above, plus four feet is not enough)

—close small businesses (while leaving large ones open)

—test and trace (because what works for STDs also works for respiratory viruses…not)

—stay in our home states (even though states’ infection rates were nearly equal)

—elect Biden (because, like Nixon, he had a secret plan to end “The Pandemic(!)”)

-—vaxx! (because it’s “safe and effective and will stop the spread!”)

—avoid family at Christmas (because people should be even more miserable)

—return to restaurants, theaters and stadiums (but only to 25% of capacity)

—continue to uncritically obey the authorities (although nothing they’ve said, worked)

—vaxx again!! (and blame the unvaxxed for continuing infections)

—continue to wear a mask…or two masks! (unless you’re consuming food or beverages)

—keep schools closed (even though kids were never at risk)

—test even more (though the tests are 90% inaccurate, we need to keep scaring people)

—vaxx yet again!!! (only about 100,000 people have died, been hospitalized of injured after injecting; and keep scapegoating and hectoring the unvaxxed, and require them to vaxx, even though the vaxxed are getting infected, spreading infection and dying)

….we could “CRUSH THE VIRUS!” (Yay, Us!)

Actually, the lockdowns, masks and first round of vaxxes were, by themselves, supposed to get this done. The other measures rest were, well, just more “Science!” Conveyed by “Experts!”

People, how gullible can you have been/still be? None of this worked. None of it could ever have worked. Learn some Microbiology. You’re surrounded, and even inhabited, by microbes. You always have been. You always will be. The world cannot be made sterile. You wouldn’t survive in a world without a wide array of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses. You have to co-exist with microbes.

To paraphrase the Good Witch’s message to Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz, the power to end the Scamdemic was always within your power.

If only you had (and now I’m being serious):

—turned off your TVs and radios, Twitter and Facebook and instead believed your own eyes and your own Coronavirus outcome data set comprising people you knew

—considered that only very old, very sick or very overweight people were at any risk

—known that asymptomatic spread was very rare

—weighed the impact of lockdowns and school closures on people besides your lazy, commute-avoiding, laptop-using, fully-paid or subsidized self

—focused on making your body healthier, instead of eating and drinking whatever you wanted and sitting all day

—educated yourselves about inexpensive, preventive supplements and cheap, safe, effective anti-Covid therapeutics with the same level of focus that you apply to learning about sports teams, celebrities, politics, investments, fashion and gossip

—disobeyed governmental restrictions on your assembly and movement.

—refused to be injected with experimental, ineffective, harmful substances

—realized that sometimes some old and unhealthy people pass from this Earth

…this whole thing would have been over in a month. Or less.

A new calendar doesn’t matter. Only your decision to either comply with, or to resist, all of the continuing propaganda and political theater does.

Happy New Year. But there’s nothing lucky about the number 2022 or the Year of the Tiger. Everything will stay the same as long as long as you allow it to.