Posted on 05/21/2020 7:15:33 AM PDT by SJackson
Life in the Age of the Great UnReason can be difficult for some of us.
Conservatives and others who now take exception to the Internment of 2020the reduction of citizens homes, towns, and states to what amounts to internment camps from which they are forbidden to leave via Shelter-in-Place orderstypically frame their position in terms of reopening the economy.
In doing so, they stack the deck against themselves.
Putting the matter this way cedes the moral high ground to those who want to prolong the Internment, for it invites the latter to depict the conflict as one between those, like themselves, who care about life, versus those conservatives who only care about money.
Indeed, this is exactly what has happened.
Those of us who have recognized the Great Unreason for what it is from the outset and who demand a restoration of America would be well-served to take a different tack. It is we, and not those who insist upon suppressing the country, who have the moral capital:
Tens of millions of people forced out of work;
Over 100,000 businesses forced to close forever, and thousands upon thousands more that have been made to lose millions;
The inevitable increase of instances of suicide and domestic abuse (here and here);
The exacerbation of such mental health phenomena as despondency, depression, and anxiety;
The higher incidences of alcohol and drug abuse (here and here) that invariably correlate with unemployment and alienation;
The loneliness and accompanying depression of untold numbers of elderly and sick people whose families have been forbidden by state governors from visiting them in hospitals and nursing facilities;
The loneliness and accompanying depression of untold numbers of people from all backgrounds who have been alienated from their friends, families, faith communities, and the myriad of other associations to which theyve belonged and that define their identities as the specific, unique individuals that they are;
The people who have grown sicker, and who have outright died, because they have been denied medical attention that has been reserved for COVID-19 patients (here, here, and here);
The exponential exacerbation of tensions between the citizenry, particularly those citizens who otherwise have been their biggest defenders, and police officers who attempt to enforce the oppressive decrees of governors;
The de facto indefinite revocation of the United States Constitution (as New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy now infamously, and ominously, told Tucker Carlson when the latter challenged his authority to, in effect, intern the residents of his state: The Bill of Rights is above my paygrade.);
The promotionvia those Social Distancing protocols proscribing human contact and requiring the wearing of those stupid, hideous masksof something bordering on a paralyzing fear of others;
The unprecedented closing of churches and other houses of worship;
The starving of hundreds of millions and potentially billions (see here)of otherwise impoverished peoples from around the planet whose lives will be made that much more wretched by the disruption of the global food supply chains within which America is the most indispensable of links;
And, let us not forgetwhat the media seems all too ready to forgetthe tens of thousands of elderly, immunocompromised nursing facility patients to die from The Virus because governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York and Phil Murphy in New Jersey forced these facilities to accept COVID patients.
These are the consequences that have ensued from the mitigation policiesbased as they are on the wildly inaccurate models designed by the now disgraced, epically and perpetually wrong Neil Fergusonprescribed by such bureaucrats as Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, enthusiastically promoted by partisan hacks in Big Media, and imposed upon the citizenry by power-hungry politicians.
This is the incalculable human suffering and death brought about by those who coerced the country into Social Distancing.
Physically; emotionally; psychologically; spiritually; sociallythe real crisis, the real existential crisis, confronting all of us is not some virus from which 99.6%-99.9% of those who contract it recover, but the reduction of America to a giant internment camp and its citizens to its prisoners.
It is the mandatory quarantining, or lockdown, of America that comprises the greatest of all public health crises.
Governors, like (#not) my governor, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, style themselves war-time executives. They incessantly appropriate the rhetoric of war to justify their draconian decrees. Yet wars have and can only ever be waged against people, not viruses. It is the residents of their states upon whom they are waging wareven if many of the residents are ignorant of the fact that they are the targets of a (sweeping, remarkably successful) psychological operation and the governors justify their actions in the name of keeping people safe.
Given the foregoing facts, it is high-time for the opponents of the Internment to take the moral high ground that is rightfully theirs. I recommend (for now) taking at least the following two steps going forward:
(1) First, while lockdown is certainly a term loaded with negative connotations, we may be better advised to select the term used here, for internment dredges up in the collective consciousness the memory of a darker time in our history when Americans of certain backgrounds were confined to geographical regions of the country that were made into camps. This is a set of circumstances that most Americans have been determined to never again replicate. In referring to our present situation as an internment, perhaps more people will catch onto its ominous character.
(2) Those in conservative media, especially those on television, like, say, Fox News, should stop with the running numbers of (alleged) COVID-19 infections and deaths and, instead, focus exclusively upon the immeasurable suffering and death brought about by the Internment of 2020. They could spend countless hours reporting on personal stories from around the country of people who have been adversely impacted by it.
Those of us who detest the Internment have all of the moral capital.
Our oppressors who have interned the country, imperiling not just hundreds of millions of Americans, but potentially billions of human beings around the planet, have none of it.
Lets start acting like the moral superiors on this issue that we are.
Lets put the Great UnReason behind us once and for all.
You don’t quarantine well people. Makes them even more vulnerable when things do open up.
And yet, someone is propping up the stock markets. They can NOT be up because of impending economic recovery with all of this going on. It’s impossible.
The American Gulag was a huge social experiment, into what would be the effects of shutting down the engines of capitalism. We have had a taste of what life would be like should the “global-warming” and pro-socialist forces gain the levers of power in this country (or many other countries around the world, for that matter).
Massive amount of vastly under-utilized resources, both human and natural, unable to be delivered to those most in need, and a general aimlessness of the entire population, with a most desultory attitude to what was once widely known and believed, but now just broken dreams.
The COVID-19 virus was most definitely NOT the cause, but it acted as a catalyst for this experiment to go forward.
Can these effects be reversed? Can there be some sort of synthesis that absorbs all the ills resulting from this catastrophic and epic failure, and convert those effects into a positive lesson for all mankind going forward? For these are the kind of events that forged many of the lessons inscribed in the text of both the Old and New Testaments, and tie our own lives to those of our ancestors.
Up to us to find the resolution.
Excellent article, especially the supporting links. Thanks for posting.
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