Get people to panic. Then tell them you can fix what’s causing the panic, if they’ll simply follow your lead. Then tell them that your solutions are the only ones that will prevent the cause of the panic from returning. Rinse and repeat. Now you’re in control. This is what our political class has been doing to us. Gaslighting is the word you’re looking for. It comes from a story and movie starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman who’s husband is deliberately trying to drive her crazy. One way he does it is to have the gas lamps in their home go high and low. When she comments on it, he says nothing happened. He also has the servants in on it. So, she thinks she’s the only one who can see the lamps going up and down. Combined with other despicable acts by the husband, like telling her that whatever else she’s seeing and experiencing is in her head, she begins to believe she’s crazy. Her husband has gaslighted her.
The end goal is not elimination of the virus. That’s not going to happen. Even with a vaccine, it will be back. The flu comes back every year and we have flu shots. A coronavirus is what a common cold is. This will be back. Bear in mind, though, it is most emphatically not lying in wait for you to walk out of your front door without a mask (despite what you’ve been allowed to assume). Nor will you get infected by walking past somebody on the sidewalk. About the only consistent, and apparently reliable, data we have access to points to age and underlying medical conditions, in combination, as the highest risk factors for death due to COVID-19. Does that mean somebody who does not hit those markers cannot get infected, and cannot succumb to this illness? Of course not. What that means is that is is HIGHLY UNLIKELY they will. There are always outliers. Always. Look at it this way…a product/drug/whatever, claims that 99% of those using it have found relief. That means that 1% did not. When you hear those stats rattled off in TV ads…suicidal thoughts, nerve damage, blindness, cancer…that means that in the trials of that drug THOSE THINGS HAPPENED TO SOME PEOPLE. That’s how they know!
Yes, we’ve had approximately 150,000 deaths in the US from this virus (that’s .04% of the total population). But something like 80% of those deaths were people over the age of 75. You can thank Andrew Cuomo and Tom Wolf for their policies of requiring nursing homes and assisted living facilities to readmit residents who had tested positive or had symptoms of COVID-19. They stuck all those sick individuals back into homes with the rest of the most vulnerable population and then locked them all in. Here in PA immediately prior to issuing that order, the PA Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, pulled her mother out of her assisted living facility and put her in a hotel. It’s almost as if she knew her mother would be in danger is she stayed in the facility…hmmmmm.
The entire “response” to the virus has become an exercise in inducing continued panic while presenting greater and greater controls. It has gone well beyond actually having anything to do with slowing the virus. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, but this is certainly one of those times when the political class (and I am excluding POTUS, which if you can control the frothing OrangeManBad!! actually makes sense…states are responsible for state policies and those states with the highest death rates are…wait for it…blue states!) follows Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and never lets a good crisis go to waste. Need more evidence? Look at the ever changing demands of BLM leaders, teacher’s unions, state level policy makers, etc. Once the virus itself was as controlled as it’s ever going to get, they’ve started backing and forthing on everything that went before. Open up and get new cases? Yes, that will happen. What we’re not getting is how many of those new cases are 1) NOT the result of false positives (just search for “false positive tests” and see how many stories come up), and 2) how many of those new cases actually get sick. We’re told that large numbers of people are wandering around with the virus but are asymptomatic. What’s yet to be clarified (and likely won’t because it makes all these lockdowns and other mandates useless) is how frequently those asymptomatic cases are actually contagious.
In the end, if large numbers of us are asymptomatic, then the point of wearing masks, social distancing, etc. is gone. And when those are gone, control is gone. When control is gone, well, we go back to doing what we all do best…living our lives and taking care of our families.
Keep going. Do what you feel most comfortable doing. But don’t expect me to copy you. I don’t expect you to copy me.
In the end, we win and they lose.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
