The year is 2020, and a pandemic rages on around the world. Only not all of us are quite sure it still is a pandemic, if ever it was. There is some debate about that.
So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the perception of a pandemic rages on.
Or perhaps it would be still more accurate to say that a debate rages on.
Do you wear a mask everywhere you go? In the stores, at the park, in your place of business, and while driving to and fro in your car? If not, you may be doxed and told people hope you and your family die.
Will your kids be going back to school this fall? Supposing they do, they may wear a mask all day. But will they have recess? Probably not. Will they have sports? Perhaps some day. But the leagues that make money and support Leftist causes will. Will your kids have meaningful social interaction? Not so much as they will have “social distancing.”
Better yet, is hydroxychloroquine and zinc a viable treatment for COVID-19? We cannot even have that debate. Trying to will result in your attempts at engaging in the public discourse being suppressed, your content flagged with warnings, and your account being suspended or deactivated. And if you are a doctor or medical professional or anyone else with clout, you might even find yourself fired if you express independent analysis.
But at least you can go to church. Or can you?
In many places, the answer is in the negative. If your pastor flouts the prohibition, he will be threatened with arrest and fines or jail-time. And some people in his congregation and the broader community will denounce him angrily, and you as well if you support him.
The Fractures & Rifts
The year is 2020, and chaos reigns. Listen to “the experts.” Who are they? Yet another debate rages on.
President Trump and Republicans don’t care if black people die. America is and always has been systemically racist. Let us rewrite history. And supposing that does not take, or we cannot pull it off convincingly, abolish the subject entirely.
Trust the media. Listen to the pretty talking heads giving you small doses of the almost-truth. But angrily write-off and dismiss anyone who ventures beyond the carefully scripted and oft-repeated narrative the major outlets and your Leftist betters contrived.
Conspiracy theorist. Nutjob. Whack-a-doodle.
Even if you are right, you are wrong. Do not say that. You may lose your job. You may lose friends. Your family may never talk to you again.
Someone was offended by what you said. Or they may have been. Or they may some day be. At this rate, everything you say or do, and do not say or do, can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. “Silence is violence,” the protest signs tell us. But so also, your language is violence.
You are a Nazi, an Uncle Tom, a sellout, or an ignorant backwoods hick if you hold onto even a shred of what we felt and thought and believed a year, decade, or century ago.
All institutions must bow. Everyone must bend the knee – not figuratively anymore. Quite literally. Only complete submission and surrender will suffice. Anything less will cost you, perhaps even your life.
The People’s Tyranny
The year is 2020, and this is the new love. It hates you unless you cave to its every demand.
This is the new tolerance. It will not tolerate you talking back to it.
This is the new righteousness. And you, foul naïve, will suffer the death of a thousand paper-cuts if you dare to oppose it.
Or else “mostly-peaceful protestors” will show up at your house and ask you to step outside. They just want to talk. Go on out for an honest conversation – at 5AM, with torches and pitchforks, and high-powered lasers shone in your eyes to blind you. They come in peace.
So many if not most of your countrymen mute themselves. Self-censor. Be quiet. Keep your head down. Save yourself. Live to fight another day.
Yet this is the furor and ferocity with which opposition to the new regime is treated, and you cannot stand up to it today? Just wait until it has really entrenched itself. If this is already too much, it is only going to get harder.
Then again, perhaps that is the takeaway. Most of America failed to realize the extent to which this tyranny had already embedded itself in all our institutions until we were well into the all-out assault on our liberties. We were too busy to be bothered.
But there I go again, talking crazy. It sounds like paranoia to say this was coordinated.
Do not be silly! This is all grassroots, right? This is all spontaneous! The violence and destruction and deceit – it is all just a heartfelt expression of “the new normal.”
But wait. There is more. This is actually your fault. You voted for President Trump. This is what you get. You had this coming. You have no one to blame but yourself for having antagonized the lynch mob.
Going Out Of Business
The year is 2020. Store closing. Fire sale. Everything must go.
Liberty, 50% off. Buy one get one free on inalienable rights. And, look! Free markets and private property have a mail-in rebate. But is the Constitution and Bill of Rights still under warranty?
Generations who know nothing so well as their preferences, pleasures, and feelings never learned to repair broken things. All they know to do with a broken thing, or some object they do not like because they do not understand the utility of it, is to curse and throw such things away.
Is the country broken? If it was not before, it certainly is now. And are we fixing it, or are we breaking it more, and irreversibly?
Harder, faster, stronger.
One man’s dirge is another man’s block party.
And for every pastor who long ago prepared to give the graveside eulogy for America, there are ten who are ready to shout Hallelujah.
And for every ten pastors shouting Hallelujah, there are a hundred who somberly stand on the sidelines insisting that their calling is the gospel. Do not get political. Never pick sides.
Did they think highly of Obama’s rules of engagement for our armed forces during the War on Terror? Shoot back only once they have shot you and your buddy and the two of you are bleeding out. Then, and only then can you engage the enemy. Maybe.
But then perhaps “enemy” is too strong when we prefer whatever mealy-mouthed words we estimate will save our pitiful necks.
There are no enemies here. We are all friends. We are all brothers, even when some of us are actively trying to destroy all God’s notions of good and evil, of right and wrong, and of truth and falsehood.
The Real Sickness
The year is 2020. And what ails America?
Some say COVID-19. Others say political correctness.
Some say partisan tribalism. Others say social justice.
Some say a stubborn, selfish preoccupation with “rights.”
Others say a flippant dismissal of the rights of others in favor of naked self-promotion, self-preservation and group-think.
The truth is that America is sick, but not with COVID-19. America is sick with cowardice and complicity and apathy in the face of the greed, envy, and blood-lust of what at first was a very vocal minority which the public was too busy amusing itself to death to take seriously.
So now what was at first a very vocal minority makes up an increasingly large-scale threat, particularly where stupid efforts to pacify and appease the mob only make it stronger.
The firefighters turned their water cannons on the inferno only to douse it with gasoline. Then, when the smoke of our national ruin rose ever higher to heaven, they turned and accused those who had been warning of this threat as the real instigators.
The Democrat politicians presiding for decades over high-crime cities and states blamed Republicans.
The social justice warriors in the church – whether in the pews or behind the pulpits – blamed conservatives.
And most of the country residing somewhere in the middle, at least so far, has opted for some combination of paying lip-service to the new morality, and biting its tongue where it disagrees.
“Peace, peace,” they tell us. But there is no peace. And the wounds of our people are healed lightly by false prophets, and those who want nothing in life so much as comfort and safety.
The year is 2020, and sin and vice and falsehoods of every kind rage. But who has sufficient courage and strength of convictions to resist the Devil until he flees from them?