Don’t trust leaders and pay your parking meters

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

They tell us we’re at the back end of this international disaster, this plague many are blaming on China although to me it became a convenient political tool for a number of Democratic governors to bring down the economy.

Between media and the hype, we get from the government, everybody seems convinced if they go outside, they will die.

One friend claimed we are living in a science fiction movie. I think of it as more of a Shakespearean play.

The whole pandemic seems as contrived as all the other political dramas drawn up after the 2016 presidential election, only more desperate.

After all the previous attempt to bring down Trump, the pandemic seems like a hail Mary pass designed to create chaos and fear, out of which the Democrats might be able to reshape the upcoming election in their favor.

This may explain why Democratic governors are the most resistant to helping restore the economy.

Even the plague itself isn’t cooperating, ending far too soon with far too few casualties – far from the 200,000 to 1.6 million the CDC originally predicted and more in line with the 20,000 deaths annual Flu season brings.

There is a new move to claim that there was an undercount.

The most obvious manipulation is the “positive” count that we get from the various testing centers – designed apparently to make up in volume for the lack of bodies.

This hasn’t stopped media from playing the death card to the hilt – naming every celebrity that has passed the way they never did in past pandemics.

Scared people everywhere point to the fact that many more people are being hospitalized and put on ventilators when none of us really know if this was a problem in the past – I have headlines from previous pandemics that sound nearly as hysterical at the current ones, but seem to lack the backdrop of the upcoming election to give them emphasis.

Our governor changes the rules daily – so that by the height of the disaster, he has us all wearing masks when for more than a month, this was optional. He closed the parks because some people came too close to each other, people he called knuckleheads.

Old people suffered the most and were ignored most in our state, as the governor spent most of his effort making prisoners of the healthiest yet sent no medical help to those people most threatened. He seems to have to abandoned the old and vulnerable in the same way they did in Italy, pumping up the volume of dead.

Each day, we get more restrictive rules that seem pointless since we’ve lived with the virus since November when businesses and the U.S. Post Office reported numerous sick outs.

Everybody is too scared to go out or when they do, they are wrapped up like mummies, wearing masks they hope will keep them from becoming ill, and gloves to keep them from touching anything that might give them the disease.

Since the state is only testing those who are already ill, and guarantee an increased rate of positives, we really don’t know how bad this epidemic is – New York has more than 4000 deaths, but all but slightly over 100 were people already at death’s door from some other ailment, often well over 70.

It’s almost like this is a baby boomer virus, designed to rid the world of the excess population that changed the social dynamic of the planet after World War II.

Since I’m of that age and have some risk factors, I ought to be as terrified as everybody else.

But I refuse to live in fear. I gave up looking for ghosts under by bed when I was 10, and think it is absurd to trust leaders who have an agenda that does not correspond with my best interests.

One friend called this the greatest story of the 21st Century, in itself a vast exaggeration considering the short-term memory of the masses. Even media – which fed on the dead like vultures for weeks – has turned its attention to new disasters, looking in the path of tornados for bodies the virus cannot longer supply them.

I hope to look back at this moment from a time when we all realize just how much we were manipulated and understand the real virus was the terror, not the disease, and the real lesson is not to rely on media or government as a savior. Neither can be trusted.

Bob Dylan said it best, “don’t trust leaders and pay your parking meters.”