I actually had moments where I felt glad to be alive yesterday. It was remarkable. I think I can see how one could learn to process life in a calm and pleasing way.
The more I think about it, I think the first and foremost purpose of life is learning to enjoy it. Everything good comes from that. Happy people are naturally more connected, more generous, more open, and in the end, more inspirational and uplifting, in a world which has all the things, but little soul.
It occurs to me to comment/speculate that the primary relationship most Americans–and most members of most developed nations and indeed now many undeveloped ones–have, is the one they have with their screens.
Your TV, your smart phone, your computer: who are you without those? How much anxiety would you feel if they were all suddenly taken away?
The screen is the intermediary between you and your friends, if you are typical. Of course you meet them, see them, talk with them, play with them. But friends are temporary: the screen is forever.
And the screen is mutable. It demands your compliance and conformity, but promises no stability, no constancy, and indeed one of its “charms” is its very randomness and unpredictability.
I’ve seen commentators as diverse as Yul Brenner, Orson Welles, and G. Edward Griffin, comment that we are born alone and die alone, and that whatever companionship we find in the middle is a gift.
But the screen is constant, is it not? Is this a solution of sorts to the interminable and very ancient human problem of betrayal, of misunderstanding, of change and death?
I think much of our world is suffering from some varying combination of Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and not infrequently de facto sociopathy.
People are not real, to to many of us.
Charlie Sheen, but without the intuitive sense of proportion, innate dignity, and ability to delay gratification.
It hit me this morning, doing my Wim Hof Breathing–which likely also has some Sanskrit name–that gratitude is prayer.
This it occurred to me that all four of the Four Greats–equanimity, joy, compassion and love–are also forms of prayer. If you feel calm, that is prayer. If you feel happy, that is prayer too.
It seems both empirically and logically obvious that people who never develop the symptoms of COVID-19 are never really involved in its spread. This means that anyone who has never been “sick” with COVID-19–who has not had at least a briefly elevated temperature, a dry cough, and certain shortness of breath–has never had any reason to wear a mask.
What is madness about our response, and one more thing which is radically new, is that we are all being asked to act, at all times, as if we were sick but don’t know it yet. We are asked to wear masks, not to protect ourselves–because that would then be a matter of personal choice–but a a matter of social conscience. But this exercise is pointless, demonstrably, for 99.9% of us, each and every day. If we are sick, we know it, and there is every reason to stay home. That part makes sense and has always made sense. But if we are not sick and have never been sick, every moment of discomfort we have endured has been pointless, at least if we believe the data that masks are useless as PPE, and are only being recommended as Source Protection.
What spreads this or any other virus is little viruses in your breath, which have replicated in your lungs or elsewhere in your body, and which mingle with the moisture in your breathing. If you are in close contact with someone long enough, a certain number of these things lodge in your lungs, and then if allowed to by your immune system, replicate.
If you imagine fogging up a mirror with your breath, and all the water droplets which make up that fog being mingled with viruses the same size or smaller, you get an idea. We are all surrounded by a small cloud at all times.
But at least half the people who test positive for the presence of COVID-19 never develop symptoms. None of those people, most likely, are EVER contagious, because the “viral load”, as it is called, never develops sufficiently in you for you to spread it to others. Only symptomatic and–most importantly–PRE-symptomatic (people in whom the virus is incubating rapidly) people can spread this thing.
Every winter some 60 million people “get” the flu. But those are only the people with symptoms. There is every reason to believe that hundreds of millions of us are exposed every flu season, and that if we treated flu the way we are treating COVID-19, we could create the same mass panic every winter.
This thing is causing less than ten percent of the deaths, and overall mortality in 2020 is on track to be about what it was in 2019 and 2018. There is no mass dying going on. There is not even that much sickness, when you consider that some portion of the populace is sick with something all the time.
Most of us live our lives in fear of some future some part of us is trying to create.
Here is the open question: WHAT WOULD IT TAKE for the people feverishly supporting Joe Biden to give up their support of him? The True Believers, I mean.
One left wing commentator a few months back said she would still vote for him if he ate babies. I literally think she meant this.
Would it matter that the Chinese have bribed him with something on the order of a billion dollars? Would it matter if his son was really guilty of the crimes he is accused of by at least Alex Jones–who never lies, but who often takes grains of data too far–, which is to say the rape and torture of ten year old girls? Would that do it? What if Joe himself was guilty?
Ponder all this. Sort through the feelings. SEE the sickness which is everywhere around us, the smoke, the smell, the fire.
I have for some time been accusing the Left of being a cult. I well remember the dream I had shortly before Obama’s reelection, of people voluntarily being decapitated, and my decision to call them the “headless ones” back then.
I had a dream of Joe Biden too. I won’t share the details, but I honestly believe that he is a murderer. It’s intuition. I have zero evidence. But that is what I believe.
Be all that as it may, WHAT WOULD IT TAKE? Is it not MADNESS that things have done so far? What has Trump done to be so hated? Nothing.
He talked with Ice Cube, not Joe Biden. He appointed the first openly gay Cabinet member, not Barack Obama. He has a plan to help black America–the Platinum Plan–not Joe Biden. And Obama never even TRIED. He obviously did not see any reason to. He had the black vote, and he obviously did not care about them. There was not then and is not now any compassion. He is a cold fish.
I think I know how Cassandra must have felt. Obviously, there are a lot of people like me, but it still feels like I exist much more closely to this madness than most. I feel it, it enters me, I can smell the crazy on so many people’s breath, see it in their eyes. It is far deeper than most realize.
I think Trump needs to have a private screening of the pictures and videos from Hunter Biden’s laptop, for media, bloggers, and anyone else who makes sense. Hell, maybe Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg need to be a part of it.
And for that matter, if it is true we have videos of Hillary from Anthony Weiner’s laptop, add those.
For my part, I would gladly sacrifice the effective prosecution of the guilty in order to get the truth of the matter in the public domain. Let them be shunned by most the rest of the lives–lives they live out in freedom–but let the American people know the truth of what has been happening.