The day the sky fell…
Four years ago there were some very significant developments. On Saint Patrick’s day 2020, I was sitting in a nearly empty pub, enjoying some corned beef and a glass of house cab, with the knowledge that things would be very different from thereon out. I would go on to pen The Tenth, which was set in the near future, four years later, in 2024. It was an exploration of what life would be like in a slightly post-apocalyptic world following a flu outbreak, as a setting for a Bruce Highland styled conspiracy novel. It never really did very well. I don’t blame folks, it’s depressing.
Things have largely settled down since the panic-demic, but life isn’t the same, not by any stretch of the means. Literally thousands of small private businesses have been destroyed, and a lot of individuals and families still to this day have not recovered. That’s actually the lesser problem. The larger problem is that our state government was allowed to run recklessly amok, completely out of control of the people, setting a new bar for the destruction of freedom and civil liberties, fueled by relentless widespread panic campaigns conducted by the major media networks and the federal government. Folks, we ain’t getting those back, not easily, because most people don’t even realize they are gone. Stalin. Lenin. Trotsky. Marx. They wrote the playbook. State and federal leaders executed it. Remember pre-WWII Germany? German citizens - and the military, were systematically and methodically conditioned to accept seemingly innocuous measures, leading up to the point where they were asked to do the reprehensible. Not all bought it, but too many did.
I did another thing. I made a post to my Facebook page explaining the whole thing as I saw it, and it basically went viral. The overwhelming majority of the replies were in agreement with me and I had hundreds of shares. But of course not everyone agreed with me. There were some that accused me of being dangerous, for daring to speak out against the government. Fair enough. I actually took that as a compliment - if I was dangerous enough to illicit a response from the public, I must be doing something effective. I hope I was. I even made an offer to one gentleman that, if in four years, everything returned to normal, I would personally buy him a beer. I do not personally feel that I in fact owe him a beer. Many businesses can’t even get people to come back to work in their places of employment to this day.
There was worldwide panic. It is interesting to note that an actual communist country, Vietnam, actually was one of the more responsible acting countries during the time. Initially, they came down with an iron hand, locking down citizens in the major cities to house arrest in their own homes, unable to earn a livelihood and support their businesses. The government quickly realized ‘hey, we’re killing ourselves economically by doing this’ and that silliness ended in a matter of weeks. Did people drop dead in the streets as a result of a return to normality? No, actually they didn’t.
Love to hear your thoughts. And you can disagree with me if you want.
