Writing with a pen in a journal is a different exercise from writing at a keyboard — this almost silent scratching out of words in the old way, as Hawthorne and Emerson must have done, the words forming letter by letter from my hands — but I repeat myself.
Of course, if I write every day, I’m going to repeat myself from time to time over the course of a lifetime or even over the course of a few weeks, months or years exercising this habit. So …
Repeating myself: Refuse to be Afraid. Free yourself. Dream.
When fears claw at your consciousness, rein them in as best you can. Remember that fear is a way to control you, and ask. Who wants to control me, what do they want, and why? It will help to understand and empower you to go your own way.
Free yourself — choose yourself — give yourself permission — because freedom is a certain, unalienable right endowed by the Creator. That is to say, you were born free.
Dream. See the possibilities. “I have a dream,” the speech, resonates because it touches universal desires — to be left alone to pursue peaceful ambitions and make a better world.
I spent time Saturday morning catching up on the independent journalist coverage of the Freedom Convoy standoff in Ottawa, where the prime minister of Canada and the premier of Ontario continue to defy the people’s demand to loosen the chains they have put on their nation’s economy.
In a remarkable article by Rupa Subramanya that was posted on Bari Weiss’ Substack, “What the Truckers Want,” she noted that it’s not an “anti-vax” protest seeing as the vast majority (some say 90%) of Canadian truckers have received the injections for COVID-19:
“So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.”
Subramanya said she has “spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital,” in part because she lives nearby. “What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.”
As of Saturday the protest/strike has been nonviolent and isn’t stopping despite Big Government/Big Media/Big Tech/Big Pharma’s efforts to smear and misrepresent them. Many local and state governments, understanding the power of the people, have been lifting the mandates that provoked the protests — but the Powers That Be with the biggest stakes in keeping us under the boot, the Justin Trudeaus and Joe Bidens, are doubling down.
Biden’s handlers the other day urged Trudeau to use his powers to do what it takes to open up the Ambassador Bridge between the U.S. and Canada — and they weren’t talking about listening. I fear at some point the government will use violence to break it up, risking civil war rather than following the people’s will, as tyrants always have.
People toss around words like “communist” and “totalitarian” to describe the ideology of this ruling class, but I think “tyrant” is the most appropriate. The word is free of the political implications of communist or Nazi or fascist or whatever, and it names them accurately. They are simply tyrants who want to be in charge, and they don’t cotton resistance. It’s a weird world right now with these tyrants terrorizing everyone.
If “people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people,” then Justin Trudeau may be the most frightened person in the world right now. Frightened people often do stupid things; fair warning.
I really don’t want to be a “conspiracy theorist,” but sometimes you just gotta wonder, says I. Yesterday, while searching for something else she wrote, I found a 2019 article by Bretigne Shaffer called “Is Vaccine Safety Too Dangerous for Us to Discuss?”
It begins with a description of how HuffPost had deleted a 2013 article about “a case in which the U.S. government’s Court of Federal Claims conceded that routine vaccination had aggravated a child’s underlying condition and led to that child developing ‘features of autism spectrum disorder.’” The website even deleted a link to the actual court decision.
This retraction did not occur in a vacuum. The first half of 2019 has seen a coordinated effort to scrub the Internet of any information that is critical of the claim that “vaccines are safe and effective.” The push began last fall, but gained momentum in January when the World Health Organization declared “vaccine hesitancy” to be a “global health threat,” placing it alongside Ebola, cancer, war zones, and drug-resistant pathogens.
On March 1, U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and, after stating that “there is no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases,” expressed his concern that Amazon might be allowing content with “medically inaccurate information.” He asked what action Amazon was taking to address “misinformation about vaccines.”
The thing that raised my tinfoil-hat hackles is that all this scrubbing was taking place in 2019. The article appeared Sept. 3, 2019, a couple months before news started creeping out of Wuhan, China, about a new novel coronavirus, and the rest is history.
I knew the censorship of vaccine questions was real because I have a family member whose otherwise normal child ended up on the autism spectrum not long after receiving a routine vaccination years ago. The “canceling” of my once-outspoken family member was a harsh reality long before “cancelation” was in vogue.
But I didn’t realize the crackdown had ramped up significantly the year before government took unprecedented actions to break the world economy in the name of public health, which led to the effort to shame and segregate people who hesitate to take an experimental medication that has been described as a vaccine. Even the way I phrased that description is subject to “fact-checker” smackdown.
Why was it so important that Schiff asked Amazon to self-censor its inventory and purge anything that may lead people to question whether the giant corporations that manufacture vaccines have their best interests in mind? Shaffer reports Schiff sent similar letters to Facebook and Google, and all sorts of big platforms had begun pruning vaccine “misinformation” from their sites.
When did asking questions about medical procedures and medicine become taboo? What more basic right do we have than the right to have all available information about something that’s going into our bodies, even information that self-serving manufacturers deny is true?
Apparently, it began a year or so before Big Pharma and government began putting pressure on us to get jabbed for our own good and our neighbors’ good.
Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Like I said, sometimes you just gotta wonder.
As athletes from around the world gather to compete in a spirit of peace and cooperation, sabers are rattling in the halls of perceived power. Oh, how weary of this dance we all are.
What a miraculous creation is the human body, which can twist and turn and run and skate with grace and skill and speed. What a despicable creation is the diseased human mind that conjures ways to penetrate and tear and explode the human body.
And for what cause? A patch of territory? A show of strength? A match of pissing? Sometimes I feel the people who built engines of mass destruction are merely itching to pull the trigger to see how well they work.
Or, even more ominous, I wonder if they wish to decrease the surplus population as a favor to those left behind after their havoc is wrought, not remembering that Scrooge was cured of his delusion that human beings may be regarded as “surplus population.”
Why are the vultures of war carrying on while the mission of peace unfolds half a world away? Why do the Powers That Be grow anxious at the sight of strong men and women competing to see who is best at games of skill and strength rather than who is best at killing and maiming?
We have more in common than differences, and that above all frightens the Powers That Be who thrive only when we clash. Shame on the saber rattlers. May they rot in their own mess and leave the rest of us to live together in peace.
So the guy who wrote “Keep on rocking in the free world” generated a kerfuffle the other day when he decided freedom is a dangerous thing.
Neil Young didn’t agree with what Joe Rogan was doing on the Spotify platform, so he demanded that his music be removed from the platform: “You can have Rogan or Young, not both.”
I don’t know much about Joe Rogan other than Young is apparently unhappy that Rogan gives a voice to “misinformation” about the experimental medications that are generally called COVID-19 vaccines. This is exactly what I was talking about the other day when I said we’ve reached the point where it’s risky to say 2 + 2 = 4.
If a doctor tries using a generic drug that has worked against other viruses, and announces success, then Big Pharma and its allies with a stake in costly new medicines declare the doctor unfit to be heard or perhaps even unfit to practice medicine.
If unusual numbers of people start dying of non-COVID maladies, and the surge in deaths coincides with mass distribution of the above-mentioned experimental medication, you point out the “coincidence” at the risk of your own reputation as a sane and credible source.
In a free world ideas get aired, the sound ideas survive, and the unsound ideas report to the dustbin of history. In an unfree world ideas get muzzled or throttled, and a central power decides what is a proper idea. The rest is proclaimed misinformation or disinformation, even if it’s 2 + 2 = 4.
I’m going to keep rocking in the free world, because it’s clear Mr. Young had a better idea 30 years ago.
UPDATE: And now Joni Mitchell, too. This also reminds me of another fact of life: It’s better to own your music, whether via CD or vinyl or download. A stream can be edited or removed, as these incidents show. I can still listen to Neil or Joni anytime on my turntable or digital players.
The “big three” dystopian novelists, I believe, are Orwell, Huxley and Bradbury. In many ways we live in Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia; in many ways we live in Bradbury’s book-burning dystopia; but I think Huxley and his soma-induced dystopia may be closest.
Here is a magic pill to take away your pain; here is a magic pill to make your sex life better; here is a magic pill to clear up your skin, to clear out your lungs, to help you sleep, to keep you awake, to lift your spirits, to focus your mind, to deaden your soul, to conquer your fears, to keep your heart beating, to help you lose weight, to overcome your addiction — there’s a magic pill for everything.
Every few moments there’s an ad for something you need to rebalance your body chemistry so you can live a normal normal life. I don’t have a quarrel with legitimate medicine, but seriously, there’s a pill for every real and imagined disease, and imagination conjures newer diseases and more magic pills every day.
And magic pill manufacturers have placed themselves among the most powerful folks in our society, right there next to the politicians. Follow the money: If you were a media mogul, would you listen to calls to take money out of politics, knowing that the money in politics purchases millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising on your platform? Would you have your news department investigate whether a certain magic pill or vaccine is killing people, knowing that every other non-political ad is for a magic pill?
Or would you hire “fact checkers” to certify that people who criticize certain politicians or question the magic pill makers are spreading misinformation?
Our real dystopia combines elements of Orwell, Bradbury and Huxley, in fact. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the surveillance state is omnipresent. In Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. In Fahrenheit 451, TV screens are so big they take up entire walls, and ideas that make people uncomfortable are illegal. And in Brave New World, magic pills make everyone so comfortably numb that they don’t notice they’re living in dystopia.
All is not lost, of course. The words of Orwell, Bradbury and Huxley are still available, and people are still reading them. I suspect that’s why The Powers That Be have doubled down on dystopia the last couple of years: More and more people are waking up.
At the end of “Revolution 9,” the experimental sound collage that is the penultimate track in the Beatles’ white album, a crowd is chanting “Hold that line! Hold that line!” in what is obviously a sports event of some kind. There’s a flurry of sound, followed by a chant of “Block that kick! Block that kick!” Clearly the opponent has scored a goal or a touchdown, and now the imperative is to prevent the extra point.
We live in an era where it seems the line is not holding. Fact-checkers deny the facts. One might say 2 + 2 = 4 on social media, only to have your post masked by a note that says, “Context missing” or “This post contains misinformation.”
I remember being amused at stories from old Soviet Russia, where political dissidents were taken to mental institutions and official pronouncements assured citizens that what was happening before their very eyes was not really happening.
It’s not amusing anymore. Freedom is redefined as slavery, everlasting war is called peace, and ignorance is proclaimed to be strength. Orwell is revealed as a prophetic voice in the wilderness, and some animals are more equal than others.
I assert the right to say 2 + 2 is 4.
May we always strive to encourage those who are holding the line and, should the line not hold, to block the kick and prevent further damage.
