“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
--- C. S. Lewis
As we
slog through this absurd chapter in American history, I am starting to get
pissed off.
Always,
the story changes. Now we are told
reinfection with the virus is a looming danger.
There’s no real immunity, you see.
The antibodies disappear after a few weeks, or a few months. An article I saw recently reported four cases
of people who caught the thing twice. Four
people in the world. So we’re all at
risk, all over again, including the poor suckers who have already had it.
Immunity
for the afflicted is literally the first thing mankind discovered about
disease---that if Og got the plague but somehow survived it, he wouldn’t get it
again. Humans first realized this
thousands of years ago. For Edward
Jenner and the other medical pioneers of the 18th Century, it was
the basic idea behind vaccination. Ah,
but neither Og nor Jenner ever had to face this SARS-CoV-2, did he? Now we are told that even acquired immunity
is a false comfort. And most people believe it.
This,
of course, only concerns the type of immunity acquired by catching the disease
and recovering from it. Once the immune
system has defeated the invading virus, a quantity of special B-cells and
T-cells are produced that remember the specific invader and wait around
(watching football games and Tik Tok videos), in case it shows up again. They usually survive for decades if they’re
waiting for measles or chickenpox to return, but the Rona-killers only last a
month or two. We are told.
The
obsession with these antibodies is one of the many big lies we are told by
those who wish to lock us down, shut down businesses, terrify our children, and
force us to strap underwear to our faces.
The memory B-cells and T-cells are important, of course, to those who
have acquired them the hard way, but that is a tiny percentage of the
population. What’s truly important is
the 98% of us who never got the virus even though some of us have been exposed
to it almost every day. The
immunity-deniers never even acknowledge the existence of this other line of
defense that has always been present.
That is
because COVID is a “novel” coronavirus.
It’s what they told us from the start.
Nobody (and nobody’s immune system), has ever seen it before, they
claim, so we are all at risk and we still are.
That’s their story and they are sticking to it because to admit the vast
majority of us never had anything to worry about would be to admit that all the
societal and economic destruction these authoritarians have unleashed on us was
pointless. And that’s something they
will not do.
But
there is only one explanation for my continued good health and the continued
good health of hundreds of millions of others.
Yes, this COVID-19 is “novel” in the sense that our bodies had never
encountered it specifically, but our bouts with other coronaviruses (e.g., the
common cold), over the years provided us with B-cells and T-cells that could
recognize COVID-19 and get the job done.
It’s a process called “cross-reactivity,” and it is NEVER discussed by
the bureaucrat kings and queens who rule us.
The big lie is the refusal to acknowledge the existence of
cross-reactivity and the immunity of most of the population.
While
I’m catharting here----is that a word? probably
not, but it should be----let me take a minute to discuss the uncaring cabal of really-smart
leftwing elitists and their “experts”---the people who have brought about the
shutting down of worldwide society, culture and economies and the wanton
destruction of millions of lives and livelihoods.
Let’s
start with the slogan, “We’re all in this together,” which now, whenever I hear
it, makes me grab the nearest piece of pottery and hurl it into the
fireplace. It’s not true, of
course. It has never been true, though
it typifies the self-centered blindness of those who chirp it endlessly.
There
are certain people who are not at all inconvenienced by the lockdowns and
shut-downs, and these are the people who think they are a grand idea. These are folks with a well-paying,
professional career that they can pursue without leaving the house. Or they may be people with a comfortable
stream of retirement income, the resources to have everything they need
delivered, and a home containing high-speed internet, a flat-screen, a
recently-rehabbed kitchen, and a small backyard area suitable for some
plantings and a compost bin. Let’s throw
most public sector employees in there as well.
Not cops and firemen and garbage men, but the other ones who don’t have
any work or do, or not much of it, but get paid just the same.*** Those folks are not having a very hard time
of it, are they?
For
everyone else, it’s like a bomb went off, nobody told us it was coming, and
nobody will tell us why they had to drop it on us. For people who work in restaurants or hotels
or theme parks or cruise ships, or entertainment, or anything to do with travel
or tourism or fitness, well, they’re screwed.
Think of all the people who work for non-professional-level wages in
jobs that can’t be done online. There
are a lot of them. There are tens of
millions of them. And the oh-so-comfortable
self-quarantiners are barely aware such people exist. How could they be? The poor suckers who bus the tables and turn
down the beds just don’t show up in their Zoom calls.
Around
the country, we are told, half the restaurants will not reopen, or if they do,
will not survive with capacity restrictions.
Tens of thousands of small businesses are no more, along with the years
of savings and planning that went into opening them in the first place…. But these are statistics, numbers. Instead, let me tell you about two specific
lockdown nightmares and the people involved.
The
Koresh Dance Company, in Philadelphia, was started by Roni Koresh in 1992 and
has somehow survived for 28 years with a dance school that teaches modern
dance, hip hop, ballet, and whatever to five-year-old girls, their big sisters,
their mothers and their grandmas. In
addition to that thin stream of income, Roni and his brothers/partners occasionally
land a small grant from somewhere or other.
The troupe, which consists of ten dancers, has performed all over the
world but has never exactly qualified as a “profit center.” I am not privy to Roni’s books, but I would
be surprised if any of his dancers were paid that new “living wage” of
$15/hour. Typically, they dance for ten
years because they love it, have a bartending job on the side, and then quit to
search for a career that will actually allow them to eat and marry and buy a house.
Though
I haven’t asked, I suppose the Company was eligible for some of the federal relief
money that was being handed out to help businesses retain employees, but they
are not in it for the money, and the activities of the Koresh Dance Company have
basically ground to a halt. There are
some online dance classes available, but attendance is sparse. The troupe’s entire schedule of performances
for 2020, and into 2021, was cancelled, so there were no rehearsals for months. Now Roni has started them up again, but
actual performances remain a distant fantasy.
Meanwhile, the dancers are in the process of losing a year from a career
that may only last five or ten.
I don’t
know if the Koresh Dance Company will survive the lockdowns, but what is being
done to them seems particularly sad and unjust.
Like anybody else, I suppose dancers would like to be rich too, but all
of them went into dance for the sheer love of it, for the need to do it, and they knew financial rewards would probably never
be in the cards. They believed, however,
that if they gave their art everything they had, they could survive on the
crumbs available in a place as rich as America.
Then the politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew best for all of
us.
The
other lockdown nightmare concerns a woman named Justine that I met only
once. A couple years ago, she managed to
scrape together the resources to open a yoga studio in the neighborhood. My wife does yoga, and I wound up meeting
Justine at a dinner party and talking with her a bit.
I think
she had a couple other instructors who ran a few classes for her, but Justine
did most of the teaching, along with all the marketing and accounting and
sweeping up and security and everything else that somebody trying to get a
small business off the ground has to do.
And her
business was surviving. From my one
conversation with her I got the impression yoga was “her life,” and that she
was 100% focused on making her yoga-studio dream come true. It’s hard not to root for somebody like that.
And
then the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Mayor of Philadelphia shut her
down. Three months later, in June of
2020, she couldn’t pay the bills anymore, and she closed the studio.
A dream
deferred, or destroyed. Tens of
thousands of dreams deferred or destroyed. Lives uprooted. Careers ended. And our betters will never accept
responsibility for it. According to the
mayors and governors and “experts,” it’s the disease that’s destroying people’s
lives. And that’s the biggest lie of all,
because it’s not the virus that may destroy Koresh and it’s not the virus that
shut down Justine’s studio. It’s the
lockdowns. It’s the politics. It’s Cuomo and Murphy and Wolf and Whitmer and
Newsom and Fauci. It’s the people who are
so certain they know what’s best for us, they will not even look at what they
have done.
Copyright2020Michael Kubacki
*** Regarding public employees, I suspect there is a special place in hell for the people who work at the public libraries in Philadelphia. Though library workers are still getting paid, these people have kept the doors locked for 7 ½ months. Meanwhile, they demand I return a book I checked out in February, something I cannot do because the doors are locked and even the drop-boxes are closed 23 hours a day. OPEN THE GODDAMN DOORS!
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