THE SEGREGATION BEGINS

         In my big-box store, I now see parents with bare faces walking around with masked little children.  The parents, I’m guessing, are vaccinated, and at the moment in Pennsylvania, a vaccinated person is not required to wear a mask in a store.  Their six-year-olds are not vaccinated, however, so the parents put masks on them.  I get it.  It’s what they are “supposed” to do.  They’re following the guidelines, and when the guidelines change, they then follow the new guidelines.  And then when the guidelines change again, well, guess what they do.

 

          It’s hard for me to forgive them for simply accepting whatever they are told, with no attempt to use their own reason and common sense.  In my mind, it is one thing to do what the authorities command you to do, but it’s another when you abandon responsibility for your own children’s welfare.  Beyond the truly heart-breaking sight of little kids being forced, for no reason, to wear the damn masks, these parents are also teaching their children to do whatever they are told on TV.  In the long run, that’s far worse.

 

          “No, Johnny.  Don’t read those scientist articles you found.  In our family, we just do what Anderson Cooper tells us.”

 

          My feelings about these cult members are complicated.  For the most part, I feel sorry for those who just believe what Fauci or Snoop Dog or Dr. Oz or Whoopie Goldberg tells them.  After 18 months of this, anyone could have found time to look half an inch beneath the layer of propaganda and manipulation that blankets us, but they have chosen not to try because…well, I don’t know why exactly, but it is certainly easier to be part of the 75% who have embraced the new reality than to endure the shunning, censorship, name-calling, and now even criminal prosecution that descends on those who refuse to be moved, like livestock, down the chute.

 

          I live in the world, and I want to have friends and acquaintances and people who will go to Murphy’s Tavern with me for burger night, so I don’t proselytize.  I don’t argue.  It would be pointless anyway since no argument has ever been permitted about masks and lockdowns and vaccines and vaccine passports and mandatory testing and everything else.  There have only been mandates or guidelines or regulations, usually issued by unelected bureaucrats, and the cultists have accepted them without question, while the rest of us have not.  What is taking place is not an argument because an argument is what happens in a representative democracy among free people.  This is something far more frightening. 

 

          But though I don’t try to antagonize people I know, I don’t lie about the madness either.  And people who know me will probe.  They need to know what I think so they will know whether they can trust me.  And then when they find out, they don’t anymore.

 

          The scary part right now in America is not the government, though that will come, as it has in other countries.  The scary part is the friends and neighbors and family members who silently decide to avoid you.  The process does not begin with the KGB or the SS or the East German Stasi.  It begins with the people who would stop by your house to chat and have a cup of tea, but now never find the time.  It begins with family members who, you suddenly realize, haven’t seen you or talked to you in over a year.  The process of segregation begins very quietly.  You wave to someone on the street and they pretend they didn’t see you, or they quickly wave back, then hurry off in the other direction.  As the cult reality takes hold, you come to understand you are the white supremacist or the anti-vaxxer or the climate change denier, though you may not really be any of those people.  It’s what they are thinking about you.  It’s what they are muttering about you to their spouses and their children.  And that’s how it starts.

 

          The train ride to the country comes later, much later.

 

Copyright2021MichaelKubacki