The promise of a new decade began in earnest. On December 31st, 2019, the bells were ringing, the crystal ball slowly dropped ready to crown the year in perfect unison to the cheer of the crowd as the countdown pulled it down to its vaunted perch. The glow and excitement, the singing, hollering, crowd infused, and drunk with the hope of a brighter future to come were filled with hope and dreams. What innovations may evolve, what dreams may come true, what happiness and loves would flourish, what friendships would evolve, all thoughts were buried in that one moment of joyous celebration.
But that was many moons ago.
An 80-160 nanometer RNA monster cloaked in a protein shell was dreamt up in the confines of four walls, glass partitions, and a bright white sterile confines of the Wuhan laboratory in China. Perhaps the escape from this “Alcatraz” was an unfortunate hiss of the loss of a positive pressure environment of a Biosafety lab, or perhaps it was inadvertent contamination, and a minor infraction led to the runaway uncontained debacle.
The physical drama would soon be broadcast across the globe.
Soon began the dance and drama of containment. It first sparked in Wuhan, Hubei Province of China. All of China was immediately cut off from the Province. Containment processes ensued and video information of forced encampment of citizenry spread far and wide. Street spraying, a 10-day make-shift-hospital, and images of overrun hospital emergency rooms started happening in that far away land from the western shores. Amused by the goings-on in these distant shores, a cadre of pontiffs began to swell here and elsewhere. These self-appointed experts in the western lands began to sing. The song was initially quite conciliatory and harmonizing evoking feelings of nothing can hurt us. Some false prophets claimed to keep the borders open to all travelers from China. No, they cried, this is paranoia, nothing can harm us. All were in a state of a temporary kumbaya.
Then the change came. The psyche preprogrammed from the earlier visuals began to play…
A spark in the state of Washington ignited the fuel of concern. The monster was here! Soon the spread would come. And it came. Another spark ignited in the densely populated skyscraping land on the eastern shores of the United States and all hell broke loose.
In that sinister spread, something else emerged.
The call for a strict discipline to conform to the call of “Science.” Sprouting in the midst were a few who took that call seriously and started invoking the term at every street corner of the social media where a gathering of eyeballs was glued to their feed. Charts and Graphs were everywhere. The exponential rise of the infections was teased statistically and the exponent kept on getting higher to make the graphs worse and worse. Amid these trying times images of inundated tired and overworked doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers gowned and masked emerged and broadcast across the world. Italians, Spaniards, French, Danish, and Americans.
The deluge of the suddenly ill grew.
A make-shift hospital in New York (The Jacob Javits Center) was built, while a large Navy ship coasted and anchored near Manhattan to take on any excess patients sickened from the virus. But no ambulances of the ill came around to fill those excess beds. Yet the calls from the political leaders grew, claiming lack of this and that. Meanwhile some politicians exacerbated the deaths in their states by sending virus-infected idviduals into the Nursing Homes where the vulnerable population of the aged was resident. Men and women dressed in white coats appeared on television to new-found fame advocating for more of everything in packages and less of everything related to liberty and freedom. Whereas protecting the elderly and vulnerable was need, mandates for all to acquiesce to the mandates was the want.
The Public-Private enterprise emerged, and all the levers moved, the gears switched, and the mechanics of the newly crafted Rube-Goldberg machine produced. Innovation occurred at the whoosh of the breeze. Mountains of innovations were suddenly at hand to be deployed and used.
The newly appointed tele-evangelical scientists clamored for more. More masks, more gowns, more of everything. And more was created in a short flash of time. In that whole drama was a desire to create more testing. Machines were built and logistics created to distribute the emergent technology across the country and thence to the rest of the world.
Testing was the new norm. People lined up in their cars to get a swab inserted in their nostrils to discover if the virus had entered their body’s realm. Many were proclaimed positive through the magic of the Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) tests. The positive tests grew and call for a shutdown and lockdowns from the ignorant leaders who relied on their pseudo-scientific health advisors (some with degrees in sociology, others in social service, and yet others in computer science). In all this drama a white knight emerged. He took on the mantle as a spokesperson with his impeccable credentials in bureaucracy. He seemed to waffle a bit, initially taking his cue from a non-physician head of the World Health Organization. He first implied that there was no risk to the United States from the virus, and then changed it to a serious threat. He also maintained the mask-wearing was useless as a protective mechanism against the virus in line with the WHO and then suggested that masks should be worn at all times. He then stated that vaccines would put an end to the “pandemic” and then stated that even after the vaccination distancing and masks should continue to be worn. The cases grew as the PCR machines chugged along falsely giving positive results as they churned out 35-40 thermal-cycles determining non-infectious fragments of the viral RNA.
Meanwhile, where once children played in the yards, swirled around in merry-go-rounds, swung from the swings, swished down the playground slides were silent at homes, tied to the outside world through the medium of social media. The creators of the social media were hard at work broadcasting pseudo-science and virtue signaling, warping the young and flourishing minds with their version of the “new norm.”
Children more susceptible to such subtle and nuanced broadcasts without the link of companionship to other children started a new and sustained epidemic within society. Depression. Teen and adult suicides increased. The fragmentation of the family unit began to show deeper cracks as the finances took a hit.
Companies were shut down since workers needed to be “protected” and adults lost their jobs since companies could no longer bring in the revenues from unsold products that filled their inventories. Adults could not bring in the paycheck to pay for their family’s needs. A disruption of the cohesive family networks suddenly started fragmenting the fabric of society had a loose thread that slowly began to unravel. The politicians meanwhile jockeyed for position to control and used the “pandemic” to their advantage. The floodgates of the sham however would soon open. The deluge would soon follow. And all of the worlds would dearly pay.
A few groups started rioting and destroying commercial and private properties to send political messages across the land. These were considered "peaceful protests" as homes and property burnt to the ground. Something sinister was at play.
The cloth and surgical masks, it turned out, do not, and never did protect against viral infections. The former has a 90+% chance of failure and the latter about 45+% of failing to protect. The N95 masks do help but if used for more than 2 hours at a time, harm the individual wearing it from a whole host of harm of rebreathing exhaled air, acidity in the mouth, periodontal disease, and the consequences resulting from that; coronary artery disease, intestinal illnesses, and change in the microbiome of the mouth and the GI tract resulting in a decline in the robustness of the immune system.
Where once was joy, depression ensued. Where once was music, a daily broadcast of “cases” and “death counts” played, plucking the detuned strings of society. Dissonance followed. Further jarring the fragile mental framework of a society teetering on the edge of its stable psychological limits.
11 months later, cars still drive on roads, albeit much fewer. Aircraft still dot the skies but are few and far between. The car industry and the airline industry are in shambles. Their Earnings per share declining faster than a lead bullet speeding down a well. Malls are shuttering as brick and mortar retail shops have few to none consumers strolling around looking for things to buy to warm up their families with joy and some happiness. Meanwhile, a few mega-companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. capturing personal data of the citizens are selling information to evaluate and control the habit of the population at large while making large sums of money for themselves, earning billions of dollars an hour from the decimated smaller businesses that lie flailing for their last breaths.
The once glorious, happy, and harmonious world has become a shell of its past. The music seems to have died in the soul of this and other nations. The schools are forcibly closed by governmental mandates for absolutely no reason, yet the term "Science" is proclaimed to be behind all such decrees. Experts are clamoring for placing more restrictions on citizens, made to socially distance to limit interaction, and mask-wearing is enforced to further limiting any and all social human interaction. Some are being bullied by authorities, others handcuffed and processed. This goes on as the same politicians enforcing the mandates are also releasing convicted criminals from the prisons under the guise of the virus.
A plague is upon us and it is not the virus!
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