Another excellent meditation and deep exploration of the effect of the events of 2020. It is too easy to toss that experience into the dustbin of forgetfulness. I like that you are really working through it, via literature, and a very close look at your own response to what happened. As you say, paraphrased, healing has its own timetable. Again, I really like the clarity of this piece, the emerging strength of the writer, very able to convey who he is, what he thinks and feels. That whole part too of going grocery shopping etc. and "pretending" to be part of that world that is lost forever. Yes. That says so much of what it feels like for us.
I wrote the following words today at another blog site I visit on occasion. The topic of discussion was The Old State Saloon in Eagle, Idaho that's gifting a whole month of free beer to whoever helps ICE identify and deport an illegal alien, or more. Local blue-haired nose-ringed liberals are frothing mad, demonstrating, getting arrested themselves for promising violence, etc. The discussion was mostly a focus of where one might live anymore to be near "your kind" whether it be liberal-blue or conservative-red. The fake pandemic erased those distinctions for me. I wrote this...
"I’m on acreage out in Santa Fe County about 10 miles from one of the most liberal enclaves that exist. Not as bad as Portland or Seattle but only because the population here is so small. I’ve got really beautiful views and can drive into wilderness in just a couple of minutes. The snowcapped mountains are visible from my bedroom window. Physical nature in northern New Mexico is amazing… it’s only people who suck.
I’ve got neighbors living on 3 or 4 or 5 acre spreads and I invited about 35 households to my place for an HOA meeting in 2021. The 2020 meeting got called off because of the “pandemic” which I place in parenthesis because I didn’t believe it for even one minute. The emailed message went out, “Who would like to offer their house for the meeting?” I replied to everyone, “C’mon over to my place! And now that everybody’s been vaxxed you don’t have to wear a face mask.” The hatred and curses that spewed forth from my computer screen blew back my hair. However, I was laughing as my neighbors called me “racist” even though we’re all white here. I was called “science denier” and “anti-vaxxer” and “misogynist.” I was called everything but “child molester.”
So I wrote back… “Hey everybody, wait a second! Don’t you all love going to the restaurant? Even though you know there’s a DEADLY airborne virus gonna kill you, you go to the restaurant and stand there with your mask on in the DEATH ZONE while they fetch your menus. Then, once you’re seated you take off the face mask because everybody knows there’s no virus down there. That’s the science! So once you’re at my house and everybody is seated will the face masks come off?” Even MORE hatred and vitriol came forth. These people, my neighbors, wanted to kill me. The meeting was switched to a zoom call and I didn’t participate.
There’s a difference between red and blue, liberal and conservative. But when everyone obeys government blindly, stupidly, then they’ve morphed into an undistinguishable blob. To abandon all your rights and make obedience the highest virtue? Now you’re all the same. You ALL suck. It’s un-American to obey and trust government. So I wave if someone waves at me but I don’t hang out with anyone. As for this post here? I live in my own private Idaho."
Hi Tom: I’m in the same boat. As I say in the essay, I’ve never socialized all that much but now, with rare exception, I only hang out with my few new, awakened, unjabbed friends. And I don’t even do that very often. I love being home. Love my little house. Love hanging out with my girlfriend who, praise be, is on the same page about the state of the world. And we, too, live a beautiful part of the country. Not nearly as stunning and vast as where you live--no snowcapped mountains outside my bedroom window--but it has its own, old world, quiet beauty in which I feel very much at home. The only trouble is that the area is very blue and jabbed. There are many lost souls suffering from all the misguided delusions that come with being in that camp. I still see them driving around alone in their cars with a mask on, which speaks volumes about where they stand on everything else going on. Plenty of blue hair and nose rings, too. Sometimes it’s hard to take. But a few months ago, at a small fundraiser for a local, Republican sheriff (who lost the election, of course, although he was by far the more competent candidate), I remember feeling relieved that there are handful of fellow compatriots around these parts. And it’s that small but dedicated community along with my small circle of friends--as well as everyone I'm connecting to on this platform--that gives me strength, support, and comfort.
Indeed, we adjust to reality, the "new normal" as CJ Hopkins describes it all. He's having a tough time coping because they're actually prosecuting him for laughing at them. "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." - Mark Twain
All CJ was doing was being a smart ass, and writing brilliantly, and "they" don't like a smart ass. There was a marvelous gathering with CJ here at my house and another the next day in Santa Fe. Did you get to see him in Greenwich, Connecticut?
Reiner Füllmich, on the other hand, was actually scaring the crap out of them because he's got the tools that would have landed a whole lot of them in jail. Thus, Reiner is the one in a jail cell, I think, for the next four years. I can't hold a candle to these guys, such as what happened to Brodsky? I'm surrounded by the surrender monkeys and family, friends and neighbors willingly took on the identity. People fully revealed what they are made of and it's virtue signaling obedience and subliminal suicide. I'll turn 70 on December 20th and it's a combination of the great psyop they conducted plus this age we find ourselves at where I really don't crave friends or anyone anymore. I met a whole pack of aware others during the CJ visit so looks like my human ratio quota of intelligence-based life forms will continue. I'm in the middle of reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Never touched it until a few days ago. Every page is a kick to the groin. The evil those people were dealt? How in this day and age people would willingly bow to controls and loss of life-quality is psychopathic, but they dwell among us. I avoid them like a disease. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?” - Franz Kafka
I tried to do this as a reply but Substack wouldn’t let me.
I have been anti government, or at least anti big government since I was a child. In the early seventies I heard on television that Social Security would run out of money, and I believed it. So since then every socialist type of program has been a no go for me. It got worse over the years. Ford pardoning Nixon seemed ridiculous. There was no way he was going to be prosecuted anyway. Many of Carter’s policies were just plain stupid. I thought the world had changed for the better in a big way when Reagan was elected. When I heard him say “Save Social Security” I wanted to smash my television, but I gave it away instead. When Papa Bush reneged on his “Read my lips, no new taxes”. I was very angry. When Clinton got away with saying “That depends on what the meaning of the word is is”. I lost all respect for the American people. On 9/11 I was furious, and when the first building fell, I was even more furious at our government, and the idea that they would probably get away with it. I got arrested that day for disturbing the peace. I could go on but I think you can understand just how I feel about government lying, and its effects on all of us. I don’t have any special sources of information, yet I knew they were full of it from the first time I heard of covid. I told my nephew to put up a sign in the window of his restaurant that said no masks allowed. I was never afraid of the virus but I was definitely afraid of our government.
Despite all of this, when the mask requirement at work ended, and I saw people without masks in that huge building, it scared me. All of us were brainwashed, even the most resistant to it.
"I was a different I" ... This is what resonated with me, as I have walked through a few doors in my life, and suddenly "The tenant finds his new house wholly strange," but the change is in myself: an all new environment, permanent, not a visit, and the soul shape-shifts to adapt. I am a different person. There is no going back. There is only forward. Thanks Jim.
Hi Brent: Thanks for your comment. That line from Brodsky really struck me, too. While I’ve felt that “I was a different I” a few other times in my life, I’ve never felt it so keenly as I have the past five years. Whatever bridges I could have crossed to go back to who I was before March 2020 are gone. So be it.
There is nothing like the writings of Russian authors that bare the soul. Your essay has done that also..Thank you for introducing me to Joseph Brodsky. i want to read that now. I have read Vladimir Bukovsky and Solzenitsyn..any writing of dissidents from the Soviet Union. Any of their histories . I even have a memoir about a prison guard of the gulags. It feels exactly what happened and what is happening since 2020.. this invisible intimidating evil force against the mind and heart for conformity and compliance based on fear. The creation of the digital gulag. Solzenitsyn knew in 1974 what was coming. when he wrote in his “Live not by lies” for his countrymen at the end of the essay “ but if we shrink away then let us cease complaining if someone does not let us draw breath - we did it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down while our comrads the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.” Well that day is here. It will take all of us that know to not shrink away. But to stand against. Thank you again for such depth of writing about the Covid atrocity on the human race.
Hi Barbara: I am also a big fan of Russian writers, as well as writers from the former Eastern Bloc. The more contemporary writers from these countries—Brodsky, Solzenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz, for example—have much to teach us about the world we’re living in here these days. Although these days the technological capacities for surveillance and control are far more sophisticated--and dangerous--now. Years ago, when I started getting interested in them (when I was in China and ever since) I had no idea we’d be facing much the same tyranny they’d faced, that “invisible intimidating evil force against the mind and heart for conformity and compliance based on fear,” as you say. For some reason it’s long fascinated me. The two collections of Brodsky essays I have are “Less than One” and “On Grief and Reason.” I think you’d like either or both.
Thank you. I definitely would like both. I have a need to find how others faced with courage such opposition to human freedoms. I was struck how a Chinese woman faced down the intimidation of the Mao cultural revolution in “Life and death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng. These are witnesses that surround us. Thank you again for such information and understanding. I just ordered both books of essays. Just how he made that room for himself sold me.
Feels a bit different to me. I have been self exiled since long before I realised it. The scamdemic just added another layer. I seldom write long essays like this one, but rather history in varied forms. I think understanding of what happened, and why, is more important than understanding our feelings about it. However your essay has clarified my own thoughts about myself. Thank you.
Hi Edgar: Thank you for your comment. In this “Underlined Sentences” column, my intention is to do both: try to understand what happened during the scamdemic and articulate my feelings about what happened. Many writers on this platform are focused only on what happened (yet still so few really know, including myself); few are writing about how they feel about it. And that’s what I want to do here. By articulating my thoughts and feelings about what happened—and is happening—perhaps others can relate to my experience and not feel so isolated.
Another excellent meditation and deep exploration of the effect of the events of 2020. It is too easy to toss that experience into the dustbin of forgetfulness. I like that you are really working through it, via literature, and a very close look at your own response to what happened. As you say, paraphrased, healing has its own timetable. Again, I really like the clarity of this piece, the emerging strength of the writer, very able to convey who he is, what he thinks and feels. That whole part too of going grocery shopping etc. and "pretending" to be part of that world that is lost forever. Yes. That says so much of what it feels like for us.
I wrote the following words today at another blog site I visit on occasion. The topic of discussion was The Old State Saloon in Eagle, Idaho that's gifting a whole month of free beer to whoever helps ICE identify and deport an illegal alien, or more. Local blue-haired nose-ringed liberals are frothing mad, demonstrating, getting arrested themselves for promising violence, etc. The discussion was mostly a focus of where one might live anymore to be near "your kind" whether it be liberal-blue or conservative-red. The fake pandemic erased those distinctions for me. I wrote this...
"I’m on acreage out in Santa Fe County about 10 miles from one of the most liberal enclaves that exist. Not as bad as Portland or Seattle but only because the population here is so small. I’ve got really beautiful views and can drive into wilderness in just a couple of minutes. The snowcapped mountains are visible from my bedroom window. Physical nature in northern New Mexico is amazing… it’s only people who suck.
I’ve got neighbors living on 3 or 4 or 5 acre spreads and I invited about 35 households to my place for an HOA meeting in 2021. The 2020 meeting got called off because of the “pandemic” which I place in parenthesis because I didn’t believe it for even one minute. The emailed message went out, “Who would like to offer their house for the meeting?” I replied to everyone, “C’mon over to my place! And now that everybody’s been vaxxed you don’t have to wear a face mask.” The hatred and curses that spewed forth from my computer screen blew back my hair. However, I was laughing as my neighbors called me “racist” even though we’re all white here. I was called “science denier” and “anti-vaxxer” and “misogynist.” I was called everything but “child molester.”
So I wrote back… “Hey everybody, wait a second! Don’t you all love going to the restaurant? Even though you know there’s a DEADLY airborne virus gonna kill you, you go to the restaurant and stand there with your mask on in the DEATH ZONE while they fetch your menus. Then, once you’re seated you take off the face mask because everybody knows there’s no virus down there. That’s the science! So once you’re at my house and everybody is seated will the face masks come off?” Even MORE hatred and vitriol came forth. These people, my neighbors, wanted to kill me. The meeting was switched to a zoom call and I didn’t participate.
There’s a difference between red and blue, liberal and conservative. But when everyone obeys government blindly, stupidly, then they’ve morphed into an undistinguishable blob. To abandon all your rights and make obedience the highest virtue? Now you’re all the same. You ALL suck. It’s un-American to obey and trust government. So I wave if someone waves at me but I don’t hang out with anyone. As for this post here? I live in my own private Idaho."
Hi Tom: I’m in the same boat. As I say in the essay, I’ve never socialized all that much but now, with rare exception, I only hang out with my few new, awakened, unjabbed friends. And I don’t even do that very often. I love being home. Love my little house. Love hanging out with my girlfriend who, praise be, is on the same page about the state of the world. And we, too, live a beautiful part of the country. Not nearly as stunning and vast as where you live--no snowcapped mountains outside my bedroom window--but it has its own, old world, quiet beauty in which I feel very much at home. The only trouble is that the area is very blue and jabbed. There are many lost souls suffering from all the misguided delusions that come with being in that camp. I still see them driving around alone in their cars with a mask on, which speaks volumes about where they stand on everything else going on. Plenty of blue hair and nose rings, too. Sometimes it’s hard to take. But a few months ago, at a small fundraiser for a local, Republican sheriff (who lost the election, of course, although he was by far the more competent candidate), I remember feeling relieved that there are handful of fellow compatriots around these parts. And it’s that small but dedicated community along with my small circle of friends--as well as everyone I'm connecting to on this platform--that gives me strength, support, and comfort.
Indeed, we adjust to reality, the "new normal" as CJ Hopkins describes it all. He's having a tough time coping because they're actually prosecuting him for laughing at them. "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." - Mark Twain
All CJ was doing was being a smart ass, and writing brilliantly, and "they" don't like a smart ass. There was a marvelous gathering with CJ here at my house and another the next day in Santa Fe. Did you get to see him in Greenwich, Connecticut?
Reiner Füllmich, on the other hand, was actually scaring the crap out of them because he's got the tools that would have landed a whole lot of them in jail. Thus, Reiner is the one in a jail cell, I think, for the next four years. I can't hold a candle to these guys, such as what happened to Brodsky? I'm surrounded by the surrender monkeys and family, friends and neighbors willingly took on the identity. People fully revealed what they are made of and it's virtue signaling obedience and subliminal suicide. I'll turn 70 on December 20th and it's a combination of the great psyop they conducted plus this age we find ourselves at where I really don't crave friends or anyone anymore. I met a whole pack of aware others during the CJ visit so looks like my human ratio quota of intelligence-based life forms will continue. I'm in the middle of reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Never touched it until a few days ago. Every page is a kick to the groin. The evil those people were dealt? How in this day and age people would willingly bow to controls and loss of life-quality is psychopathic, but they dwell among us. I avoid them like a disease. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?” - Franz Kafka
I tried to do this as a reply but Substack wouldn’t let me.
I have been anti government, or at least anti big government since I was a child. In the early seventies I heard on television that Social Security would run out of money, and I believed it. So since then every socialist type of program has been a no go for me. It got worse over the years. Ford pardoning Nixon seemed ridiculous. There was no way he was going to be prosecuted anyway. Many of Carter’s policies were just plain stupid. I thought the world had changed for the better in a big way when Reagan was elected. When I heard him say “Save Social Security” I wanted to smash my television, but I gave it away instead. When Papa Bush reneged on his “Read my lips, no new taxes”. I was very angry. When Clinton got away with saying “That depends on what the meaning of the word is is”. I lost all respect for the American people. On 9/11 I was furious, and when the first building fell, I was even more furious at our government, and the idea that they would probably get away with it. I got arrested that day for disturbing the peace. I could go on but I think you can understand just how I feel about government lying, and its effects on all of us. I don’t have any special sources of information, yet I knew they were full of it from the first time I heard of covid. I told my nephew to put up a sign in the window of his restaurant that said no masks allowed. I was never afraid of the virus but I was definitely afraid of our government.
Despite all of this, when the mask requirement at work ended, and I saw people without masks in that huge building, it scared me. All of us were brainwashed, even the most resistant to it.
"I was a different I" ... This is what resonated with me, as I have walked through a few doors in my life, and suddenly "The tenant finds his new house wholly strange," but the change is in myself: an all new environment, permanent, not a visit, and the soul shape-shifts to adapt. I am a different person. There is no going back. There is only forward. Thanks Jim.
Hi Brent: Thanks for your comment. That line from Brodsky really struck me, too. While I’ve felt that “I was a different I” a few other times in my life, I’ve never felt it so keenly as I have the past five years. Whatever bridges I could have crossed to go back to who I was before March 2020 are gone. So be it.
There is nothing like the writings of Russian authors that bare the soul. Your essay has done that also..Thank you for introducing me to Joseph Brodsky. i want to read that now. I have read Vladimir Bukovsky and Solzenitsyn..any writing of dissidents from the Soviet Union. Any of their histories . I even have a memoir about a prison guard of the gulags. It feels exactly what happened and what is happening since 2020.. this invisible intimidating evil force against the mind and heart for conformity and compliance based on fear. The creation of the digital gulag. Solzenitsyn knew in 1974 what was coming. when he wrote in his “Live not by lies” for his countrymen at the end of the essay “ but if we shrink away then let us cease complaining if someone does not let us draw breath - we did it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down while our comrads the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.” Well that day is here. It will take all of us that know to not shrink away. But to stand against. Thank you again for such depth of writing about the Covid atrocity on the human race.
Hi Barbara: I am also a big fan of Russian writers, as well as writers from the former Eastern Bloc. The more contemporary writers from these countries—Brodsky, Solzenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz, for example—have much to teach us about the world we’re living in here these days. Although these days the technological capacities for surveillance and control are far more sophisticated--and dangerous--now. Years ago, when I started getting interested in them (when I was in China and ever since) I had no idea we’d be facing much the same tyranny they’d faced, that “invisible intimidating evil force against the mind and heart for conformity and compliance based on fear,” as you say. For some reason it’s long fascinated me. The two collections of Brodsky essays I have are “Less than One” and “On Grief and Reason.” I think you’d like either or both.
Thank you. I definitely would like both. I have a need to find how others faced with courage such opposition to human freedoms. I was struck how a Chinese woman faced down the intimidation of the Mao cultural revolution in “Life and death in Shanghai” by Nien Cheng. These are witnesses that surround us. Thank you again for such information and understanding. I just ordered both books of essays. Just how he made that room for himself sold me.
Feels a bit different to me. I have been self exiled since long before I realised it. The scamdemic just added another layer. I seldom write long essays like this one, but rather history in varied forms. I think understanding of what happened, and why, is more important than understanding our feelings about it. However your essay has clarified my own thoughts about myself. Thank you.
Hi Edgar: Thank you for your comment. In this “Underlined Sentences” column, my intention is to do both: try to understand what happened during the scamdemic and articulate my feelings about what happened. Many writers on this platform are focused only on what happened (yet still so few really know, including myself); few are writing about how they feel about it. And that’s what I want to do here. By articulating my thoughts and feelings about what happened—and is happening—perhaps others can relate to my experience and not feel so isolated.