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carolyn kostopoulos's avatar

so true. why would anyone have ever trusted the government? even the framers of the government warned you against trusting them and did their best to limit their power going forward because they knew they couldn't be trusted!

no, the heartbreaking part was seeing how your "friends" and "relatives" behaved, realizing that they would have all volunteered to load jews onto boxcars for brownie points back in the day, learning that the people you would have trusted with your life probably couldn't be trusted with your cat, that you had friends of 30, 40 years duration who you will probably never speak to again, that the job you loved with a passion (and rearranged your entire life so you could do it until you dropped dead) really assumed that you would just quietly comply even though you had been a renegade for the entire 4 decades of your tenure and that your rebellious independence was exactly the quality that had made you such an asset in the first place!

you learned that the arts, the center of your life, were not the fierce creative forces who spoke truth to power that you believed they were, that they caved hard and fast, went above and beyond enforcing discrimination and doing the government's public health dirty work even when it hurt their commercial interests. you've learned that such vaunted institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway, the Holocaust Museum, the Spoleto Arts Festival, theater, opera, music have no moral legitimacy.

sure, you've made some new friends and maybe taken on some new causes, but you will never have the shared memories or long term experiences with them that you lost.

everyone you meet you have to wonder "are you a person of character or will you turn on me the minute you are tested?" would your neighbors continue to like you if they ever learn that you didn't buy into "it" or will they hurl bricks through your windows? can you really ever like or trust anyone again?

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Corinne Garbutt's avatar

Yes that has been the biggest loss for me and the hardest to get over . I look at every single human now through the lens of did you turn your back on your fellow citizen and let them get fired and de personned over a vaccine ? You expect stupidity lying and game playing with governments. You hope individuals will not want to hurt their fellow citizens, but they did and didn’t give a flying monkeys that it happened. I can’t trust people anymore.

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