People keep talking about a crisis of trust in government due to Covid. Pfft. What Covid revealed was a crisis of trust in your neighbors, workmates, friends and family
People keep talking about a crisis of trust in government due to Covid. Pfft. What Covid revealed was a crisis of trust in your neighbors, workmates, friends and family
People keep talking about a crisis of trust in government due to Covid. Pfft. That’s not the lesson. No one should have had trust in government even before Covid. What Covid revealed was a crisis of trust in your neighbors, workmates, friends and family who so suddenly turned against anyone not fully backing the Covid cult’s edicts.
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?
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.
Early in the pandemic mania of Spring, 2020 I came across a story out of Oklahoma about a mayor of a mid-sized city/town there, I don't remember if it was Tulsa or another smaller town, who had ordered lockdowns after Trump's nationwide declaration only to reverse his decision and reopen his town a few weeks later. It seems as though the citizens of that community didn't go along with it, and with great prejudice let their beliefs about lockdowns be known. The story told through the mayor's perspective was that he was subjected to extreme abuse and threats, hounded everywhere he went, shouted at, confronted by local citizens who held nothing back. The mayor retracted his lockdown order saying, "I was just trying to help, all I was doing was trying to help. They didn't have to be so ugly about it, I was surprised at the level of personal hostility directed at me and my family."
I wish I could find that story again, I've searched many times since, lost and obscured by search engine algorithms, no doubt. But the story revealed how We, The People are most responsible for holding our elected officials accountable. And if we don't then we deserve the abuses we're subjected to and the loss of rights we once cherished. We give them our consent to abuse us and take away our rights. And only when we are willing to take our consent back and reclaim our rights are we able to be free people. Neighbors, workmates, friends and family in that Oklahoma city/town understood that truism. And defended their freedom with great prejudice. A lesson for us all.
The feelings of an authoritarian politician being hurt by such impolite objections should be of no consequence. Too bad most of the rest of America didn't react the same way as those townfolk. Yes, our citizens in our own communities are the biggest threat to our freedom if they don't share our same aggressive defense of freedom. Feelings of authoritarians be damned. Authoritarians have no power without the consent of the governed. A society with a government that fears the people more than the people fear the government is a free society.
‘The Mob’ was one of the most disturbing elements of the last few years for me. We’ve all grown up with the stories of the raging, pitch fork wielding mob coming to banish or destroy. It’s certainly unsettling to see it in action and to be the outsider that rage is directed at.
Some friends were in the front row of the mob. It’s hard to let that image go and forgive.
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?
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.
Early in the pandemic mania of Spring, 2020 I came across a story out of Oklahoma about a mayor of a mid-sized city/town there, I don't remember if it was Tulsa or another smaller town, who had ordered lockdowns after Trump's nationwide declaration only to reverse his decision and reopen his town a few weeks later. It seems as though the citizens of that community didn't go along with it, and with great prejudice let their beliefs about lockdowns be known. The story told through the mayor's perspective was that he was subjected to extreme abuse and threats, hounded everywhere he went, shouted at, confronted by local citizens who held nothing back. The mayor retracted his lockdown order saying, "I was just trying to help, all I was doing was trying to help. They didn't have to be so ugly about it, I was surprised at the level of personal hostility directed at me and my family."
I wish I could find that story again, I've searched many times since, lost and obscured by search engine algorithms, no doubt. But the story revealed how We, The People are most responsible for holding our elected officials accountable. And if we don't then we deserve the abuses we're subjected to and the loss of rights we once cherished. We give them our consent to abuse us and take away our rights. And only when we are willing to take our consent back and reclaim our rights are we able to be free people. Neighbors, workmates, friends and family in that Oklahoma city/town understood that truism. And defended their freedom with great prejudice. A lesson for us all.
The feelings of an authoritarian politician being hurt by such impolite objections should be of no consequence. Too bad most of the rest of America didn't react the same way as those townfolk. Yes, our citizens in our own communities are the biggest threat to our freedom if they don't share our same aggressive defense of freedom. Feelings of authoritarians be damned. Authoritarians have no power without the consent of the governed. A society with a government that fears the people more than the people fear the government is a free society.
‘The Mob’ was one of the most disturbing elements of the last few years for me. We’ve all grown up with the stories of the raging, pitch fork wielding mob coming to banish or destroy. It’s certainly unsettling to see it in action and to be the outsider that rage is directed at.
Some friends were in the front row of the mob. It’s hard to let that image go and forgive.
absolutely 100%