Animals Need Social Distancing Too

Corona virus

Photo: WebMD.com

A comedic uncle called today to ask how we are surviving in our lockdown quarantine, if we have food and medicine, if we are lonely, cabin feverish, closer than ever, or ready to kill each other.  

He told us that his son and best friend were coming out of their police-imposed two-week quarantine upon their return flight from a European Union country. The police made sure they went straight home and stayed there for two weeks. In order to provide groceries and medication for his elderly parents, his son could now receive a special travel document within the city presentable to police roadblocks upon request.

My uncle did not seem to be too upset about the lockdown  – having survived decades of totalitarian communism, he was used to road blocks, travel restrictions, curfews, and those aggressive and drunk on their power comrade underlings shouting, “show me the papers.”

We were all used to being told which buildings we could enter, which zones we could access, which stores we could shop in, and which were verboten to the proletariat minions.

We walked slowly past areas out of reach for us, wondering what was behind the tall walls, the wired fences, and behind the fancy closed gates and doors with armed guards in sight, patrolling back and forth with menacing looks.

Even the dollar shops, not the type where items cost a dollar, but those which sold goods in hard currency, German marks and U.S. dollars, had guards posted outside to make sure no unwashed masses made it passed the doors. Merchandise that we could only dream of was on sale for foreign visitors, the communist elites and their cronies, who could own foreign currency without the fear of being jailed or worse.

The city hall was off limits to foreign nationals and it upset foreign visitors greatly that they had so little freedom of movement – they could not wait to go back to their countries like the U.S. where people were allowed to enter any public buildings.

The population learned to despise closed doors and lack of access because it infringed even further on their loss of personal freedom. Few remembered the time during the monarchy when they could have walked freely into any buildings. But when the socialists took power, everything changed and the collective memory disappeared, subjugated to the new socialist indoctrination.

It was bad enough being kept prisoner within the borders of the country, without any possibility of ever escaping to the free world even for a short visit, but to be told that you could not enter certain places in your own country, was much worse.

It’s not that we were envious. We just wanted some freedom of movement, choice, and speech. We could see how the elites lived, where they lived, how they drove personal cars while we walked, took the bus and the train, how they went on lavish vacations, to restaurants that we were not even allowed in, much less afford to dine there on a bare minimum salary.

So, we all learned to despise locked doors and gates, those who locked them and kept us away, and the heavily armed menacing guards who kept us at a safe distance.

To this day, my heart skips a beat when someone wants to see “my papers” and I get angry when I see a closed door or gate to something that taxpayers like me have paid for to develop, i.e. a park, a museum, a forest, a memorial, and a famous landmark maintained with taxpayer money.

The huge national forest nearby was closed. Sixteen thousand acres of thick woods with endless trails, waterfalls, and creeks seemed like a good place to get away from people and keep a safe distance from human contact and potential spread of the Corona virus, but the benevolent bureaucrats who care so much about our health thought otherwise and locked us out. After all, it is for our own good, for the collective good.

Even the boardwalk over the swamp was closed as well, perhaps animals, birds, fish, turtles, beavers, and snakes need six feet of “social distancing” too.  One young man, ignoring the locked gate, had jumped the fence and was walking alone on the boardwalk, enjoying the serenity and sounds of nature. Nobody was going to keep this guy away from nature, not even a locked gate.

Do we really understand that quarantine was designed to restrict the movements of the sick or the potentially sick while the movements of the healthy are being restricted by bureaucratic authoritarianism?

It is very difficult to discern facts from misinformation coming from the global and national main stream media, various government entities, and individuals in positions of power, so ordinary and confused citizens imagine biological, economic, and psychological warfare coming from China in partnership with international communists/globalists and the domestic segments of both knowledgeable and ignorant “resistance,” the one that never stopped trying to get rid of the duly-elected President Trump.

After ruminating over the locked gates, we went back home to start our third week of government-imposed “lockdown/social distancing.” I don’t know why but the feelings of dread I had under the socialist regime decades ago enveloped me again and hung like a heavy cloak.







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Our Disposable Society

Photo: Ileana Johnson

In our throwaway society, where nothing is sacred anymore and is discarded with the speed of an unwanted darkening banana peel or a lit cigarette butt out the window of a moving car, the miser in me keeps coming out periodically.

Animals, love, life, family, relationships, marriages, appliances, trash, things recyclable, valuables, and trash are thrown out or disposed of mostly on purpose with no remorse and with a faster speed than you can say “I do.”

I sheepishly admit that I was washing Styrofoam containers and plastic forks from McDonald’s back in 1978. Why throw away perfectly reusable items, I thought, when I just landed from the land of poverty, misery, and long lines for food? We had rusty flatware on our table and chipped mismatched plates. My Grandpa used to wash her plates in a little tub of hot water boiled on the gas stove. And sometimes they still had dried food stuck to them from the previous meal. I tried to scrape it off and wipe it with a towel when she was not watching. I could not afford to be choosy or hurt her feelings.

My husband at the time made fun of my miser side because he could not possibly understand even though he visited my childhood home. No matter how many times he took me to the grocery store to see the laden shelves of abundance, my miser inner self could not comprehend so much food and I was certain, it would be gone the next day.

To this day, I wonder when we might have to be without food, water, and electricity, or things that everyone takes for granted, like toilet paper and vitamins. So I used to go from room to room and turn the lights off that my husband had left on and I still do today. Why waste energy? What if we had to be in the dark again like we were often under the socialist/communist regime that planned enough for them while the rest of us had to struggle hungry, cold, and in the dark after sunset?

I recycle today every piece of paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum that crosses my kitchen and my pantry. I even cut the plastic circles that hold bottles in place for fear that some wild animal might get stuck in them if the plastic winds up in a dumpster.

It pains me greatly and I do not understand how someone can throw a live human being or puppy tied in a garbage bag on the side of a deserted road, miles and miles away from a city, and leaves them there like trash, to suffocate and die? Isn’t the way we treat our helpless, animals, children, and old people, an indication of how civilized our society is?

We discard aborted fetuses, humans who are perfect and want to live because progressive society views that as a “choice.” We dump the elderly in nursing homes and seldom visit them. We depend on strangers to be good to them. We visit at holidays out of sheer guilt. There’s an influx of visitors at the nursing home around holidays, I suppose they don’t want to be left out of grandma or grandpa’s will.

We dispose of marriage quicker than we planned the lavish weddings – we get divorced at the drop of a hat. Nobody tries hard to get along anymore; everyone seeks instant gratification and personal happiness. If you ask, nobody is able to give a cohesive definition of what that personal happiness is. But rest assured, it revolves around the “me, myself, and I.”

The “selfish-me generation” throws away everything that is old, including their country, their citizenship, their culture, and their Constitution. Anything they do not understand but has been drilled into their heads by socialist teachers as evil must be discarded. If it is repeated enough times, it becomes their “social justice and equality” playbook.

We discard and abandon children to foster care like a used-up toy because we are too busy or too unable to care for our own offspring.

We euthanize those among us we do not wish to bother with anymore, and we abort the result of loveless hookups because nobody wants to be inconvenienced by a human breathing inside them.

We dump our friends on a whim – they just don’t share the same politics and ideology of the moment and are therefore no good. People we disagree with are suddenly poisonous snakes.

Yet grown Americans keep that one collegiate t-shirt from years ago, with holes everywhere, or that ratty disintegrating blanket one used to drag around for comfort as a toddler, or a favorite dog’s or cat’s toy. Those are holy objects that cannot be thrown away.

We keep that first car, often on cinder blocks, rusted out, and covered with weeds, spiders, and cobwebs. Sometimes rabbits, coons, and the occasional rattlesnake make their nests inside.

We keep that old moldy dresser that belonged to great-grandma because it’s an antique and it might be really valuable someday and fetch a big penny at auction.

We could feed an entire small country daily with the amount of food thrown away in locked dumpsters around the country, perhaps composted, incinerated, or buried later in the landfill.

Beautiful books of wisdom are recycled or buried all the time, in the drive to become a paperless society and to save the trees and the planet from progressive Armageddon. Who has time to read and learn something useful when there is the Internet?

Electronics are discarded as well, perhaps recycled and some buried in the city landfill. Valuable metals, plastics, and glass tubes get buried with them as well.

We throwaway a perfectly running TV that nobody wants in order to make room for a flat screen and top of the line smart TV, so smart, it can report anything you do to the mother ship.

And nobody has landline rotary dial or key punch phones anymore. They worked even when power went out. Those are dinosaurs, thrown away long time ago with the trash, not even recycled. They are buried somewhere in the city dump. When the smart grid goes out and it will eventually do, nobody will have a phone to communicate and answer that 3 a.m. call.

This disposable society mirrors the trashing of our culture in general, of our borders, our language, and our national identity. “We went through darkness so you can find the light." Why are you extinguishing it?

 

Climate Change Has Been Tamed

The COP21 was a seminal moment in the history of the planet. The wizards of the Paris conference, reportedly 147 heads of states, their very large entourage, and thousands of delegates and journalists from 195 countries will be remembered as the slickest con-artists ever in the history of humanity.

Paris, the City of Lights, of culture, of learning, of civilization, is a perfect place for such a gathering. Decadent, rich, storied, and romantic, it provides the perfect destination for bureaucrats who avoid poor places like the plague. The elitist choice is always the most luxurious and expensive locales where they can travel, live, eat, drink, and party in style at the expense of the hapless worshippers of Gaia who foot the bill.

These tin pot bureaucrats and their developed world brethren have finally succeeded, through the audacity of persistence, power, pressure, and blatant lies, to fleece seven billion people who willingly gave up their lifestyles and their fortunes in order to save the planet from an impending doom and gloom presumably caused by man alone.

We are so lucky!  We are getting a new life and the assurance from the gods of climate that we will live in balmy weather and glorious climate across the globe, with plenty of water and no harsh weather, only sunshine and blue skies, anytime, anyplace, on a blessed and abundant earth, protecting its most precious inhabitants: wild animals and the elites.

We can now rest assured and with confidence that blizzards and heat waves, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, mudslides, and other weather and climate related events are a thing of the past.

The whizzes of the Paris COP21 conference have tamed the climate and we no longer have to fear anything.  The science is settled – all discussions or debates will cease. Deniers will be marginalized, ridiculed, silenced, fired, or jailed if too persistent and annoying.

The seas will no longer rise and flood some obscure pacific island or some city built unwisely below sea level; the oceans will no longer acidify and kill marine life; the fish stocks in rivers will self-replenish, the delta smelt will thrive again once the agricultural industry will be completely destroyed; the globe’s temperatures will no longer rise by 2 degrees because now, we are going to pay through our noses more taxes to the climate lords and their lucrative climate change industry dominated by renewables.

Climate science elites will make sure that our paper money will stop pollution, volcanic activity around the globe and at the bottom of the oceans. The oceanic currents will flow the right way. El Nino will sit with them at the discussion table and will tame and subdue its activity. The sun will cooperate and stop flaring whenever it wants. Everything will now be under the sly control of the bureaucrats at the United Nations who, ever so wise, have no idea how many countries have actually signed this existential and unenforceable proposal. Or is it a gentlemen’s agreement, paraded as a treaty?

The third world nations are already salivating at the prospect of dividing 100 billion each year with more to come in the future. The planet must be 100 percent renewable green in a short time.

We will all be singing kumbaya in our dark and dank caves once all the dams are blown up, the rivers restored to their pristine state, the salmon and other migratory animals and birds will be safe from encroaching development, and the polluting coal power plants will be closed.

Wild animals and birds will have nothing to fear as long as birds avoid flying into the chopping blades of the wind turbines or into the solar panels’ vaporizing heat flux. Animals may have to move away from the constant and maddening thump-thump noise of wind turbines and away from millions of acres of solar panels.

China and India will finally breathe fresh air again. Nuclear power plants will be a thing of the 1970s, replaced by renewable wind and solar power.  Coal mines will be closed, “dirty” coal will no longer provide energy, and cars and planes will rust in place while the elites will whiz by in their expensive solar automobiles and private planes. What a perfectly dystopic planet that will be! Who needs civilization when the animals of the planet will be safe?