Week 9 of Forced Quarantine for Healthy Americans

Everybody must have bought all the toilet paper they needed because now grocery stores have toilet paper. I am not so sure if the food supply is adequate because the hoarders stopped panic buying but the shelves still look empty at my local grocery chain.

The draconian social distancing rules have added more lines, arrows, policing, one entry and one exit only, 50 plus lines of people outside Costco and Wegman, waiting to get into the grocery store to buy their weekly necessities. Before this opportunistic viral plandemic, most grocery stores stocked three days’ worth of groceries, now it looks more like a couple of hours’ worth.

The progressive population around me still wears N-95 masks for walks in the woods and give the rest of us dirty looks for NOT wearing facial masks. We are there to get fresh air, not to catch viruses which are abundant in nature and have always been. I am not so sure THIS virus even exists in nature.

Stores are still closed for the good of the fearful and the moronic inhabitants of northern Virginia who don’t seem to listen or behave well, the governor and other local powers that be told us, we keep having cases of new infections among the illegal construction workers who don’t care about viruses, they just want to feed their large families and work in close proximity to each other, building more townhomes and apartments for the Democrats flooding the area.

Since we have not declined our infected numbers, as prescribed by the doctor-in-chief, Fauci, the governor was petitioned by the third layer of government, the local ones, to extend our quarantine for the healthy indefinitely.

The street are completely dead and silent, save for the wild animals coming out of the woods in the absence of humans, looking for food, and crossing the streets in the middle of day and walking behind our homes – coyotes, foxes, deer, racoons, and the ever-present squirrels which have multiplied since the lockdown weeks ago – nobody drives much to kill them accidentally.

The cops are everywhere, bored but ever-vigilant for the few unlucky drivers who venture out to essential stores such as grocery, pharmacy, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Office Depot, liquor store, the legal marijuana shop, and who happen to speed on an otherwise empty highway.

On weekends, when the traffic picks up a bit, it is obvious that people have forgotten how to drive properly during their nine weeks of forced quarantine for the healthy. They look tired, harassed, old, and like woolly mammoths with unkept hair of all colors flying in the wind like SOS banners.

The parks are still closed but people are inventive – they park on the side of the highway and enter the parks on foot or pretend to go fishing with their children. To be sure to not be stopped, they all wear facial masks, some of them professional grade for good measure.

The gas stations seem deserted because nobody has anywhere to go much but gas prices remained steady at $1.89/gallon.

People give themselves haircuts or learn to wear caps and hats again with their favorite team that is no longer allowed to practice or play.

High school and college graduates’ families have made makeshift podiums in their front yards to make-believe that their graduating children will have a memorable experience – Covid-19 Lockdown Graduation 2020.

After having cleaned their homes to a sparkling shine and planted all the flowers allowed because vegetable seeds are forbidden in some states or cannot be found, people stay on social media too long, desperate for human contact, especially on Facebook but are angry because they are being put in Facebook jail for their opinions even though we have a constitutional right to free speech.

Facebook hired censors to shadow-ban us and to factcheck our thinking and our opinions against such vaunted leftist opinions from media such as USA Today, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.

We are allowed medical Zoom conferences with our doctors who hide behind their computer screens at home instead of practicing medicine in their offices and touching patients they are supposed to help.

Pharmacists yell at customers who dare come too close for comfort even though they are now hiding behind six feet of space, masks, a counter, and tall Plexiglas for their protection from the unwashed and contagious masses.

The banks are also closed for our protection but it does not matter because, after Nancy Pelosi passes another $3 trillion stimulus package to pay their crony capitalists to remain in business and the ever-climbing unemployed to stay home and not ever work, your money will be worthless against rising prices deriving from the upcoming galloping Weimar Republic-style inflation.

We are thankful that we still have trash pickup as we generate tons of garbage from staying home. The mail runs much earlier than usual because there is not much correspondence, bills to pay, or ads as stores have remained closed for at least two months and are not planning on opening soon, many having declared bankruptcy. But Amazon, FedEx, and UPS are busy delivering groceries to neighbors and whatever else they shopped for.  Mountains of cardboard boxes are waiting on the curb to be picked up by recyclers.

Some have asked me recently if this reminds me of living under communism. The answer is yes and no. The lockdown seems like prison, but it is a gilded prison by comparison as we have all the luxuries of western wealth and civilization that we did not have under communism. Deliveries of goods, food, and prepared food did not exist then.

The censorship of speech, assembly, religion, is fast developing into a much stronger censorship than we had under communism and it is more insidious as today’s technology makes spying on people so much easier and cheaper.

The Democrat Party has turned into the Socialists and Communists we feared, yielding a lot of power over our lives.

Our President today has been neutered quite effectively for the “collective good.” The communist dictator we suffered under yielded absolute power.

There are isolated cases, for now, of people violating lockdown orders, and paying fines and going to jail, but I am not sure communists have released hard-core criminals from jail for their own health. That is something entirely different that no communist regimes have engaged in. Many were sent to gulags for their political leanings, speech, associations, and thought. For now, we are just censored in the U.S.

Constitutional rights here have been suspended just like they were under communism. They were spelled out on paper but the Communist Party, like the Democrats, did whatever they wanted with their citizens who were locked down between borders and inside their homes.

A semblance of healthcare was provided under communism, best for the elites, like today. We did not have virtual conferencing and virtual doctors then, hospitals were not closed for lack of patients, we just did not have many hospitals or drugs to treat the sick. Today, people are scared to go to hospitals and their doctor’s offices are closed. You must take your own temperature and blood pressure.

How close are we to communism? In some ways we are quite close, in others, we still have a bit to go. But, at the rapid rate of freedoms lost, it will not be long before we live under a totalitarian regime in the U.S. as well. I just hope that the food and drug shortages to come will not be as severe as I have experienced in my first twenty years of life under communism.

From our vantage point, although in the grand scheme of things, it does matter where this not-found-in-nature Covid-19 virus has originated, like the Roman soldiers, who only cared abut the pebble in their shoes, the average American wants to live in a free and dignified way. Yet, the more we ask for freedoms we have lost, the more we are ignored and hear the chains rattle.

Interview Across Cyber Space with Mircea Brenciu - Part III Standard of Living

Life in general has improved for Romanians. They can now travel freely in the country and move across international borders with ease.  They have freedom of political and artistic expression, freedom of assembly, unlimited Internet access, plenty of trashy television but also good educational programming, public information, easier access to medical care and better quality care, the right to own private property, professional opportunities, the right to go to college, even private ones, and many other freedoms the West had taken for granted. The failed European style multiculturalism, sexual freedoms/perversions, and drug use have arrived as well.

Food is probably the most beneficial improvement in the lives of Romanians – it is available everywhere and there is no need to stand in endless lines to leave empty-handed as was the case during the communist regime. People are no longer faced with having to repair their shoes from year to year because they could not buy new ones. Grocery stores display an abundance of food, not just one solitaire salami in the window. Pharmacy shelves are no longer empty and drugs are available. Fast communication and modern transportation are now a breeze even in the most isolated corners of the country.

Brenciu described the standard of living and the buying power of the Romanian citizen who must live on a minimum net salary of $232 a month, about 1050 lei. According to economists, the median net salary for the country is 1,600 lei a month, $384. Yet prices for goods and services are 90 percent in line with prices across Europe. How are Romanians expected to survive under such conditions and unfair disparity? Even though Romania has joined the European Union in 2007, life is much harder than in the other EU members where salaries are much higher and in proportion to prices.

Not one political leader has succeeded in 26 years after the fall of communism, Brenciu added, to increase the Romanians’ standards of living to at least the minimum level of their European Union brethren.

The fact that people expect politicians to have solutions for their problems is quite telling. It is an indication that decades of communism have brainwashed the citizenry into believing that solutions to their problems come from big or bigger government’s intrusion into everyone’s lives.

What is to blame for the current unresolved economic disparity? Incompetence and corruption across the board at the state level are significant, however, even more important, in Brenciu’s view, are the politics of other foreign governments, of multinational corporations, and of strategies to undermine the interests of the Romanian people in order to subjugate a small country with yet unexploited natural resources. “Onerous patrimonial and business interests supersede the interests of the Romanian people.”

In his opinion, the Romanian population, after decades of tyrannical communism, has learned to survive in a harsh environment and to live with very little and quite poorly, but the younger generation does not seem so eager to be marginalized at the periphery of the globalized political system.

There are many foreign entities, Brenciu explained, who salivate at the prospect of dividing the country and claiming parts, they think, are rightfully theirs. “The Hungarians have exophthalmic eyes for Transylvania; Europe is thinking out-loud how they can round up all the gypsies into the Baragan Fields, and the Moldovans on the Russian side of the Prut River dream of an illusory Big Moldova. Even Bulgarians are not too relaxed about northern Dobrogea.”

The European Union has had to deal with Greece and its potential exodus from the EU called Grexit. The technocrats in Brussels “calmed the waters” with billions of euros in funds that are helping the Greeks continue their socialist spending. Brenciu thought that “Romania might follow the same path if EU does not take rapid measures to increase the average pay for Romanians, even though they would have to break the rules of economic development.”

Brenciu reminded us that Germany was the beneficiary of the Marshall Plan after WWII, which saved the Germans from an “existential impasse.”  He argued, “Romania was in a real war, longer and more criminal than Germany’s but nobody took this fact into account. What was communism if not a war of life and death of an entire nation? Why does EU not organize a system for Romanians, similar to the Marshall Plan, without so many conditions and strings attached?” He semi-answered his own question when he described how Holland opposed Romania’s entry into the Schengen Zone because Romania refused the indefinite concession of its main port, Constanta.

What seems to be Romania’s salvation at the moment, he said, is the fact that Romania is located strategically at the confluence of the Christian West and the Islamic Orient and the United States is taking a keen interest in this strategic location.

During the fifth decade of the 20^th century, heroic anti-communist, anti-Bolshevik resistance fighters hid in the Carpathian mountains, waiting for the American troops to save them. American soldiers never arrived but they are here now, strengthening the buffer zone between Christianity and Islam. It is a blessing, Brenciu added, that “American strategic interests are converging perfectly with Romanian interests” and the ties to Washington are stronger than ever.

Brenciu believed that Europe, with its culture and enlightenment, the center of human civilization on earth, owes a debt of gratitude to the “poor Romanians who never betrayed common European and Christian values and were satisfied with very little in order to survive as shields in the face of so many barbaric invasions.”

He concluded, “Europe should bow its head in respect and should produce urgently and with love, the fraternal and just reparations to a people who defended with their absolute poverty, the splendor of a narcissistic and profoundly selfish civilization.”

As a former Iron Curtain nation, Romania started its road to democracy and to a free market economy at a distinct disadvantage when compared to other former communist Soviet satellite nations. Ceausescu made it a point of pride that Romania should not owe money to foreign lenders; he saw himself as a ‘maverick’ president. He paid all loans quickly by taking away much needed food and funds earmarked for improving the lives of Romanians who were forced to survive in abject poverty, with no decent food, meager rations, no basic necessities, little heat, and intermittent water and electricity.

TO BE CONTINUED