Mark America

Do We Deserve the Country They Built?

When one thinks about what form the post-COVID word will take, one thing nags at me above all others. All of these public officials who have been willing to strip from us our civil liberties, often without any legitimate authority to do so, will be left in place to do this to us again the next time somebody decides “necessity” demands it.  I don’t care if they’re Republican or Democrat or Independent.  I don’t care whether they’re a lowly County Commissioner, a County judge, a mayor, a school superintendent, or a Governor.  None of these people have the authority they’ve seized, and as courts continue to make that point abundantly clear, I think it’s up to us to examine our own behaviors in response to these various mandates, decrees, and executive dicta that have so thoroughly demolished American life.  We must never permit this again, and indeed, we must put a stop to its continuance now. In order to see this through is going to require an active, rebellious citizenry, unwilling to suffer any more of the indignities being heaped upon us.  We must rid ourselves of all the petty tyrants, big and small. We must leave none of them with any power to do this again.  We must punish them, and we must teach them a lesson: Our liberties are not disposable, nor are our lives, our livelihoods, our businesses, or even our leisure activities.  This is our country, and to preserve it, we must throw off all of these dictators-in-waiting.  If they made mask mandates, closed down businesses, ordered school closures, or took any other action that restricted the lives and movements of Americans, they must be removed. All of them.

Early on Tuesday, I had been watching the most recent video on YouTube by the creator Amazing Polly, entitled It’s Your Funeral.  She’s Canadian, but she has a strong affinity for America, and I think she recognizes that if Americans won’t fight, her country will easily be subsumed into whatever global catastrophes to which America falls.  In particular, in this video, one of the things she addresses that caught my attention was her discussion of the psychology of isolation, and of tyranny. You can view the section of the video I’m referencing below. The portion on which I’d like to focus runs from approximately the 9:02 to the 27:02 timestamps. You may wish to skip ahead to the 9:00 mark:

https://youtu.be/GP6mApouvAw?t=539

Polly’s point is an important one. In fact, I’d like to expand on it, because I’ve observed a phenomenon since the onset of the various lock-downs and mask-mandates that troubles me greatly.  She mentions the Milgrim Electric Shock experiment, and she gives a decent explanation of the basic premises that inquiry investigated.  Basic human psychology doesn’t really change much, because we’re wired the same as people who lived one-hundred or one-thousand years ago, despite the artifices all our modern technology provides.  What’s most interesting about the experiment is how rapidly people become desensitized to the infliction of pain on others, how accepting of isolation they become, and just how readily people, all people, can be persuaded by authorities to do the most egregious things to one another.

This is even more remarkably distinct among people who already live and work in a martial or quasi-martial environment, like military or police.  It’s quite plausible, based on my experiences and observations that people in those environments, already inculcated and indoctrinated to take orders and execute them more or less unquestioningly to pick up on this behavior even more readily than their civilian counterparts. Of course, it’s not just police and military, but also any hierarchical structure, like education or medicine, where this becomes a problem.  Accustomed to following orders handed-down from on high, people in those fields are potentially just as dangerous when under such demands.  Obedience and compliance become the keys to survival within such institutions, and it is this that, more than any other thing, should concern us when regarding all of these would-be dictators at the state and local levels.  People who can uncritically accept specious “science” which on one day tells you masks are pointless but on the next tells you they are indispensable in stopping the spread of a virus are just the sort of persons who should never be entrusted with or granted any power over their fellow man.

It’s been asked in innumerable forms how it was possible for the German people to permit the holocaust.  While I am not here directly comparing mask orders to the holocaust, what I seek to examine is the basic human psychology that permits either.  You see, we have had countless incidents of otherwise innocent and peaceable people being accosted by authorities in one form or another for refusing to wear masks, or maintain strict “social distance.” See below for one recent example:

I’m quite afraid of what might have happened had I been present for this. I don’t believe I’d have been able to sit by and watch this assault go on. I’m as big a supporter of law enforcement as any, but this behavior by this school resource officer was completely unjustified.  I don’t care what else is said about this incident, but the fact that an armed man was willing to use [less] lethal force(NOT non-lethal) against an unarmed woman for the “crime” of not wearing a mask when she’s clearly well beyond six feet from anybody not related to her is ridiculous.  Frankly, none of the powers of arrest or force should ever have come into play here.  The officer should be fired.  His credentials should be stripped. Every person in the chain of command between him and the Governor of Ohio should be removed from their offices, forcibly if need be, and they should all be charged for varying degrees of criminality. What was done in this case was a complete demolition of this woman’s civil liberties, and the institution directly responsible should be made to pay compensation.  If she is not able to obtain satisfaction by legal means, she would be morally justified in almost any action she would thereafter take in response.  She is entitled to her pound of flesh.

Will you suggest to me otherwise? Stop! Please leave my website. You don’t belong here. You don’t need to read anything I’ve heretofore written. You’re not fully human, and your willingness to submit to this idiocy is all the evidence I need of your inhumanity.  Law is important, critical in fact, but it is not everything and cannot substitute for morality, but for those of you who would happily go along with this woman’s abuse at the hands of the authorities, you are morally no different from the dirt-bags in Germany who went along with their atrocities. Yes, I agree that the degree is different, but the underlying psychology, the premise underlying and justifying this action is really no different.  You are every bit as dangerous to your fellow man as the SS officer who shot Jews on command and dumped them into a mass grave. I mean that. All of it.

If, on the other hand, you find, as do I, that this had been an unconscionable abuse of authority and power, I must ask: “What are you doing about it?” What are any of us doing about it?  You see, this is the real problem. I’m more than one-thousand miles remote from this taser incident, but I’m aware of it.  The people of South Central Ohio are aware of it. What are they doing about it?  Herein lies the problem: We all find excuses to remain uninvolved.  People, this is happening in America! This is happening in YOUR COUNTRY! This isn’t happening in some third-world S-hole, although given their preferences, the left will surely turn it into one.

My larger point here is that as Polly argues, we must not let our humanity be stolen from us, and we must be willing to make a stink. Beyond that, we must be willing to fight against this entire monstrosity. Our liberties don’t evaporate because there’s a virus, whether it’s extremely virulent, or spread only through intimate contact.  Our rights don’t get suspended because some tin-pot dictator-wannabe says so. The problem is that when all this finally ends, if we leave these people in place, they’ll be emboldened to do this to us again in the next emergency.  Some of them have grown to like this power they’ve managed to seize, and from our perspective, the problem is that in our willingness to comply for our safety and those of our loved-ones, we’ve too easily ceded too much ground, and too willingly watched as abuses of citizens goes on unabated.  I don’t understand how the school resource officer in the video above didn’t find himself surrounded by a bunch of citizens explaining to him that he’d better back off, or else.  I don’t understand it.  Where are the men, by the way?

Our society is collapsing in part because men have become neutered and indifferent; emasculated and impotent, morally much more than physically. I fear for our nation because now we live in a society in which tin-pot punks with official titles hand down orders and edicts, while ostensibly free men and women simply comply. What sort of people have we become?  What else will we accept when pressed?  Is there no limit to the indignities we will suffer on the say-so of some dimwit who mustered a majority of voters in some small county in an off-year election?  It’s time to reject all of this.  President Trump was right to say that we mustn’t let COVID19 dominate our lives.  He was right to lead from the front, rather than shout orders up from the Presidential bunker, like so many others. None of us get a second lifetime, and watching it bleed away in isolation offers no consolation. I’m done with the lock-down now. One way or the other, it’s over. Come what may. I will not be reduced to the sort of cringing loser who will surrender the right to console my aged mother, nor the sort of hapless mealy-mouth who helplessly watches a mother be assaulted by a power-hungry bureaucrat with a badge and a taser. It’s not happening. I hope my fellow Americans will join me in rejecting this “new normal” before it morphs into something more insidious. Those public officials who have handed down and enforced such orders must go, and the purge must begin today. What they’ve demonstrated is that they are too willing to abuse citizens on the basis of orders in pursuit of public policies that violate our constitutional rights, and that is a sin we cannot tolerate, and a treason against us we must not permit.