Freedom as Infection — A Thought Experiment

Let’s say we — just as an exercise — rename COVID-19 as FREEDOM-19, a virus we will survive or fail. How are we doing? Compare and contrast:

Still just brainstorming here, pun intended, but let’s consider the circumstances when a high civilization is most in danger. There’s only one that really matters: when that high civilization begins to forget that survival is always an issue and becomes complacent to the point of ignorance, carelessness, and passivity. That’s when they are easy prey for the predators of their own and every kind of force in nature. When danger arrives, they curl up in the corner, they panic, they submit to whatever authority professes to have the answers to a survival outcome they have entirely forgotten how to provide for themselves.

Nothing penetrates the creeping ennui. Let’s face it. Rasmussen and the other polling organizations are manfully cherry-picking the data to keep Biden at approximately 45 percent approval. Except he should be in the low thirties, if not mid-twenties, by now. He’s underwater on every major issue. Everybody, and I mean Everybody, knows he’s in an advanced senile state, which given that he was never that smart in the first place means he isn’t qualified to be president. At all.

We’re in a kind of race right now. Something truly horrific will happen within the next year. Probably nuclear. Probably millions of victims when all is said and done.

Everyone knows. Why all the tin-foil apocalyptics from Revelation freaks to climate change idiots are trying to tell us the end days are upon us. But they’re all full of bullshit, from both the right and the left. See, some of us know better. I, for example, actually read the New Testament. Revelation is not a prediction but a metaphor. I also read my science and my life. I’m actually old enough to remember weather. When I was a kid in the 1960s, we went through some global warming that would make you vegans crap your pants. Whole summers full of 90+ degree days. My sister and I never had a White Christmas in our childhoods. Fact. I used, even back then, to look up the worst weather. It was always in the 1880s. Dead people in New York.

Lived through some hurricanes here in the northeast. Baaaad storms. Hazel caused the front door to bend inward (literally not figuratively). Donna made us run to town, where there was still some electricity.

But then there was surcease. Call it a pause in the weather pattern. Milder summers, a couple White Christmases years later. When you get old enough and know just a little something, you learn that weather is just weather is just weather.

But why our current obsession generally with apocalypse? Because, deep down, we all know we have lost the incredibly important concern for our own survival. Which is not happening. There has to be an excuse for survival panic. No matter how idiotic. Climate Change? Too mild a terror. Won’t hurt anyone for a generation. We’re even too scared to come up with a truly scary scenario. Not working.

Where FREEDOM-19 comes in. I wrote a post years ago called Death in a Cold Light. One of my best. Yet despite my repeated attempts to make people aware of it, this piece has never received a single comment. Not one. Never even an acknowledgment that it existed at all.

Where we are. We know our lives are in danger. But what do we do? We hide under the covers.

When God takes a hand. He threatens us all. Nothing we can blame for other people’s sins. You know. Cancer caused by smoking, heart attacks caused by overeating, strokes caused by fury and, uh, nasty personality? This time, it can just kill you out of the blue as it were.

So how do we react? Panic. Of course. We’ve become a gutless, complacent, fat and ignorant and stupid mountain of promiscuous pieces of shit.

WE DON’T WANT TO DIE! SAVE US, FUCK IT!!!

You’ll trade away anything for another breath. Including all your freedom. Serfdom is acceptable, even kind of fun. Except for the few who still have the genetic antibody for FREEDOM-19. The one that makes us remember who and what we are as conscious beings here on earth.

For many of us, FREEDOM-19 is an opportunity to remember we don’t live forever. Survival is always at issue. So how do we live with the time we have? Your choice, sweetheart.

My own appraisal is that we’re losing this test, big time. The dead cells of COVID are drifting through our sad bodies, and we don’t even know how much damage they’ve already done.

The good news? My number was always 19. I’m still alive. How ‘bout you?