…And blurting out, “We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” is no longer an example of acceptable tautology.
Propaganda works. We typically don’t refer to indoctrination that way any longer. Today the term “Virtue Signaling” is the path forward. Window dressing aside, propaganda is as virtue signaling does. Ask any former communist or student of truth and history, and they can immediately identify the use of virtue signaling phrases in use. Here are some examples you may have noticed over the last few months:
-Save Lives – Stay Home
-Flatten The Curve
-We Are All In This Together
-Social Distancing
Once a society, or in this case a community accepts this mode of thinking, all kinds of atrocities are possible. Why? Because you’re made to feel selfish or you’re ostracized via social pressure. This compels compliance. If you think I’m all washed up, you must not have paid any attention to anything going on around you recently. These folks enjoy asserting victim status at each turn as they rely on your decency to push you into denying your gut response. Some of them have been highly effective as well.
The real problem here isn’t that the soft-headed among us continue to run their yaps incessantly about things of which they know little, but that they occasionally manage to destroy businesses, futures, and people, all never having taking one iota of responsibility for any of the havoc they bring upon the neighborhood.
Once the dust settles from the covid19 scare, the virtue signaling protagonists will fall into two camps.
One camp will take the posture, had they not managed to strangle an entire community, state, and nation, that the devastation would have been much worse. This false premise should scare each of you. For the moment you hear that response, it truly is the universal “The Ends Justify the Means” defense. Each time you hear a person blurt out “The Ends Justify the Means” you’ve listened to a disgusting thought, as they have told you in no uncertain terms they truly neither care about you nor do they have any respect for truth. Any action was apparently necessary for their will to be granted. …And aren’t there some things that are off limits in a civilized society?
The other camp will make the claim they couldn’t predict the future, and someplace over in a dark corner, seated in a little bistro enjoying a cucumber sandwich with a progressive pal, one will utter to the other, “We didn’t know what we didn’t know…”
So… You’ve got a group of pawns. Split among them will be people who seek to avoid truth at all costs, and the others seek to avoid responsibility. Can you and I inhabit a world void of both truth and responsibility? There will be some stragglers who read this and work hard to avoid the reality I’m illuminating. Despite those attempts, their actions, words, posts, and postures will reveal their character.
The question isn’t whether these folks have done this and will do it again, but rather, how long are you willing to allow these voices to manipulate you? “We didn’t know what we didn’t know” won’t pay your gas bill, your kid’s college, or make the balloon payment on your ranch.
The possibility exists that herd immunization, like it or not, could the path forward. I’m no different than others in that I’d like to avoid getting or transmitting something. So, I use ‘best practices’ at every turn. While I pretty much adhered to those standards before, I benefitted from some shoring up. I’ve been known to eat a ham sandwich with greasy hands after coaxing my near-worthless Massey Ferguson 165 to start and run. This was a wakeup call for me to do a better job of washing up thoroughly and being extra careful about what comes out of my snoot.
The mask? I have relatives and dear friends in emergency management and some in microbiology and virology. They’re pretty much telling me what I figured. “Yes masks are fine, and we often tell people to wear them, but that is primarily for the masses that are none too bright coupled with the paranoid among them. A mask is fine, but it honestly doesn’t do much at all. And what most masks actually accomplish on a minute scale is what comes OUT of you and not what you take in.” After fully digesting this information offered me many ways but similar in sentiment over and over, I was led to a couple of conclusions.
First, this thing might just have to run its course. There is no practical way unless everyone in America agrees to live like a hermit for the better part of a month, to kill this off. The idea the Mask Brigade offers is fine in notion but kicks the inevitable can down the road. It simply isn’t going to work. It hasn’t anywhere else in America, why would your neighborhood be the exception to the rule?
Second, considering what masks do and don’t do, what the Mask Brigade is really telling you is kind of funny when you think about it… They’re saying they can’t be trusted not to cough on you and they’re not that good at hand washing. You might as well visualize what I have been for a while now. When I see a person wearing a mask in a food prep area, I’m pleased – you might not be able to cough into your elbow while sporting raw chicken in one hand and 10” chef’s knife in the other – I get it. It is a safeguard for others. When I see a person sitting at a park bench, I chuckle a little. Especially some guy wearing a mask made out of a T-shirt… They’re telling you, even though they can’t grasp it, that they can’t be trusted not to sneeze on your face. Maybe they know something about themselves, but that’s unlikely. They’re following orders, even if they defy logic, past precedent, and the capabilities of a mask.
The other thing many in the Mask Brigade seem to be? …Living in fear. I don’t envy them that either. Some, in truth most, probably believe some of the rhetoric they offer. Living in fear is a terrible way to inhabit your culture. I genuinely feel sorry for them. They want to be taken care of rather than accepting responsibility for themselves. Compliance is key to their way of thinking. I too have concerns, but I won’t misplace my fears onto others. I wouldn’t remove from them their human and basic civil rights to calm my fears, as if forcing them into something could somehow translate into my safety or security.
I truly don’t know how this will play out, but the blame game is tell-tale of the weak of mind. When they apply this model, they assume, falsely, their version of the moral high ground, chastise you and me, assert their status as victims, and cash in on our guilt. Not this time. I’ll do all I can to love and respect my neighbor as a reasonable guy. But what I won’t do is succumb to the will of those who either know and don’t care, or who willingly pass on the propaganda as if it were truth. Shaming your neighbors and stupidly destroying your core as you worship at the alter of the virtue-signaling gods isn’t my idea of Faith, Family, and Community. …All three of which are necessary for America to flourish.