Kathleen Devanney – My kindergarten teacher – Mrs. Schumacher – used something she called Pretend Time as a means of keeping her class in order.

A carrot you could say, dangled in front of her flock of five year olds, maybe more accurately a deal: behave (especially outside the class room, where it really counted) and in exchange we might earn a minute of unbridled imagination.

Be anyone or anything for a full minute. This would unleash an insane amount of frenzied activity. (No doubt entertaining to Mrs. Schumacher.)

There were a few rules: No physically attacking another student; no destroying class property; and no jumping off desks. The last rule wasn’t strictly observed – I once heard a classmate explain that he had to jump off the desk because he was in fact a pirate walking the plank. She nodded agreement.

Needless to say Pretend Time prepared us well for the world.

While some kids attempted to inhabit as many identities as they could in such a tiny window – morphing from super-hero to cowboy to war victim – others picked up the same one every time. (I’m thinking of sad Sandra who would assume the role of her mother and pretend-iron in a corner. Sigh.) I liked to have my Pretend Time character decided in advance and would stick to one for the minute.

However, even prepared – in the midst so many characters bursting into life – you had no way of knowing who your adopted identity might bump into.

Once – as I recall – in the midst of acting as the Principal of the school, heroically directing children out of the burning building, I had to suddenly deal with an outlaw threatening to burn down my family’s farm. Do I abandon saving the children so I can protect ‘my’ farm – a farm which existed only in his imagination? Very annoying. I felt compelled to drop my invented world and respond.

Once the minute was up, Mrs. Schumacher would yell: Pretend Time over! and we’d scramble back go our seats assuming our ‘real’ selves. The picking up and putting down of identities in our imagination, was likely more profound in its lessons, then our teacher knew.

Naturally, we had no way of knowing our normal lives were fully wrapped up in an even more elaborate pretend-time world. How could we? That what we were being taught was key to the continuing fabrication of that world and that we would inadvertently – via our indoctrination schooling – perpetuate it.

Such innocents.

It makes me wonder – these decades later – what happens when the deception is seen through by that critical, magical number and the curtain fully closes on this extravagant production?

As is, no doubt, happening.

We can’t tell from this 2 minute edited clip how many folks disagreed with the claim: “Covid is a Scam” but clearly many have come to the conclusion it was, over the last few years.

What I didn’t see in the clip was much in the way of outrage. Recognition of a world wide scam, acknowledged in passing. Of course people were on their way somewhere else. It wasn’t a protest; it was a guy at a table with a sign. Still, there is something odd about so many taking in the massive deception, casually.

This tells us something important, though I’m not clear what. I’d like to interpret it positively – as a largescale integration that will result in largescale non-compliance. If you know the ‘authorities’ lied to you at that level, would you listen to them again?

I guess we’ll find out.

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SF Source Kathleen Devanney Apr 2024