J.B. Shurk – What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose? Why are we here? Daunting questions whose answers have been sought since mankind’s birth.
Although we mortals will continue to debate the nature of our existence for as long as we exist, I know this: we are not here to scream at each other for not wearing three layers of masks or to force each other to submit to experimental medical injections just because some very powerful people say we must.
We are not here to lock people up in jail because they have the temerity to worship God together. We are not here to board up small businesses because family owners desperate to remain financially afloat choose to operate in defiance of politicians exercising unjust, arbitrary, and completely capricious powers that they do not legally possess.
We are not here to shun those who refuse forced injections of foreign substances, to lock our doors when they are near, to disinvite them from family gatherings, or to vilify them as “unclean” and “unworthy” of life. We are not here to silence those who have different opinions by censoring their words and prejudiciously labeling their arguments as “misinformation.” This is not the purpose of our existence.
Yet it is entirely too clear that for a large number of Westerners, this kind of COVID authoritarianism has been tantalizingly appealing. After governments declared a public health crisis nearly three years ago, far too many people were willing to turn life upside-down. Schools closed their doors to students. Churches closed their doors to the faithful.
Shoppers fought for toilet paper and cans of soup. Politicians and bureaucrats suspended constitutional rights in the name of “emergency.” Without actually witnessing people dropping dead in the street or suffering through any medical symptoms, Westerners turned on each other quickly, and the worst impulses in humanity came springing to life.
Chaos during perceived crisis is nothing new. When humans are confronted with danger, only ten to twenty percent are capable of remaining calm and behaving rationally. The rest have a tendency either to be somewhat paralyzed with fear or to react in such a way as to become a danger to themselves and others. Politicians, whose entire profession is predicated on the cynical manipulation of human populations, know all too well how to rile people up and exploit their natural weaknesses for maximum advantage.
What was different with COVID, however, was how quickly it transformed mundane human behaviors. Out of nowhere, someone suggested that individuals remain six feet apart, and without any scientific rationale to back the premise, the new “rule” took over society. Separation marks were painted on store floors; municipal administrators policed outside lines with yardsticks; people became hysterical if they perceived the slightest penetration of their six-foot radial space.
The same thing happened with personal masking. First, health professionals declared ordinary cloth masks useless; then general masking was recommended; then citizens were encouraged to double- and triple-mask with no end in sight. It did not matter that no medical studies existed to demonstrate any benefits from universal masking.
It did not matter that most people were reusing dirty, pathogenic-infested masks for months on end. It did not matter that mask use should have been a personal bodily choice, just as it has always been a personal choice of the mask-obsessed to venture forth into society.
All of a sudden, multiple-masked individuals went flipping nuts if they encountered another human not respecting the severity of the arbitrary masking rules — even if that person was jogging far from other humans or sitting in a vehicle completely alone.
Of course, the enduring mantra during this unnatural social experiment has been that we must follow the science wherever it takes us, even if that “science” takes us in completely contradictory directions from one week to the next. New COVID rules were promulgated with great frequency, and those most committed to “saving” the world from its destruction dedicated themselves to these rules like one does with a solemn personal calling. The loudest rule-enforcers among us embraced COVID authoritarianism with an intense, quasi-religious zealotry.
If anyone needed a wakeup call as to how morally confused and spiritually lost Westerners have become, three years of COVID-1984 insanity have encapsulated our problems clearly. For decades, a post-modern, anti-Christian, anti-Western malignant cancer has spread throughout society, eating away at life and joy and fomenting putrid, destructive obsessions with meaningless “multiculturalism,” self-hating anti-nationalism, synthetic globalism, and a Big Government devotion ideologically akin to communism’s pathological ethos.
Citizens have been forced to abandon their culture, way of life, religious identity, and family allegiances while enduring government conditioning meant to deprive them of their individuality and program them to submit to the “greater good” — regardless of what politicians define that “good” to be.
This era of institutionalized Marxist-socialism has left Westerners a shell of their former selves — spiritually and morally weakened, personally confused, despondently searching for meaning, and desperately seeking salvation in all the wrong places. For so many lost and troubled souls in the West, COVID-1984 has provided a missing purpose to otherwise hollow lives, and unscrupulous politicians have been only too happy to welcome old communist congregants and newly converted disciples to Big Government’s irreligious cause.
COVID mania has reflected a stark truth that Westerners today crave some sort of tangible meaning in their lives during a period of history in which political leaders have constructed an increasingly meaningless world.
Still, these COVID trials have revealed something else. During perhaps the most intense, unethical, and cruelly psychological pressure campaign ever inflicted by rights-denying governments (and their herd-mentality, just-following-orders, COVID-compliant, inane rule–enforcing, thuggish citizen majorities), a stubborn minority refused to obey.
There were those who questioned the “science” and said, “This doesn’t make sense.” There were those who looked at the easily discoverable small lethality rates and asked, “Why are we closing everything down for this?” There were those who watched government health bureaucrats and medical doctors rush through the global rollout of experimental treatments largely devoid of supporting scientific data, respect for safety protocols, routine study of control groups, or basic ethical considerations and said, “You will not inject me with something against my will, especially when you have given the pharmaceutical companies pushing the injections complete legal immunity in their pursuit of profits.” Even in the face of abusive government mandates, social stigmatization, and gross disrespect for human rights, a firm few said, “No!”
French general Christian Blanchon published a letter last month praising those courageous enough to resist the global COVID pressure campaign as “superheroes” who “embody the best of humanity.” “They did what others could not do; they were the tree that withstood the hurricane of insults, discrimination, and social exclusion.” Commending them as true warriors, the general concludes that “these are the soldiers that any army of light wishes to have in its ranks.”
The general is correct. It is also true that those who have demonstrated courage will inspire others to act courageously in the future. More people today see clearly the Machiavellian manipulations of Western governments these last few years, and more people who ran with the herd in 2020 will now push back against its movements in the future. More people understand that COVID compliance does not lead to spiritual salvation. More people comprehend that governments do evil things and that following political orders serves no higher calling.
Pursuing virtue and truth does provide meaning, and both are often found on the same path to an Almighty God. As for the mortal world, we are not here to blindly or meekly comply. We do find great purpose, though, when we choose to fight for what’s right.
SF Source American Thinker Oct 2022