For most of us in certain parts of the Unites States, the government response to COVID was the first time we really experienced a form of totalitarianism firsthand.
Mar 28, 2023·edited Mar 28, 2023Liked by Clayton Craddock
For me the early stages of this.... phenomenon, were very confusing and contradictory. I live in a very small farm town in the Oklahoma panhandle, so one would not expect events here to be any kind of epicenter of history or representative of such a far larger event. But the schools were (briefly) closed, churches began to hold only online 'services' for a few weeks, the one bank in town went to drive-up-only for maybe a month or so, and the town office had us shoving monthly water payments through a mail slot and waving to the (not masked, as I recall) nice ladies through the glass. Retail businesses obediently placed their little six-foot stickers on the floors and hung up those silly plexi-sneeze-guards by the cash registers, placed boilerplated stickers on their doors about 'social distancing' and whatnot, but mostly never included any mask requirement which nobody would have observed anyway.
And all the while, rumors and gossip abounded, the odd discussion about 'case' statistics and third-hand accounts of individuals who'd 'got the cova' could be overheard, but never sounding much in earnest nor particularly convinced of any one point of view as to WTF must actually be going on.
Since I don't do 'social media' and never have and never will, I had the unique point of view of realizing that anything anyone thought they knew had come from entirely uncorroborated sources, and no doubt 'curated' for them by means of AI systems designed to show them what they seem to want to see to begin with. Any time I would challenge anyone to back up some claim about stats or threats connected to 'covid', the answer would amount to 'I saw it in the news, and it's the news.... why would they lie about it....?' But they could never recall the primary source of such 'news', had never done any of their own research, and the weirdest thing was that any sense of urgency I could ever detect from anyone seemed prompted and insincere, outweighing any recognizable measure of personal investiture, such as one might see in a discussion of NBA draft negotiations or college football scores....
And I heard a few elderly people claiming they'd 'had covid', that it was a vaguely difficult brief period of being 'real sick', and that they had all recovered and were now fine.
I had the sad occasion of traveling to Kentucky for my mom's funeral that first summer, via Tulsa and on through Missouri and into western Kentucky, which State had only days before brought in a new mask law. Whether in urban Tulsa or rural road stops along the way to Kentucky while passing through these three States, every place of business we entered had mask signs on the doors, and nobody but the odd staffer was wearing any mask. Nobody at the funeral or any of the places we visited in my parents' home town was either.
The next summer I had to go to a medical center in southern Kansas for hernia surgery. I was there three times, and each time the only 'covid' things I could see were that the entrance closest to the patient parking lot had bizarrely been shut off, forcing me to walk an extra several hundred yards with a groin hernia, and then being confronted by two very young interrogators with clipboards at the one remaining entrance, wearing masks, who went through the motions of 'screening' me with a lot of silly questions I could have given any answer I chose to. Inside the facility the only people wearing masks were employees in the common spaces, and everyone else, including those working in their offices or inside the various practitioners' areas, and the entire non-staff public, wasn't.
These several months spent in the various heartlands areas I had occasion to pass through showed me consistently that nobody really seemed to believe that 'covid' was any kind of real threat to anyone least of all to themselves, but I didn't get much sense that anyone actually thought the whole thing was a fake, more like it was all happening in some parallel universe but not right here where they were. Or something.
I have to say, the bland obedience only disappointed me, as bland obedience always has, and the lack of any visible signs of people forming their own conclusions based on responsible self-education scared the shit out of me, as such willful ignorance and useful idiocy always has. It was the rank intellectual mediocrity and mildly skeptical half-compliance that I found the most disturbing of all: I knew from the start that we were all living through a behavioral pandemic and not a viral one, and that this new meaning of the very term 'viral', to describe the effects of social media items experiencing rapid spikes in numeric visibility, was the real threat to all our futures, while any threat from an actual virus had probably been all but nonexistent.
And in the middle of all this I got banned from Medium-dot-com for saying exactly this.
What we've been seeing, or at least what I've seen, is that the power to determine and enforce what is or is not acceptable in speech, behavior or ideas has now been accelerated to a kind of law unto itself, superseding any concept of actual codified laws or regulations or any official powers to enforce them. Those with such powers to enforce actual laws and regulations have done so in the 'covid' era neither with any genuine belief in actual threats or any personal sense of duty to uphold the law, but rather because of the scariest non-legal motivator of human behavior of them all in the Century of Stupid: FOMO, the fear of missing out, now raised to a level of doing what everybody is doing because everybody is doing it, and for absolutely no other more adult reason anyone wants to be caught articulating openly.
'Covid' has never been anything close to the threat it has advertised itself as being. But what I have witnessed in human conduct both official and individual during this time is the most threatening thing I had ever experienced. And its effects have only just begun to take shape.
And humanity's own capacity for autonomous thought and action has little to do with any of it: the machines are now in charge, because we let them be, and they couldn't care less one way or another about what might become of any of us.
For me the early stages of this.... phenomenon, were very confusing and contradictory. I live in a very small farm town in the Oklahoma panhandle, so one would not expect events here to be any kind of epicenter of history or representative of such a far larger event. But the schools were (briefly) closed, churches began to hold only online 'services' for a few weeks, the one bank in town went to drive-up-only for maybe a month or so, and the town office had us shoving monthly water payments through a mail slot and waving to the (not masked, as I recall) nice ladies through the glass. Retail businesses obediently placed their little six-foot stickers on the floors and hung up those silly plexi-sneeze-guards by the cash registers, placed boilerplated stickers on their doors about 'social distancing' and whatnot, but mostly never included any mask requirement which nobody would have observed anyway.
And all the while, rumors and gossip abounded, the odd discussion about 'case' statistics and third-hand accounts of individuals who'd 'got the cova' could be overheard, but never sounding much in earnest nor particularly convinced of any one point of view as to WTF must actually be going on.
Since I don't do 'social media' and never have and never will, I had the unique point of view of realizing that anything anyone thought they knew had come from entirely uncorroborated sources, and no doubt 'curated' for them by means of AI systems designed to show them what they seem to want to see to begin with. Any time I would challenge anyone to back up some claim about stats or threats connected to 'covid', the answer would amount to 'I saw it in the news, and it's the news.... why would they lie about it....?' But they could never recall the primary source of such 'news', had never done any of their own research, and the weirdest thing was that any sense of urgency I could ever detect from anyone seemed prompted and insincere, outweighing any recognizable measure of personal investiture, such as one might see in a discussion of NBA draft negotiations or college football scores....
And I heard a few elderly people claiming they'd 'had covid', that it was a vaguely difficult brief period of being 'real sick', and that they had all recovered and were now fine.
I had the sad occasion of traveling to Kentucky for my mom's funeral that first summer, via Tulsa and on through Missouri and into western Kentucky, which State had only days before brought in a new mask law. Whether in urban Tulsa or rural road stops along the way to Kentucky while passing through these three States, every place of business we entered had mask signs on the doors, and nobody but the odd staffer was wearing any mask. Nobody at the funeral or any of the places we visited in my parents' home town was either.
The next summer I had to go to a medical center in southern Kansas for hernia surgery. I was there three times, and each time the only 'covid' things I could see were that the entrance closest to the patient parking lot had bizarrely been shut off, forcing me to walk an extra several hundred yards with a groin hernia, and then being confronted by two very young interrogators with clipboards at the one remaining entrance, wearing masks, who went through the motions of 'screening' me with a lot of silly questions I could have given any answer I chose to. Inside the facility the only people wearing masks were employees in the common spaces, and everyone else, including those working in their offices or inside the various practitioners' areas, and the entire non-staff public, wasn't.
These several months spent in the various heartlands areas I had occasion to pass through showed me consistently that nobody really seemed to believe that 'covid' was any kind of real threat to anyone least of all to themselves, but I didn't get much sense that anyone actually thought the whole thing was a fake, more like it was all happening in some parallel universe but not right here where they were. Or something.
I have to say, the bland obedience only disappointed me, as bland obedience always has, and the lack of any visible signs of people forming their own conclusions based on responsible self-education scared the shit out of me, as such willful ignorance and useful idiocy always has. It was the rank intellectual mediocrity and mildly skeptical half-compliance that I found the most disturbing of all: I knew from the start that we were all living through a behavioral pandemic and not a viral one, and that this new meaning of the very term 'viral', to describe the effects of social media items experiencing rapid spikes in numeric visibility, was the real threat to all our futures, while any threat from an actual virus had probably been all but nonexistent.
And in the middle of all this I got banned from Medium-dot-com for saying exactly this.
What we've been seeing, or at least what I've seen, is that the power to determine and enforce what is or is not acceptable in speech, behavior or ideas has now been accelerated to a kind of law unto itself, superseding any concept of actual codified laws or regulations or any official powers to enforce them. Those with such powers to enforce actual laws and regulations have done so in the 'covid' era neither with any genuine belief in actual threats or any personal sense of duty to uphold the law, but rather because of the scariest non-legal motivator of human behavior of them all in the Century of Stupid: FOMO, the fear of missing out, now raised to a level of doing what everybody is doing because everybody is doing it, and for absolutely no other more adult reason anyone wants to be caught articulating openly.
'Covid' has never been anything close to the threat it has advertised itself as being. But what I have witnessed in human conduct both official and individual during this time is the most threatening thing I had ever experienced. And its effects have only just begun to take shape.
And humanity's own capacity for autonomous thought and action has little to do with any of it: the machines are now in charge, because we let them be, and they couldn't care less one way or another about what might become of any of us.