My Substack-aversary

note to self - Stop staring at the elephants

My inaugural post was exactly one year ago today. The ‘substack-aversary’. The documentary Never Again Is Now Global by Vera Sharav was released recently, and I thought I would write about my own responses to it as a way to structure this post. Over the course of the past two weeks I  watched all five episodes. Word of warning, it can be a very intense experience. But I encourage everyone to watch. Here are the things that came to my mind as I took it in.

            Something expressed by several of the people interviewed is the sense of incredulity that others were so easily fooled by what was, to ‘us’, an obvious psy-op. The feeling of being the only one who can see, the acuteness of the “how is it POSSIBLE other people are not seeing what I see?” phenomenon. I tend to remember it as two phases -  before “vaccine” and after “vaccine”. [I really HATE using the word vaccine. They are not fucking vaccines, and the coopting of that word was a move of absolutely evil genius on the part of the baddies]. So as expressed by some of the interviewees, even in phase one, that sense of being caught in a movie, or nightmare, of unreality, of disbelief at the lack of insight of all the people around me was very distressing.

            It got worse, and given that much of this documentary is focused on the parallels between this event and what happened with the Nazis in WWII, the distress morphed into feeling extremely disturbed. I am hardly the only one who saw parallels between what’s transpired recently and what happened leading up to the Holocaust. And again, that feeling of “how can other people NOT see this?”. The vaccine passport tipped some kind of scale for me, it was the thing that pushed me over a psychological breaking point. The worst part was the reaction of people around me. It was all So what if you can’t go to a restaurant, you don’t even like eating out anyway? So what if you’re not allowed in a gym, you have a home gym, you don’t go to a gym anyway? So what if you can’t enter an SAQ (liquor store), order it online and do a curbside pickup. Or tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you. I don’t understand what you’re so upset about. Besides, if you want to do those things go get vaccinated like everyone else. I know there might be some small risk, but that’s what living in society means, you take some risk on yourself for the good of society. We all did it. If you want to have the privileges that we have, you have to take the risk we took.

            Another point made by one of the interviewees that resonated starkly with me was this concept of public health, and of being responsible for other people’s health. The interviewee even articulated some my own specific points/pet-peeves: Why am I responsible for the health of someone else? I don’t know what he puts in his body, if he smokes, what he eats, why is it my job to make sure he is healthy?  She even articulates that the word itself is problematic: who is this Public? It’s individuals. “The Public” is just a bunch of individual people. Each person is responsible for their own health. Words cannot convey how infuriating it was/is for me to be told I need to risk my health to protect other peoples’, and the phase where the headlines were screaming about Pandemic of the Unvaccinated, and how the unvaccinated are taking up hospital beds… SERIOUSLY??????!!!!!! Hospitals are filled with people who have all kinds of self-generated diseases, like metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease… all these people eating crap, causing their own health problems because of shitty diet, sedentary lifestyle, they’re the ones filling up the hospitals, have been for years as the fucking obesity epidemic rages unchecked, and super-healthy-ideal-BMI-whole-food-athlete ME is told I need to sacrifice my hard won health for people who are not willing to take responsibility for their own health? ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY??!!! If someone is sick, feeling unwell, with something that might be transmissible, it’s hoped for that they will make the choice to stay in their home, yes, and if I ever did experience symptoms like coughing or sneezing I would stay home. But we need to have some regard for other people and allow them to make their own choice about that. And for those who are hypochondriac, or in some compromised state, and worried they are at risk, how about they stay home. In other words, if you’re so worried about catching covid how about you stay home, and let the rest of us who feel perfectly well and are not worried get on with our lives? Why should we be shut in our homes (have our businesses shut down, schools closed etc)? Sorry now I am ranting because it makes me so mad. Moving on.

            Another point in the documentary that resonated deeply was when people talked about their efforts to communicate with the people around them, to open eyes and ears, to wake up those who were taken in by the psy-op. The frustration at being blocked, being shut out, being shut up, being told “I don’t want to know.” The film did a brilliant visual, images of people with their hands over their ears and eyes squeezed shut, one after another. It reminds me of a line from a comedy video by Brent Pella made after Emily Oster’s Atlantic piece, the actor says, mimicking Oster’s position, “I didn’t have the information people were trying to give me”.

           

Which brings me to another of the primary aspects of what was so intensely and personally painful for me in all this: that was the response of the man I was involved with. I had made a few attempts to send him articles or podcasts/videos, trying to get him to wake up, to see what was so obvious… but ultimately, he pulled that “don’t tell me, I don’t want to know” move. He did the hands over the ears, eyes squeezed shut. And when I stopped trying to engage him in any conversation about it, stopped sending links, and just behaved like a hooker hired for a GFE (girlfriend-experience), he was so obviously so relieved, so pleased… that was what put the nail in the coffin of that relationship. How pleased he was when I adopted the GFE behavior.

            In retrospect, it was obviously not a ‘good’ relationship from the get-go. In retrospect, I suppose I should be grateful that all this made it impossible for me to avoid recognizing that it was never a good relationship in the first place. But it still hurts. When I watched this documentary, what is so critical to see is that it is the small gradual incremental steps that led up to the holocaust that had so many of us worried, scared. It didn’t go from zero to gas chambers in 60 seconds. It was a whole decade of small changes, of each thing being ‘not so bad’. And as they remind us in the film, the Nazis used the exact same claims – that the Jews were a threat to public health, dirty, contagious. One of the interviewees recalls the time in the years when those incremental changes were happening, and how people (Jewish people) would be deliberating, ‘should we leave?’. Leaving your home is incredibly hard, in those circumstances. (As opposed to moving because you chose to, say for a job in another city or retiring to a warmer climate). The self-doubt, the wondering, ‘is it bad enough? Maybe it’s not that bad, maybe this is the worst it will get, and I can tolerate this level of badness. Maybe I don’t need to leave’. Until the time came when you couldn’t leave, and then it was too late. And I recall having those very same exact thoughts and feelings all winter last year. But where would I go, how would I leave? Alone, with my dog, in my tiny car? What about my house, my bank account, all my bills that come in each month to be paid? It was months of being very frightened, and gas-lit by the man I had become attached to. And yet knowing how the Jews who lived through those years in Germany asked themselves those questions, and in hindsight the ones who did leave were proven to be right.

Michael P. Senger wrote a post about how Covid affected us at a personal level, and collected a bunch of stories or short bits sent in by his readers which is brilliant.

How the Response to COVID Affected Us at a Personal Level

It’s important to record this kind of thing. And reading it helps us see that we are not alone in a lot of the very personal pain, the very intimate experiences that we went through. One of the people in the documentary mentions how sometimes the people in the concentration camps were able to get paper and pen/pencil, and they wrote their experiences, little diaries almost, and they buried them, just dug holes in the ground and buried these bits of paper with their stories written. Just to know some record exists somewhere, that “this happened to me, this is how I felt, this is what I lived’.

            So that’s what watching the film evoked in me in terms of looking back at the year has that has passed. The last one (it’s in five parts) focuses more on the future. And this has preoccupied me quite a bit too, often to a damaging extent, where I obsess about what’s coming down the line so much it is really not healthy. The people in the film point out all the stuff we here in the stackverse are watching unfold. In fact, of all the posts I have done in the year of this stack, the one post I truly ‘regret’, or the one where I really got it wrong, was the one about Global Government and Digital ID. In the post I was fairly equivocal about it. Possibly the influence of my then-partner who viewed those things very favorably and touted their pros: we need someone to coordinate everything at a supranational level, and we need people to behave in all the ways that are deemed necessary for our safety and the climate and all that, so global government and digital ID have to be implemented. You can’t have anarchy, you can’t have people just doing whatever they feel like, or not obeying whatever rules they don’t happen to agree with. Well, I officially call myself out now, and say unequivocally that I am 100% against any kind of global government. I have become convinced that anything and everything that can be de-centralized should be de-centralized. I will never accept a digital ID, and CBDC’s scare the fuck out of me. And as far as following the rules, once again, as pointed out by the interviewees, how many people, during the 30’s and early 40’s in Germany, were ‘just following orders’? While I agree in principle that we don’t want anarchy and people can’t just choose which laws they feel like obeying – driving on the wrong side of the road, breaking into people’s houses and stealing their possessions, not paying taxes – the statement that ‘we need to follow all the laws/rules’ is, when looking back at the years that lead up to the holocaust and the events of the holocaust itself – clearly problematic. ALL of them? Without questioning? A quotation I noted from the film fits well here: you don’t need to be evil to do evil. I was just following orders is not an excuse. And to come to the realization that someone you love is taking that stance… I remember an argument we had once and I said to him, I feel like I’m sleeping with the enemy. He said, I’m not your enemy. And I said Yes, you are. It was as if I suddenly saw myself as the Jewish woman sleeping with a man who joined the Nazi party. I know this is a rather unpopular stance, as even most people on ‘our side’ seem very sympathetic, but I have no sympathy for everyone who got taken in by the psy-op, for all the people who were complicit, who were just following orders. Who shut their eyes and ears. There is a very vengeful part of me that finds dying suddenly way too easy for them. Let’s face it, suddenly is actually the best way to die. Long drawn out is not exactly better when it comes to dying. How forgiving do holocaust survivors feel of all the Good Germans without whose complicity the Holocaust may never have happened? I found a book recently called Hitler's Willing Executioners, and although I only got about three chapters in before giving up (it was written in Academese not plain English, and my patience for that jargon is non-existent), it was enough to get the main idea.

            In the year that has passed since I first posted here, my entire worldview has changed. I have let go of the model I’d had all my life of what this world is, and accepted that is far more dark than I ever imagined. And both far more complicated and more complex. I note, now, that a mark of ‘lack of knowledge’ (I’m tempted to say lack of intelligence but I’ll phrase it without being insulting as insulting people is not my goal), is a degree of certainty and sureness that “what I think the world is, is right, correct. What I see is all there is to see and reflects reality’. (This is very much my mom – she is 100% positive that her own concept of the world is 100% correct. The world is a good place populated by only good people, all doing their best, and it’s all very simple. Nothing overly complicated, no corruption, no conspiracies, and everything is exactly as it iss portrayed by the CBC). In essence what I’ve learned the past year is how little I know, how incredibly limited my own knowledge is. The more I learn the more it becomes obvious I know almost nothing. And not just that there’s a shit-ton I know fuck-all about, the so called known-unknowns, but there’s an even bigger shit-ton I cannot ever know about. The unknown unknowns, and further, the unknowable unknowns. No one person can get a truly complete picture of this world, can know 100% of what is going on, what makes up this world. (Although sometimes I think Mathew Crawford comes pretty close, and Daniel Schmactenberger is impressive too).

            For a while I was doing pretty well with living-in-the-present, and focusing on my own stuff, keeping blinders on, but just recently I’ve fallen back a bit into spending too much time obsessing about all the potential dystopian scenarios for the future. I had a very vivid dream at one point where I find myself in a place that looks like Africa, a vast vista, walking along on a rise, on a plains type of scene -  tall grass, a copse of trees behind me, with my dog at my side. A low noise becomes apparent, and just at the range of my vision – as I can see very far in this outdoor scene – a herd of elephants is stampeding in my direction. Instinct kicks in: grab your dog and move out of the way. So I do. End of dream. It was a fabulous metaphor for what happening now: the stampeding herd of elephants is the totalitarian dystopia approaching us: imposition of digital IDs, CBDCs, China-style social credit system, climate lockdowns, more pandemics with ‘vaccines’ that we will not, this time around, be able to choose not get, train derailments releasing toxic chemicals, which blow everywhere and get into water and soil and poison us, and so on. Who knows what fresh hell awaits us, it seems like things are spinning out of control. But in the dream I react appropriately by instinct, I grab my dog and move out of the way. I do not stand transfixed, deer in the headlights, mesmerized by the elephants. I do not sit down and try to collect data about elephants: examine them, analyze their behavior, ask what can be done to change their course, come up with hypotheses, etc etc. I do think this is worth doing and that there are some people out there who have the abilities, the brainpower and skills and resources to do that, and they are working crazy hard, and I support them to the extent I can with the miniscule amount of money I have as disposable income. But I am not one of those people.

Often the behaviors a person adopts during a crisis, while they help get through the crisis, are not necessarily adaptive when the crisis is over. I think the creation of this Substack was something that I did to help get myself through a time of crisis. It was a place for me to just shoot out my thoughts and toss around ideas, in an attempt to figure WTF was going on, when it seemed like the whole world went crazy. With the help of certain stacks (Rounding the Earth is one of the best for that purpose), and some other websites, I feel I’ve at least gotten some hold of WTF is going on. Some of my very early instincts seem to be correct: that there may be some element of depopulation-agenda; some element of financial benefit for certain industries (pharma, tech, plus governments or politicians who also stand to gain financially); some element of pure control (digital ID, CBDCs); one I missed completely because I have zero knowledge/awareness of, an element of the financial system being completely deconstructed and then reconstructed differently, the collapse of the dollar, the issue of government debt… anything that ties into money and finance is completely beyond my ability to grapple with but clearly a major element in all the madness unleashed upon us. As is also pointed out in the film, and a feeling I’ve gotten, is that a lot of this was a test on their part – they just wanted to see what would happen, how the population would react to various measures. And to that extent, there was no way for them not to succeed, because whatever we did, like rats in an experiment, it would provide them with data to use going forward for their next move.

Whatever is going on was decades in the making. But I’m feeling now that continuing to focus on it all is no longer adaptive for me. The acute phase of this bit of the crisis is over now, as the vaccine passport system was dismantled last spring, and although the Canadian government is still encouraging everyone to get boosted, we haven’t been in all-covid-all-the-time-on-every-channel for many months now. All the sleepers I’m surrounded with, who are so oblivious they don’t even think “anything” is happening, have completely forgotten Covid and long since moved on. Personally, I need to keep making an effort to Stop Staring At The Elephants and focus myself on other stuff. I started working on a novel last year, a story I’d had in my mind since the age of 26 and only had the courage to make the attempt to put to paper at age 51, and I just finished chapter nine; I have just under 99,000 words (304 pages double spaced). I’ve gained some momentum in the writing process in the past month or so, and I feel confident in predicting that the first draft will be completed by the spring. So in light of that goal – of not being transfixed by the elephants, of letting go of a behavior that helped me through a crisis but is no longer adaptive, I’m going to take a leave from Substack-writing. Whether I take it up again at some future date, and start posting again, or never post another article after this, I have no idea. But for right now it’s time for me to invest my energy in other things. I want to thank everyone who took the time out of their own lives to read my words, and send out good vibes to all of you, wishes for the best of everything in your own lives. Bye for now.