During the British occupation of India in the Colonial era there were concerns about the venomous cobras and the threat that they posed to humans. The British, never known to pass up a plan from inside some office where tea was sipped in equal measure with gin, placed a bounty on the snake and soon the locals, eager to make a farthing so as not to starve to death, arrived at the headquarters with baskets full of dead cobras.
This continued until it was discovered that some of the more clever wogs had begun to breed the cobras in captivity in order to meet the demand and to reap the reward. The British, unhappy with being taken advantage of by lesser men, rescinded their offer and the cobra market crashed. The cobra breeders quickly adapted to the directives of their overlords and released their snakes back into the wild, leaving the resident of Delhi to deal with a tidal wave of deadly vipers.
This is the cobra effect. An unintended consequence of turning natural processes into an economic proposition based on the double-edged sword of hubris and selfish interest.
The wildest fever dreams of Orwell and Huxley could not have envisioned a world where obese men and bitter old women would be able to order- and be obeyed by entire populations- such draconian infringements as mandatory lock downs and stay at home orders over fears of a natural process that has existed since human beings first became a species. The spread of any influenza results in death, it always has. The weak, the sick, the addicted and malnourished, the diseased and the elderly are the victims as they have always been because the virus stresses the immune system.
Those who live in close quarters, like our modern metropolises and their wide spreading metroplexes are at risk not because this outbreak is fundamentally different than any other, but because the conditions are. Our nation, once whip thin and fit from hard work and good food has become toxic, where 8 out of 10 Americans are overweight and nearly half are obese. One half of our citizens are on some form of prescription medication and nearly a third use illicit drugs.
We have created a global cobra effect that threatens not only to enslave us all, but to dehumanize every step of the way.
My take on what is happening today is not one shared by many and I share it only with those I know and trust. There is no way to know what part of what we are being told is true and what part is false. The story has changed so often and with so little thought to it’s reason or logic that no rational being could be expected to understand what is actually happening, but I can see the effects even from my little farm on the edge of the mountain. The virus is real, I do not contest that point, but the reaction has been a form of collective madness only read about in stories from the Dark Ages.
Our observations are a modern day Decameron, a human comedy. The effects of these insane decisions have barely been spoken about above a whisper, but they aren’t debatable. We’ve been sent to our rooms by our betters for something we didn’t do, told to maintain our distance from one another while they monkey hum one another on podiums nightly, standing so close to one another they can tell what each one had for breakfast. They have destroyed our economy, shuttered virtually every privately owned business, repealed our right to peaceably assemble, to worship, to marry in front of witnesses, to mourn our dead.
They have pointed at an unseen pathogen as an excuse to attack the population, to threaten them with imprisonment and fines for simple going outdoors, where sunshine, God’s natural disinfectant would do us the most good. They’ve separated friends and families, emptied the retirement accounts of tens of millions, left families destitute, seen to the greatest layoffs in our history, told us what we can buy or sell and for how much and when, while they hand out trillions- yes, trillions of dollars right back to the very people who just wrecked the entire economic system so they can be made whole, and then promised a mess of pottage to the ones they stole everything from.
All of the lies that we’ve been sold for the past quarter of a century have been exposed for everyone to see, borders that we were assured could never be controlled are suddenly shut up tighter than a well diggers ass. Criminals who prey on the weak have been released en masse onto our streets, while the military has begun to be deployed in order to control the law abiding citizens who simply want to buy some food for their families. We’ve been told that all of the sacrifices Americans made in the service of a global economy was worth $1,200, but that we should stop expecting anything else in the future as supply lines collapse under the weight of their callous indifference and hubris.
I can see the silver lining in all of this- the time people are now spending with families they hardly knew because of their workload, the dawning realization of just how important it is to depend on oneself rather than a corporate boss or a government agency and it gives me hope. There is the awareness of just how poorly everything has been handled, the incompetence and arrogance that always seem to travel together when these poobahs speak, a day late and a dollar short at every juncture.
There has been an endless string of missed opportunities and failed missions, the squandered resources and emptied budgets that despite the billions spent year after year couldn’t manage to keep a ready supply of something as simple as filter masks. And all of this is on view for everyone to see if only they open their eyes.
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