A Tsunami of Stupid
I would like to bring your attention to some vile nonsense currently circulating among dodgy social media platforms like Facebook, to its eternal shame.
It is a negative manifesto, of sorts:
“Before I begin — I hope you won’t unfollow or unfriend me if you have a different perspective, but feel free to do so if you wish! We are all adults here… we’re friends… we’re family. So let’s love, accept and respect each other! Ultimately, we all want the same thing… our basic human rights, to be healthy, happy and enjoy quality of life… so we all have the same goal in mind, even though we may sometimes disagree on how to achieve it.
“🇨🇦 We have now been robbed of 6 months of our lives… that’s 6 months we will never get back… we are systematically being stripped of our basic rights and freedoms… proof is emerging that we have been lied to and deceived by our elected (and non-elected) leaders…I believe it’s time to exercise our right to say “No”
“🇨🇦 I am concerned that people are being labelled conspiracy theorists, simply because they question certain government, corporate and industrial motives, or because they question the arbitrary laws that revoke our basic human rights.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the Government making decisions about my health. They were elected to serve, not control me.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the extreme censorship that is taking place on social media platforms toward doctors, scientists and activists, who present and uphold valid data that challenges the ‘official narrative’ the media would have us believe. This concerns me far more than the virus.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the tracking and tracing of citizens.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to Government making decisions without a democratic process.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to Politicians, or any other individuals, who are compromised by having a lucrative ‘financial interest’ in the Pharmaceutical Industry, making decisions about my health and wellbeing.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to being told that all these decisions are for my own safety.
“🇨🇦I do not consent to censoring free speech under the guise of protecting me from the spread of misinformation.
“🇨🇦I do not consent to the closing of small businesses while multi-million dollar companies remain open.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to being labelled an ‘anti-vaxxer’, simply because I have concerns about MANDATORY, enforced vaccines or rushed procedures, without proper protocols — especially high risk ones, with limited testing that are deemed highly profitable to the most questionable of interests.
“🇨🇦I do not consent to the amount of division and hatred that is being encouraged between friends and families, simply for upholding opposing beliefs, or for speaking openly about what THEY believe. 💞
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the idea that pharmaceuticals and vaccines are the ONLY way to prevent or heal from illness… the outright dismissal of good nutrition and natural prevention and therapies is highly questionable from my perspective.
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the media only covering fraudulent and misleading ‘case’ counts, or grossly exaggerated death counts, when the survival rate is immensely higher. Fear cripples immunity, so why aren’t we talking about the excellent (99.9%) recovery rates, successful treatments and therapies?
“🇨🇦 I do not consent to the lack of care and consideration for ‘non-Covid’ patients, who have been denied access to essential treatments, consultations and surgeries for Cancer, Cardio-vascular and other life threatening conditions. Their lives matter too!!!
“🇨🇦 I don’t consent to ‘House Arrests’ and Lock Downs… staying home doesn’t protect against domestic violence, sexual abuse, depression, anxiety, starvation and suicide; all of which are costing many more lives than the virus.
Here’s what I DO consent to:
“🇨🇦Being a free and critical thinker. [Right!]
“🇨🇦A parent, who is protecting the future of all children.
“🇨🇦 An individual who cares about tomorrow… someone who understands the connection between the health of our planet and our own health
“🇨🇦A caring person, who will never stop fighting injustice and tyranny… or questioning and condemning the lies and manipulation of the Government and the Media.
“🇨🇦 We all come into this world with nothing and we’ll leave with nothing… the bit in the middle is called LIFE… life is a precious gift from our Maker… none of us know how long that gift will last, so make the most of every second, every minute and every hour of every day… live, love, take chances, not orders… be kind, be tolerant and be happy… don’t waste another second waiting for things to change… BE THE CHANGE ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
“If you agree, please copy and paste, to show your support for this stand we must take, for the sake of our freedom and the freedom of future generations and for our once great country.”
What is my response to this tsunami of stupid? It is this (mostly consisting of questions):
What do anti-maskers, anti-all-normal-epidemic-precautions people not get about “pandemic”? Do they not know that masks protect others, who then protect you by wearing their mask? These are protocols that have been well in place since 1918. They are absolutely scientifically proven and have been for over a century. They work. They’re ALL that work. There’s TONS of precedent, tons of evidence, worldwide. Canada’s Henry and America’s Fauci have both worked on, and bested, EBOLA — with precisely these sets of precautions, first and foremost. Do these people not know what ‘spikes’ are? What ‘super-spreader events’ are? Why they happen? Where they happen, and to whom? This is NOT rocket science!
When adherents of ‘personal freedom’ and ‘self-determination’ as to health guidelines in the presence of highly infectious, potentially fatal disease do not wear masks when they go to the store, and get stroppy about defending their right not to and to be potential super-spreaders and infect tons of people, do they watch for coughs and self-isolate in the presence of possible symptoms? Do they assert the hand washing regimen, and wiping down stuff that comes into the house? Do they social-distance? Do they avoid mass gatherings? Or do they renege on their obligation to the Greater Good, on the ‘debt owed to common humanity,’ to the wellbeing of others, to mere, simple decency, respect and consideration for others?
Masks protect others, not oneself. When everyone wears a mask and shows a modicum of caution, everyone is protected — by everyone else. It’s kindness. It’s humanity. And, by the way, this and the other minimal precautions are ABSOLUTELY proven by science; they have been since the 1918 pandemic. There is no question of this. In Canada and places in the States and the rest of the world that have brought the pandemic under control, do they not realize that following these guidelines of epidemiologists is WHY they don’t have a situation like Arizona, Florida or Texas? If we followed the ‘personal freedom’ guidelines misinformation reposted on Facebook and elsewhere, we here in Canada would have the problem just as bad or worse than the U.S. (which is the worst in the world) due to the Chinese-Canadian traffic at the outset.
The after-effects, which we are of course still learning about, this being a ‘novel’ coronavirus, are dire — permanent lung damage, heart damage, and neurological/brain damage in some cases. Recent analyses mean that it is now being thought of as a disease primarily of the blood and blood vessels. This puts all organs at risk. NO ONE wants to get this disease, at any age, and it’s too soon to assess the ‘full recovery’ patients for long term or recurring symptoms. The disease hasn’t been among us for long enough yet for us to know.
They apparently don’t know what is meant by “pandemic.” They don’t know history. Their emotional fixation and attachment to conservatism and authoritarian gaslighting assuages economic fears and resentments. The plight of women, non-Whites, non-Christians, LGBT people under such conservative, authoritarian regimes apparently concern them not. Though this nonsense and other manifestos like it masquerade as ‘Liberty’ movements, they’re just gaslighting writ large.
The juvenility of the repost, the attitude and the ideology itself is so rank that a commentator on my Facebook page, where I reposted it along with my redress, mistook it as something written by a teenager with her very sage and gracious comments: Elizabeth D Hoffman: “Unfortunately most teenagers don’t really have a sense of their own mortality. They take far greater risks than adults do. This is why the largest cause of death in teens is car accidents. This young man is very immature but he is struggling with big ideas. If I were his parents or clergy or teachers I would want to guide him to think about why he has wasted the last six months of his life? I have accomplished so much during this quarantine (like today I read a book that I have been wanting to read for a long time, and I have been learning Italian on the internet. I’ve been participating in online webinars with fabulously interesting people, and last week for my birthday I raised close to $800 to support Doctors Without Borders because I can’t be an essential worker myself.) Why is the young man’s outrage about what individual liberties have been taken away from him? But he has no desire to act as a steward for the general good of the community? These are questions that the adults in his life should be asking him?”
Who does the author think robbed them? Are they going to blame a microbe? For fulfilling IT’S biological mandate, which is to say doing it’s job and colonizing as widely as possible? The only ones robbed of anything that cannot be recouped, compensated for or endured with grace and goodwill are those who have died or who are left with lasting health compromise. And many, many of those were legitimately robbed of their lives or health due to the failure of government to heed its public health organizations, epidemiologists and pandemic guidelines, which of course has resulted in tens of thousands of purely unnecessary deaths from this virus — again, not here in Canada, but in the U.S., where this ideology (“be really juvenile and opposition-defiant, just ‘cause’ — we don’t have any real thoughts, altruism, goodwill or even manners”) comes from, and where its ‘leadership’ (or utter lack of) has literally made it the negative example of the world — the worst — the most cases, the most deaths, per capita. Literally.
Trolling the QAnon sites, and the 4-Chan dark web, etc. for misinformation and conspiracy theories feeds an emotional need and sells intellectual functioning down the river. Authoritarian chaos manufacturers gaslight people into thinking they’re standing up for personal freedoms when really they’re leading them down the garden path of anti-democratic authoritarian government, the outcome of which impetus will be — just as it has been in other failed democracies — a horror.
