Remember the meat shortage? What about the one that said if you take ibuprofen you were more likely to get Covid? How about Joe Biden saying he would ban fracking, and then saying he won’t ban fracking, while last week saying he wants to transition out of the oil industry? Or President Donald Trump suddenly refusing to acknowledge his desire for Roe versus Wade to be overturned?
You’re being lied to more than ever before, and you’re allowing it. We’re being hustled, endlessly, in 2020 and it’s pushing us all to our breaking points, possibly culminating in the next few weeks during and as a result of an election outcome that almost literally half of the nation will neither accept nor believe.
We have neither the time nor the space to document every single lie you’ve been fed this year…and I mean the word “lies.” Not mis-statements, or evolutions, or changes…lies. Complete and total fabrications maliciously screamed at you through social media, news headlines, the government, and big business. And then repeated to you through friends, family, a complicitly ignorant media, and even the Nextdoor APP.
We are allowing this to occur, over and over again on the daily; and what bothers some of us is that we know it, but most people refuse to acknowledge it, or even question it. And it’s leading to a never-ending state of fear in this nation. We are, as a whole, terrified…not necessarily of the same thing, but seemingly almost all of us are dreading something, if not many things all of the time, every single day. While all humans process and perceive fear differently, once each one of us decides that we’re afraid, there is a very specific way in which our body responds: Bodily changes prepare us to be more efficient in our perceived danger: The brain becomes hyperalert, pupils dilate, and our breathing accelerates. Heart rate and blood pressure rise. Blood flow and stream of glucose to the skeletal muscles increase. Organs not vital in survival such as the gastrointestinal system slow down…these things happen for a reason in what are supposed to be rare, truly terrifying life events. No longer. More and more of us are living this way perpetually which is, of course, no way to live, and will cause us to do one of two things; fight, or flee. Those who flee will run towards alcohol, drugs, and suicide. Those who choose to fight will head to the streets and do so with other Americans they disagree with. And almost all of it is caused by lies. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happens-brain-feel-fear-180966992/#:~:text=It%20also%20triggers%20release%20of,rate%20and%20blood%20pressure%20rise.
If elected President, Joe Biden is not going to create and implement a national strategy on dealing with Covid anymore than the entire nation is going to magically “open-up” if Trump wins. Trump’s president now for God sakes, and 25 states remain in some sort of relative lock-down.
But we believe these lies that we’re told. To a certain extent, it’s understandable. People are busy, too trusting, and often overwhelmed at all of the time and energy it takes to find the actual truth. Just to create this soapbox, I have spent more than 4 full hours solely focused on research to make sure I get every single fact right. Who has time for that? I don’t even have time for that, damnit!
Last week, the New York Times did everything they could to further scare the living hell out of every parent and college student in America with an exhaustive week of stories documenting the endless surge of cases across America’s campuses. The Headline boldly announced that across 1,600 colleges more than 214,000 college students have tested positive…without ever mentioning that there are 20 million college students in America. More criminal was that you had to read to the very bottom of the story to find this gem: There have been just 75 deaths at colleges and universities related to COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and most of the deaths were reported in the spring and involved college employees, not students. And only two college students since July have died after getting the virus. Meanwhile, 1,500 college students die every year from binge drinking, which, while horrible, has never been discussed as a legitimate reason to shutdown colleges. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-college-cases-tracker.html
https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/how-many-college-students-in-the-us/
Feeling gaslit yet?
What’s the cost of all of this lunacy? In addition to all of the obvious psychological devastation, college students are dropping out, solely because they are scared of a virus that essentially won’t do a damn thing to them unless they have a very serious underlying condition. That’s one form of flight. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/10/16/covid-community-college-students-drop-out-economy/5927050002/
Another is the turn towards escapes. A national survey conducted in June by the Centers for Disease Control found 13% of U.S. adults surveyed said they had started or increased substance use to cope with stress or emotions related to the coronavirus pandemic. Opioid Deaths are skyrocketing again, alcohol consumption is at a record high, and yet almost every article you read about America’s alarming increase in drinking comes framed in the context that excessive alcohol usage makes you more susceptible to Covid-19. We have almost literally made Covid the only thing that matters, the only thing that kills, and the only thing to think about all of the time; despite the fact that, according to the CDC, 99.28% of all people under the age of 50 who get Covid, will not only recover from it, but won’t ever need to see the inside of a hospital. https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/2020/10/onondaga-county-opioid-deaths-skyrocket-during-coronavirus-pandemic.html
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939e1.htm
Speaking of that, have you spent any time recently on the CDC website? Probably not…you’re probably far too busy being told to be terrified of the rising and record setting cases of Covid in America. Cases…as in people testing positive. Not people getting sick, hospitalized, or dying, just people finding out that, yup, they have the virus.
Spend some time on the CDC website for a fun evening and check out the chart that shows unequivocally the only things rising are the percentage of outpatients (people who saw their doctor but didn’t need treatment) and cases. And the rise in percentage of positive cases is minimal. The hospitalization and death rate are plummeting; and rates, not totals, are what matters. Yet every single day it’s a new form of over-the-top dread forced down your throat. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html
On Friday, the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, which has been wrong with every single projection it has made since March about the Coronavirus, predicted 511,373 American deaths by Feb. 28. And then, just as a cherry on top, said that 96,000 of those yet-to-happen deaths could be prevented if just 85% of us would wear masks…a completely made-up, computer model, humanly biased number. Although 85% is an interesting figure since that’s Italy’s mask-compliance rate and has been since summer and they’re setting daily records of cases and are, actually, seeing rises in hospitalizations, unlike America. Makes you wonder…actually, it doesn’t make enough of us wonder, and that’s the problem. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/10/23/current-covid-strategies-could-cause-more-than-500-k-deaths-feb-28/3729661001/
We’ve gone from being a nation that prided itself on not being afraid of basically anything to being afraid of everything…even things that aren’t real. We’re no longer afraid of merely dying, we’re afraid of getting sick, and we’re afraid of not being able to find Chuck Steak at Costco in the nation that literally feeds the entire world more than anyone else.
Which brings us all the way back to the next few weeks and what we’ll do with all of our fear. A poll taken in February of this year found that 59% of Americans don’t have confidence in the honesty of U.S. elections…59%!!! IN FEBRUARY…before the pandemic, before the election, and before both presidential candidates said out-loud that the only way they can lose is if the other guy steals it. No wonder more than half of America is stocking up on food and supplies again as they prepare for, not another Covid outbreak, but whatever the hell this nation is going to do as a result of the election. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-02-13/majority-of-americans-dont-trust-elections-poll
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1537426/trump-lose-cheated-democrats-rally-virginia/
The ironically most terrifying thing about all of this is that 70% of Americans are 100% convinced they know who will win this year’s election. The 35% that loathe Trump are without question certain that he will lose; their only question is whether or not he will leave the White House peacefully. The 35% that view Trump as the modern-day George Washington know that 2016 is going to repeat itself and that he is going to win. And both sides know, and have said, as have their candidates, that if their outcome doesn’t come to pass, it will be the result of blatant electoral theft.
We have been perfectly and properly conditioned for this moment for decades, but never in one-year have we experienced what we’ve allowed to happen in 2020. The endless hysteria and lies will come to a head sometime this fall, it’s just a question of when and how ugly it will be.
