An old acacia tree, slowly consumed by a thousand rising limpets of ivy, is no longer up to resisting an autumn mistral. To the sound of slow-mo cracking wood, it lands with a thrrump in the garden.
I notice it on rising the next morning, whisper an obscenity, and then ring Berrydav – he of the enormous chainsaw. By the afternoon, it’s chopped up and stored. Two nights later, it’s on the fire and cosying the sitting room.
By and large – when nature’s on good form – there’s no such thing as an utter disaster without a single saving grace. Earthquakes, volcanoes, Tsunamis, twisters and even lightning kill people…but total wipeouts like Pompeii are very rare.
Leaves fall, look untidy, get swept up and bunged in a corner. Two years later, you have free compost. Water courses bog up the lower land; so dig a well, put in a mobile pump – lower water bills and a ready supply of thirst-quenching grey water for the plants during a hosepipe ban.
Even the Great Fire of London in 1666 was a kind of blessing, in that the roaring heat vapourised the infected surfaces and rodent carriers of the Plague.
“From bad, there comes always good” as the Buddhists say. But does this apply to Coronavirus?
You have to work really hard to see anything good in Covid19, not least because nobody can agree about what it really is, how it started, where it originated, who first hit on the idea of its use as a scare tactic…..and most important of all, how to treat and control it.
This means that there is no readily apparent “what we need is a better sea-wall” after a Tsunami, or “what we need is stronger building foundations” following an earthquake. We are being told by those who sell vaccinations (or get funding from them) that the solution is new vaccinations that become, over time, obligatory. A Kong Solomon’s Mine of information and (literally) centuries of research tell us that this is far from true, and very likely impossible.
The problem is that only a very small proportion of the global population have the time, patience, intelligence, training or experience to grasp such things….and in a context where opinions remain almost as numerous as anal orifices, the first one into the What To Do arena tends to reap the rewards.
The result is that some 84% of most First World electorates are (for the time being) convinced that it is their duty as good citizens to do exactly what self-interested sectors like bourses, banking, big pharma, bureaucrats, blocists, media whores and politicians ask of them when it comes to masks, lockdowns and distancing.
Now you could argue that the “learning” here (like distancing, yet another of those verby words that American tartan-paint salesmen have turned into nouns) is that, with enough fear pumped out by an avariciously compliant media set, you can get people to do pretty much anything without so much as a murmur.
But the only folks likely to benefit from that experience are those with whom we’d really prefer not to have lunch.
In last night’s post here, I highlighted one brief para in an attempt to get to the core of what the real issue is we’re facing with Covid19:
So for me, this is the lesson every over-confident sofa-based Putschist needs to take on board: there isn’t going to be a Hollywood movie dénouement moment in which 70-300 million scales suddenly fall from citizen eyes.
I’m not trying to be a defeatist drain about this: I’m merely surveying the evidence of this century to date to inform my expectation….and then using them to galvanise where necessary.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was never going to be an Arab Spring. Nobody got to the bottom of the 2008/9 crash. QE and Zirp were not recession palliatives, they were naked power-plays to save the banks. Obama never even defined what the Thing was we could do….but obviously, we couldn’t – and he didn’t. EU federalism was planned from 1960 onwards: real Brexit from it has been a ruthless EUNATO roadkill ambition since the Referendum. The governing class of this country has not the slightest intention of righting the injustice done to Waspi/Backto60 victims of buttock-covering in their horrid embezzlement caper.
Trump was a maverick from Day 1, and the US Shadow State has heaped Grassy Knolls on this flawed, infantile but dynamic man ever since. BLM is a construct designed to create anarchy, as are Antifa and Momentum. The Anglo-Saxon Left among the English-speaking Peoples wants to gain power by hiding socialist intentions behind everything from climate change and political correctness via immigrant adoration and “Good Health practices” to mindless worship of diversity.
Now the new kid on the block is Covid19…..and once again, the social media’s individual commenters hold forth: ‘there will be blood on the streets’, ‘when this all comes out there will be a reckoning’, ‘the whole system will collapse’ and so forth.
None of this will just happen: wake up and learn from the 21st Century experience. We are outnumbered by 5 to 1.
If several ‘fronts’ can ignore ideological poppycock disagreements and bind together a real Opposition, then Covid19 will have done some good. That is to say, it will make the Controlaholics retreat….and teach Western citizens something they’ve either forgotten, or assumed otherwise: to reclaim freedom and real democracy, you have to do more than tweet and shout at the telly.
You have to actively persuade.
I find myself surounded by those who say, “Yerrr, but it ain’t gonnoo ‘appen izzit?” To which my response is, “Not as long as dingbats like you walk around spouting Donothingness, no.”
Perhaps Contrick19 will help people to relearn a lesson.
The lesson is this: the person next to you – the odds suggest – is five times more likely to do nothing than something.
The Slog 