Victory is in Sight

Well, maybe not quite, but still…

Sometimes, the significance of a development is entirely other than what it appears to be.  Columbus thought he had uncovered a new route to China.  He had discovered a new world.

Elsewhere, I’ve long said that the Corona Virus pandemic would last exactly as long as we let it; we could continue wear masks, close everything imaginable, etc indefinitely — or we could just begin ignoring it.

To put it differently, the virus isn’t going away — ever. Viruses don’t. On the bright side, unless you are literally at death’s door already, it’s unlikely to seriously affect you, and almost certainly won’t kill you. We can simply resume normal life whenever we like. We could have a year ago.  We can now.

…and in any case, there’s little evidence any of our mandatory counter-measures ever made any real difference.

https://www.aier.org/article/new-study-indicates-lockdowns-didnt-slow-the-spread-of-covid-19/

The Corona Virus may well be here.  Life has to go on.  There is a South African strain of the Virus, and now a London strain, and I’ve even heard of a ‘New York strain.’  So?

The moral is what is has always been.  Covid-19 isn’t going to magically go away.  Like it or not, it’s been added to the increasing store of flus, viruses, sexually-transmitted diseases and whatever that can take advantage of our vast global population of 7.5 billion people to circulate indefinitely.  What’s more, there’ll be others in the future.  That, we can count on.

Nevertheless, life has to go on.

And now, increasingly, it is.

Florida barred mask mandates and shut downs last September. North Dakota joined her on January 18th, when the governor declined to renew a state-wide mask mandate. Since then, Iowa, Montana, Texas, and Mississippi have joined the parade. Colorado would seem to be thinking about it. She just extended her mask mandate — but only for another thirty days.

Seven states never had comprehensive orders to begin with — and aren’t about to impose them now. The mask order is ‘widely ignored’ in Kansas. I’ve noticed that the further I go out into the countryside here in Oregon, the less pervasive mask use is.

Spring, in short, is in the air. The masks are going to melt away. People are just going to get on with life. At least, so one hopes.

Of course, the mainstream media and ‘Progressive’ political establishment will eagerly look for any sign of a resurgence; indeed, there probably will be one. But I suspect people are going to start saying ‘so?’

Now this is where we get to the point. I would guess that like me, most readers look forward to the end of all the shut downs and masks and social distancing and endless, minute regulation. Let’s just forget about it, shall we? Let’s go back to that happy day when we could assume our favorite restaurant would be permitted to be open if we felt like eating out, when our children could go to school, when we could go into a store without donning a mask.

That’ll be nice. But there’s something else — something more permanent and more significant — that is going to transpire as a result of all this.

I doubt if some have taken all this with undue seriousness at any point. Certainly masks weren’t much in evidence among those crowds of blacks looting Targets and such all last year. If white people outside the big Leftist cities start ignoring this as well — as across much of the country they apparently already do — who’s going to be left? It’s all going to look like a map of the Byzantine Empire in one of its bad patches. The Empire will still have Constantinople, and Salonika, and other major urban centers, but outside the walls, it will be a great uncontrolled sea of Slavs and and Bulgars and Turks and Pechenegs and things. In our case, of course, it’ll be all the states and jurisdictions and whole populations simply ignoring the Corona Virus edicts. The chattering classes will hold their gentrified enclaves in Seattle, and Portland, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington DC and New York and such — but everywhere else, the barbarians will roam, unhindered and unmasked.

Now, if our masters were wise and rational, they would shrug and forget the whole thing. After all, People do get sick. Occasionally, they die. They are especially likely to die if they were about to die anyway.

When I am seventy seven or eighty seven or ninety seven, and in rapidly failing health after multiple strokes, something will kill me — be it the Corona Virus, or some other flu, or pneumonia, or an infection, or just a bad fall. Overwhelmingly, this is who dies of Covid-19 — people who were about to die anyway. Moreover, in the case of the Corona Virus there’s little reason to believe all our counter-measures — while they have disrupted almost every aspect of our lives otherwise — have done much to affect the course of the virus. That’s life — or at any rate, death. It happens. Those who wish to rule us would be wise not to attempt to tilt at this particular windmill. They cannot make the virus go away. They can exasperate everyone and teach them to ignore their voices.

There it is.

But will our masters give it up? I suspect not. I hope not. They’re not wise and rational.

They’ll cling frantically to the Covid. They’ll lean out from the internet windows of their internet towers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the White House, and shout shrilly of impending doom.

And the doom won’t come…and then they will have lost still more of what little credibility they have left after the events of the past year. As it is, few listen to them with the respect they once did — the days when Johnson could call for a ‘War on Poverty’ or Walter Cronkite could say ‘this war may now be unwinnable’ and most of the nation listened are long behind us. Can anyone seriously imagine America tuning in to listen to a ‘fireside chat’ from President Biden?

The battle’s already half-lost — or half-won, depending on which side one is on. If our rulers nail their flag to the mast over Covid-19, it’s going mark yet another decline in their credibility. Even fewer will listen in the future.

Let’s hope. The picture at the head of this post is indeed optimistic. The war is not won — far from it. But as another leader once remarked after news of another victory:

‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.‘

— Churchill after El Alamein

And this is the significance of what is now transpiring over Covid. Our masters are about to lose still more of their grip on power.