What’s It All For Anyway?

In this fabulous Medium post by A.J. Kay, the author asks, “if safety requires us to indefinitely forfeit the most valuable parts of our lives, what exactly are we trying to save?”

She then goes on to smartly point out that with a 2.8 million annual  (in America) all cause death toll, this could be the last Thanksgiving for some of our loved ones or perhaps even ourselves.  Do we really want to spend it isolated from the people we care about most because it’s not safe to gather?

Or freezing our butts off outside while keeping our masks on between bites of turkey à la Gavin Newsom and his beyond absurdly comical  coronavirus dictates that HE AND HIS HEALTH ADVISORS DON’T EVEN FOLLOW THEMSELVES?

Oh hell no.  Loneliness and isolation were were big enough problems  before COVID, I can’t imagine how much they’ve grown now that we’ve institutionalized staying home and staying safe and turned avoidance of others in to a collective virtue.

According to this article from Mercolca.com:

• In 2018, 54% of American adults over the age of 18 reported feeling lonely. By January 2020, it was 61% and now, nine months into the pandemic, we’ve reached 66%
• Loneliness isn’t relegated to the elderly. In the 18 to 34 age group, 75% report feeling socially isolated, compared to 61% of those over 50. Among those aged 18 to 34, 19% say they’ve gone as long as two to three months without interacting with another person.
• 10% of 35- to 49-year-olds, 9% of 18- to 34-year-olds and 7% of those over 50 say they’ve not interacted with anyone outside their household or workplace since the pandemic began.

Going several months without interacting with other people is not healthy in any way shape or form, virus or no virus. Human beings were designed to be social and this continued, dystopian world of forced people avoidance, with face masks crippling our ability to effectively communicate with one another, has done much damage to our already fractured and lonely society.

Extended  loneliness changes the brain.  It not only hurts us emotionally, but physically too, both in terms of actual aches and pains and negative health effects like increased blood pressure, obesity and heart problems.

Blue state governors enacting new state shutdowns will only cascade those ill effects and that’s not even factoring in the severe economic hardship of forced shutdowns and sky rocketing addiction and suicide rates which all feed in to the loneliness factor.

Just what are they doing and why, oh why are we putting up with it? As I wrote in a previous post, Pro Lockdown Politicians Remain stuck in March, we know so much more now about the virus, who it effects most seriously and how to effectively treat severe cases.  And thank goodness we now know that for most people the lethality rate is extremely low

Politicians calling for more shutdowns should not get another pass on this. Their fear mongering and incessant focus on “positive cases” is an insult to our intelligence and the damage they are doing is probably beyond repair. From the same post:

“I believe the extended coronavirus lockdowns to be the single biggest public policy mistake made in our lifetime, if not ever, whose negative effects will be with us for years to come and in many ways we haven’t yet realized.”

Lockdown is a term that evolved from the prison industry and is a way of exerting control over an unruly and dangerous population.  That governors like Gavin Newsom continue to impose it on their citizens should tell us all we need to know about how they really feel about us and their intentions moving forward.

It’s not about controlling the virus, it’s about controlling us.