Since we’ve gotten past Christmas — but we still have the New Year holiday to go — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Schools Undertaking Coronavirus Knowledge, Epidmiologic Research Specialization (SUCKERS) have identified yet another strain of the limitlessly variable coronavirus. This one has been labeled the Omigosh variant.
Rather than having deleterious effects on physical health that its predecessors did, the Omigosh variant seems to present significant risk to the mental health of those who contract it. Those infected present with symptoms from delusions to hallucinations, from gullibility to amnesia, from fleeting feelings of panic to full-blown, indefinitely protracted anxiety attacks. But he most pernicious feature of this variant is that it makes people believe all kinds of crazy shit.
For instance, it makes them believe (among other things):
- A vaccine that isn’t a vaccine is a vaccine.
- A booster for a vaccine that isn’t a vaccine will actually boost something.
- The timing of the Omicron variant at the onset of the Holiday Season is a coincidence.
- Politicians can’t control entire populations and destroy entire economies, but a virus can.
- Unelected bureaucratic fat cats, celebrity scientists, and their sycophants in the media should dictate public-health policy.
- In extreme cases, people don’t kill people, guns do.
- In really extreme cases, people can affect the climate of an entire planet.
Wolf!
Having nearly completed The Great Homogenization — having convinced us that group identities, identity politics, and collective complacency are more important than individual sovereignty and singular achievement — we’re now well on our way to contracting the mass psychosis by which our political betters will stand over and above us.
“That’s it, Dude. You’ve lost us AND your marbles. You’re a crank and a lunatic. Try decaf, for cryin’ out loud.”
Maybe you’re right. I often say it’s getting harder and harder not to be a conspiracy theorist. But what if I’m not nuts? What if I’m an empiricist? Would it hurt to ask? Would it hurt to question things in direct proportion to the information (not truth) with which we’re bombarded all day, every day? Would it hurt to question the motives or agendas of those who conduct those bombardments?
How much will it hurt if we don’t?
I don’t know if whatever’s going on is warranted for a disease with a global mortality rate of 2.38 percent. I don’t. But I do know we have a right — if not an obligation to ourselves and to others — to ask.
If we do, what we learn may very well surprise us.
Omigosh.
