I remember being in a store in May with my daughter. She wore a mask and I didn't. She asked if I worried about what people thought. I told her and anyone else who would listen-When we accommodate fear, we reinforce it. For the record, I don't give damn what people think about me.
Our fourth and youngest was born in late 2019 with Down's syndrome. When she was born her doctors told us that she was particularly vulnerable to respiratory viruses. We asked what this meant for church, socializing, hospitality, etc. They said to try to be careful, but that it would be terribly harmful both to her and to us if we isolated her and ourselves from others. She was hospitalized (and in the ICU) with RSV (+Covid?) for a week from Christmas to New Year's, because someone from church got our family sick. We would have NEVER asked anyone in our family or society to stop their lives in order to possibly keep her out of the hospital; they would have thought we were insane if we did.
We've spent much of the last year and a half arguing with her physical and speech therapy agency (through a county program for low-income families) to get them to move sessions to in-person, since for most of her life she's been doing "therapy" on Zoom. Even the Texas state health department has told us "too bad," since they're (technically) a private company who can do what they want.
Today our daughter had an appointment with her eye specialist (one of a handful of specialists she sees every few months). This doctor's office called earlier saying that because she's just turned two, we need to mask her. My wife refused. They said, "It's OK if she doesn't keep it on, but you must agree to at least try to make her wear it." My wife adamantly refused, and filed a complaint. At the end of the appointment today (at which multiple staff and a nurse told my wife how ridiculous they think all this is), my wife told the doctor that parents should be free to decide whether or not to force a mask on their 25-month-old disabled children. The doctor exploded at her and viciously argued with her about how this is the "national policy," how it's for everyone's safety, how her own toddler does fine wearing a mask all day at preschool, and how we should find a different doctor. We are so angry and disturbed.
I went to the Wegman's in King of Prussia (NW of Philadelphia) yesterday. It's in a blue county in a generally blue area, but we have been spared most of the arbitrary corona craziness. As I was walking through the store (it's huge), I was surprised and appalled by all the mask wearers. I expected the employees to be masked, but there were people of all ages, races, sizes, obvious levels of fitness, genders...wearing masks. After I was in the store for about twenty minutes, I heard this singsong female voice over the intercom asking everyone to wear a mask to prevent the spread of the virus. It was like a bad sci-fi movie. My unmasked face became an act of defiance.
Refuse to comply. Engage in peaceful civil disobedience.
When all this nonsense was going on I kept ripping down the caution tape to take my kids to the park. If I saw a fucking padlock on the swings I would have brought my bolt cutters.
My 18 yo, who was a senior in high school, parked his car under the basketball hoops, climbed on top of it and started removing the duct tape. Security from school came to tell him to come down, he said calmly, “wait, let me finish this”. Eventually the security guy told the boys that he is only there till 4 pm and therefore hinting they can play after 4. The week after that the school removed the basketball hoops altogether.
As for the mask, high school girls play volleyball indoors with the mask on. When one of my friends posted a picture of her daughter playing, I almost exploded.
"...never give in, never give in, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." Winston Churchill, Oct. 29, 1941
“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it any more” Howard Beale, Network
What a tragic collage of ignorant abuses.Terrorizing our children, masking, isolating and locking them inside is as horrible a nightmare and torture plan ever conceived.
I was incensed on seeing the local basketball hoops covered and the tennis courts locked at the beginning of the scamdemic. I scoured what state laws I could find, until: Aha! I called the Mayor's office, and the pleasant lady on the phone seemed interested in the problem. I said, "I think locking these recreational facilities is in violation of Arizona Revised Statutes 36-788." She assured me that the mayor would hear about it that day, and that somebody would call me back same day.
That afternoon a man called from the Mayor's Office, and said, "I just want you to know that all the locks have been taken off the city tennis courts, and the recreational facilities are now all free to use."
Without fail, every single week before and after that day, my family uses those recreational facilities several times per week. We are out there in triple digit temps as well as all of the rest of each year. In fact, that outdoor recreation is my number one health insurance. As a naturopathic physician, I know it to be the most effective one, with the best return on investment.
Gato - A great call to arms but I must ask, has something changed since you wrote this on Sept 10 after Biden gave his mandate speech?:
"they don’t have the will, the votes, or the backing and they just showed us so. there’s nothing left in their hand. they have realized the people are not with them and they dared not do anything bold. this speech was not the beginning of the new tyranny, it was the end of this one."
I confess. At each turn towards more crazy I have said to myself "surely the masses will wake up to this nonsense" and at each turn I have been depressingly wrong. It certainly seems as if the fever is not only not breaking, it is getting cranked up every higher with no absurdity too radical for the screaming Karens to swallow. I fear my employer is about to mandate the vax that I do not want nor need (covid recovered) and with the very real prospect of being blackballed from any company with 100+ workers, I have never been so distressed. I have gone through what many would consider the most harrowing things imaginable yet this is stressing my mental state of mind to unreal levels.
Thank you for what you are doing and for offering your keen insights. It has helped more than I can possibly thank you (and many others, mostly on twitter ironically). But I am curious if something has changed in your thinking from when you wrote that on Sept 10.
this is what becomes of a white, woke, western society whose intelligentsia hates itself: that hatred is used to sell clicks and drive up Google AdSense rates at Forbes and CNN, while the real powers use it to sew division, so the white, woke, western society and the quiet, docile, go along to get along majority, fight amongst themselves, rather than turn their sites at those who gain the most from this "take the money and run" bullshit. Covid and its response in most of the West, not China, is the WMD of public health. Write it down. We will all come to see it that way. In 2001-02, the vast majority of Americans supported Freedom Fries and believed the Battle for Jessica Lynch, and believed Hussein was a day away from nukes or, at the very least, was funding Osama the boogie man and Al Qaeda while our media reported "evidence" that of who the pilots were because they found their unburned passports at the twin towers wreckage. This is that. Remember what I said.
I feel like a complete failure after reading this post. I live in Seattle and we are no where near back to normal and I feel like we will never be. My kids go to school daily in masks, my son does outdoor PE in a mask, my daughter takes ballet class in a mask, my son practices ultimate frisbee outdoors in a mask. It is madness. I do not know what to do to make it stop. I have not been able to protect my kids, everyone here wants masks and some are clamoring for schools to close again like they were for a year. Masks are required everywhere indoors and in a few weeks restaurants, bars, gyms will check vaccine status for you to enter.
I went to a Travelers' Welcome Center last month and used the bathroom while there. Both the paper towel holder and electric hand dryer were wrapped in garbage bags taped to the wall. I felt really safe knowing that the staff was protecting my ability to dry my hands without fear of cooties.
Been reading your posts for a while and they are very informative - when taking my daughter for a walk I saw QR codes on playground, and it was just insane. This virus behaves very politically. Yes this is in Australia, speaking of which I wrote on the insanity of Australia recently, and it's bad in many ways -
Dr's can't offer contradictory advice, or make comments that go against the "immunisation campaign" - AS well as still offering Remdesivir as a treatment, any case I have it documented here: https://blog.reyes.id.au/the-straya-factor/
I remember being in a store in May with my daughter. She wore a mask and I didn't. She asked if I worried about what people thought. I told her and anyone else who would listen-When we accommodate fear, we reinforce it. For the record, I don't give damn what people think about me.
Our fourth and youngest was born in late 2019 with Down's syndrome. When she was born her doctors told us that she was particularly vulnerable to respiratory viruses. We asked what this meant for church, socializing, hospitality, etc. They said to try to be careful, but that it would be terribly harmful both to her and to us if we isolated her and ourselves from others. She was hospitalized (and in the ICU) with RSV (+Covid?) for a week from Christmas to New Year's, because someone from church got our family sick. We would have NEVER asked anyone in our family or society to stop their lives in order to possibly keep her out of the hospital; they would have thought we were insane if we did.
We've spent much of the last year and a half arguing with her physical and speech therapy agency (through a county program for low-income families) to get them to move sessions to in-person, since for most of her life she's been doing "therapy" on Zoom. Even the Texas state health department has told us "too bad," since they're (technically) a private company who can do what they want.
Today our daughter had an appointment with her eye specialist (one of a handful of specialists she sees every few months). This doctor's office called earlier saying that because she's just turned two, we need to mask her. My wife refused. They said, "It's OK if she doesn't keep it on, but you must agree to at least try to make her wear it." My wife adamantly refused, and filed a complaint. At the end of the appointment today (at which multiple staff and a nurse told my wife how ridiculous they think all this is), my wife told the doctor that parents should be free to decide whether or not to force a mask on their 25-month-old disabled children. The doctor exploded at her and viciously argued with her about how this is the "national policy," how it's for everyone's safety, how her own toddler does fine wearing a mask all day at preschool, and how we should find a different doctor. We are so angry and disturbed.
I went to the Wegman's in King of Prussia (NW of Philadelphia) yesterday. It's in a blue county in a generally blue area, but we have been spared most of the arbitrary corona craziness. As I was walking through the store (it's huge), I was surprised and appalled by all the mask wearers. I expected the employees to be masked, but there were people of all ages, races, sizes, obvious levels of fitness, genders...wearing masks. After I was in the store for about twenty minutes, I heard this singsong female voice over the intercom asking everyone to wear a mask to prevent the spread of the virus. It was like a bad sci-fi movie. My unmasked face became an act of defiance.
Refuse to comply. Engage in peaceful civil disobedience.
When all this nonsense was going on I kept ripping down the caution tape to take my kids to the park. If I saw a fucking padlock on the swings I would have brought my bolt cutters.
My 18 yo, who was a senior in high school, parked his car under the basketball hoops, climbed on top of it and started removing the duct tape. Security from school came to tell him to come down, he said calmly, “wait, let me finish this”. Eventually the security guy told the boys that he is only there till 4 pm and therefore hinting they can play after 4. The week after that the school removed the basketball hoops altogether.
As for the mask, high school girls play volleyball indoors with the mask on. When one of my friends posted a picture of her daughter playing, I almost exploded.
So yeah, where do we start?
"...never give in, never give in, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." Winston Churchill, Oct. 29, 1941
“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it any more” Howard Beale, Network
What a tragic collage of ignorant abuses.Terrorizing our children, masking, isolating and locking them inside is as horrible a nightmare and torture plan ever conceived.
I was incensed on seeing the local basketball hoops covered and the tennis courts locked at the beginning of the scamdemic. I scoured what state laws I could find, until: Aha! I called the Mayor's office, and the pleasant lady on the phone seemed interested in the problem. I said, "I think locking these recreational facilities is in violation of Arizona Revised Statutes 36-788." She assured me that the mayor would hear about it that day, and that somebody would call me back same day.
That afternoon a man called from the Mayor's Office, and said, "I just want you to know that all the locks have been taken off the city tennis courts, and the recreational facilities are now all free to use."
Without fail, every single week before and after that day, my family uses those recreational facilities several times per week. We are out there in triple digit temps as well as all of the rest of each year. In fact, that outdoor recreation is my number one health insurance. As a naturopathic physician, I know it to be the most effective one, with the best return on investment.
Gato - A great call to arms but I must ask, has something changed since you wrote this on Sept 10 after Biden gave his mandate speech?:
"they don’t have the will, the votes, or the backing and they just showed us so. there’s nothing left in their hand. they have realized the people are not with them and they dared not do anything bold. this speech was not the beginning of the new tyranny, it was the end of this one."
I confess. At each turn towards more crazy I have said to myself "surely the masses will wake up to this nonsense" and at each turn I have been depressingly wrong. It certainly seems as if the fever is not only not breaking, it is getting cranked up every higher with no absurdity too radical for the screaming Karens to swallow. I fear my employer is about to mandate the vax that I do not want nor need (covid recovered) and with the very real prospect of being blackballed from any company with 100+ workers, I have never been so distressed. I have gone through what many would consider the most harrowing things imaginable yet this is stressing my mental state of mind to unreal levels.
Thank you for what you are doing and for offering your keen insights. It has helped more than I can possibly thank you (and many others, mostly on twitter ironically). But I am curious if something has changed in your thinking from when you wrote that on Sept 10.
In my vainer moments, I take pride in having cut open a locked playground last year. But I know it's much too little.
this is what becomes of a white, woke, western society whose intelligentsia hates itself: that hatred is used to sell clicks and drive up Google AdSense rates at Forbes and CNN, while the real powers use it to sew division, so the white, woke, western society and the quiet, docile, go along to get along majority, fight amongst themselves, rather than turn their sites at those who gain the most from this "take the money and run" bullshit. Covid and its response in most of the West, not China, is the WMD of public health. Write it down. We will all come to see it that way. In 2001-02, the vast majority of Americans supported Freedom Fries and believed the Battle for Jessica Lynch, and believed Hussein was a day away from nukes or, at the very least, was funding Osama the boogie man and Al Qaeda while our media reported "evidence" that of who the pilots were because they found their unburned passports at the twin towers wreckage. This is that. Remember what I said.
Acredito que el gato tambien pensa assim.
I feel like a complete failure after reading this post. I live in Seattle and we are no where near back to normal and I feel like we will never be. My kids go to school daily in masks, my son does outdoor PE in a mask, my daughter takes ballet class in a mask, my son practices ultimate frisbee outdoors in a mask. It is madness. I do not know what to do to make it stop. I have not been able to protect my kids, everyone here wants masks and some are clamoring for schools to close again like they were for a year. Masks are required everywhere indoors and in a few weeks restaurants, bars, gyms will check vaccine status for you to enter.
I went to a Travelers' Welcome Center last month and used the bathroom while there. Both the paper towel holder and electric hand dryer were wrapped in garbage bags taped to the wall. I felt really safe knowing that the staff was protecting my ability to dry my hands without fear of cooties.
Unfortunately the country is filled with "Karens" and there's no reasoning with them.
Been reading your posts for a while and they are very informative - when taking my daughter for a walk I saw QR codes on playground, and it was just insane. This virus behaves very politically. Yes this is in Australia, speaking of which I wrote on the insanity of Australia recently, and it's bad in many ways -
Dr's can't offer contradictory advice, or make comments that go against the "immunisation campaign" - AS well as still offering Remdesivir as a treatment, any case I have it documented here: https://blog.reyes.id.au/the-straya-factor/
Well said. Start begging the kiddos for forgiveness for what we as a society have done to them