As was often his habit, Arthur Gilbert listened to a recording of his last stage performance from forty years ago. He listened to the lines and the life in his voice, the intensification of vocal tones and articulation. He would also listen to audio books. The susurrant stream of words lulled him to sleep each time. And today. But the sound of a distinct thud roused him and he remembered what brought him into another state of flux – a dream
“Waking up this morning,” Arthur told his best friend, “I had a dream. I was in a large passenger plane that was crashing in slow motion. When it finally landed nose first, I walked out of the cockpit window.”
Hearing this, his friend and fellow actor told Arthur that he saw a ghost of a man just last night on the ramparts. He wanted Arthur to see for himself. Arthur balked at the idea that an image could tell him anything. But his friend convinced him and Arthur said that he would go see “this poor ghost while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.”
So that night his friend accompanied Arthur to the “parapet.” There, Arthur was beckoned by a voice to follow it to an enclosed space. Once inside, Arthur heard his bulwark being bombarded thud shudder thud. “Sling n arrows outrageous!”
“Are you OK Arthur?”
“To sleep, perchance to dream. I’m shuffling off . . .”
With acoustic script murmuring and a hovering thumping and whirring around his head, Arthur closed his eyes. After some time, he became aware that he was in a dream.
He left his apartment in east central Indiana and was driving to his home town in Illinois for a funeral. Call me when you get there, his friend told him.
Heading west on I-70 dark-bottomed clouds appeared. He heard packing paper being crunched. He became angry. He didn’t like driving in the rain or at night or to funeral. He didn’t like being cooped up for long rides.
His demeanor softened when he saw distant silos along the way. Memories of friends. His demeanor saddened as he drove further away from them.
Restaurant signs began to appear.
Good’s Family Restaurant
It’s All Good at Bob and Martha Good’s
~
A Good Breakfast is not hard to find – Exit ½ Mile
Good’s Family Restaurant
~
One Good Turn Deserves Another-Turn Left After Exit
Good’s Family Restaurant
He took the exit for Good’s Family Restaurant. He saw and heard what happened next.
He entered Good’s. He found a booth next to a window. Across from him sat a plump 30-ish woman with fuchsia streaks of hair, tattoos down both arms, and a face mask. She was wiping the table and menu with disinfectant wipes. The squeaking sound annoyed him.
He looked around the room wondering if there was another pandemic that turned everyone into Karens. He saw no one else wearing a mask. To each their own pandemic he said.
A waitress walked up with a pot of coffee.
Mornin’ Coffee?
Yes ma’am.
She turned over a cup and poured the coffee.
Where you headed?
He took a sip. To a funeral.
Someone close?
An ex.
I’m sorry.
She wasn’t.
Did she know Jesus as her personal savior?
He put the coffee down.
You’d have to ask her.
What about you? Do you know Jesus as your personal savior?
Ma’am my relationship with a personal savior began when I came into God’s good creation seventy-five years ago and when I realized that the fires of creation and apocalypse were inside me, I set out to find out what that meant.
He continued. Say, you remind me of Altar-call Jake with his tracts and the folk gospel road that I’d been on. That road reduced the cosmos to four spiritual laws and a personal tow-truck service ready to remove you from life on earth. Those on that road had a strangely-dim view of the things of earth.
He became unsettled. Doesn’t that machine noise bother you?
The waitress stood looking at him with a hand on her hip. Alrighty then. Do you know what you want to eat apocalypse man?
Yes ma’am. Two eggs over easy with hashbrowns and a side of bacon. He looked up from the menu. Are you Martha, Martha Good?
Yes, and I’m with Bob, the man that’s working the kitchen. She pointed to the opening above the counter where a head with a sports cap moved back and forth.
Ain’t no good flirting with me, Martha said with a twinkle in her eye.
Well, Martha Good, I wasn’ . . . well you do have qualities you don’t find every day on the menu. I’m sure Bob is a lucky man. You bring a lot to the table. He looked over at the woman across from him.
He hit the jackpot with me, Martha teased.
Bonanza Bob? he played along.
Is that your final answer?
Yes ma’am.
Martha finished writing the check. You win the million-dollar breakfast. She grabbed the menu and walked off.
After breakfast he walked to the cash register, told Martha that breakfast was satisfying in a Good’s way and she smiled and said Y’all come back after your funeral.
He was back in the car with the whirring thumping.
The wet putty looking sky above the interstate released its moisture. The pit-pat of rain drops became a steady thudding as he crossed the state line. Washing machine rain slashed his windows. Wipers whirred and thumped. He pulled off the road to wait. He didn’t want another rear end accident, another concussion. When a semi-trailer truck swooshed by his head throbbed.
The pounding rain stopped and he got back on the road.
He passed Danville then Champaign. He hooked up with I-72. He passed Decatur. He passed a Springfield sign. There was a thumping clanking noise. Car trouble? He pulled over into a cul-de-sac.
He suddenly felt cramped stiff panicky. His hands twitched. He couldn’t remember for the life of him why he was in this suffocating machine. He wanted out. He cursed the incessant banging clicking whirring clanging and beeping going on around him. Where was he going anyway?
He turned the car around in the cul-de-sac to retrace his way.
He passed the Decatur sign. The Champaign sign. I-74. He passed the Danville sign and looked for the Indiana sign. He saw a familiar sign.
Your Lookin’ Good at the Next Exit
Good’s Family Restaurant
For Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
He drove to Good’s.
The waitress saw him come through the door, grabbed a menu, and said Welcome back. How was your funeral?
Who died?
No one here.
I can see that. The clanging of dishes and the overhead whirring of the fan bothered him.
The waitress showed him to a booth and handed him the menu.
Coffee?
Yes, and a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.
She wrote the order, grabbed the menu and walked away staring at him.
An ancient scrawny-looking man in a flannel shirt jeans and a Peterbilt hat walked up to the booth across from him. It was the same pipe smoking guy who came out of the rig parked outside his window. It was his Cavendish tobacco father.
The trucker threw down a book on the table with a thud.
What are you reading?
This. The trucker held up the book and then sat down.
The waitress brought coffee, filled his cup and turned to the trucker.
Morning ma’am, the trucker said.
Morning. What y’all reading? She poured him coffee.
The trucker showed her the book.
The Road. Cormac McCarthy. Don’t know it. Is it about trucking?
Well, yeah, in a keep on truckin’ kinda way after an apocalypse with who or what remains.
The waitress looked over at him. You read that, too?
He nodded and said Cannibalism.
Cannibalism? What on earth! The waitress scrunched her face. We don’t serve that here.
What’s left to eat is eaten, the trucker said.
To be eaten or not to be eaten that is the question! Right dad?
The waitress pointed the coffee pot in the trucker’s direction. How about you, fella? Do you know Jesus as your personal savior?
The trucker looked over at him and then at her. Ma’am, I’ve been on the road with him my whole life. But you see this Formula World is in a road race to end things to get on with the next big thing. Escaping the road and getting everyone to heaven before the next big thing, that is one formulation I don’t need. I’m a biker not a passenger in a car being towed off the road.
Uh huh. Just checking your GPS.
I had to break up with my GPS. She kept telling me to take a U-turn in my life!
Some of us need more than one U-turn. The waitress took his lunch order and headed to the kitchen.
What ya hauling?
Motorcycles, parts, manuals.
Where you headed?
Cross country. To the coast. How about you?
Home.
Where’s home?
If I knew that I wouldn’t be here.
What happened, son?
I am being eaten alive on this road. I live by words. I am made of words. And now words are being taken from me.
The trucker leaned over into the aisle Do you know your way home?
I’m seventy-five. I know my way home. What is that high-pitched beeping?
Where is home, Arthur?
Right where I left it.
The waitress brought his soup and sandwich.
Did I order this?
Yes, you did. The waitress put her hands on her hips. It’s not cannibalism but it’ll do.
Then I’ll eat it he snapped back.
The waitress looked over at the trucker and he nodded.
She turned back Everything OK?
Right as rain he replied.
The waitress looked over again at the trucker and then went to the kitchen to retrieve his order.
The trucker leaned over. Arthur, do you have family?
Yes, of course I have family . . . ah, ah . . . ah daughter.
What’s her name?
What’s her name?
Yes.
If I knew that I wouldn’t be here.
Should you call her?
I did. She told me I had an appointment today.
Did you make it to the appointment?
Damn, that whirring is so annoying.
The trucker got up and put a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up. Are we going to be OK?
You’ll be OK. You’re one of the good guys, Arthur. You’re carrying the fire. Swear that you will carry the fire.
I swear.
Come with me.
Where?
He felt himself being pulled from the booth.
“Arthur, the MRI is done. Let’s take off these acoustic tubes.”
Arthur blinked a reset and looked all around.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I couldn’t pedal any faster. Heart and legs pumped and pumped and pumped until I threw my bike down in the front yard and heard “Wash your hands, Dennis. It’s time for supper.”
Summer, like a best friend ready to pal around, came around again before my freshman year in high school. I was ready that summer to go and do a lot of things, except for one. Did I tell you this story? After sixty years, some memories, like which stories I may have told, become muddled and others remain clear as the day they happened.
Before the start of my freshman year in the fall of ’67, I received a letter from the high school that detailed all the programs the school offered. The two that interested me were sports and band.
That summer I began cross country training under Coach Howard. I was a runner. The kids on my block called me Flash. I was always chosen first for street football and sandlot baseball. But that hot and sweaty five-and-ten-mile practice summer I found out that I was not a long-distance runner. I had only enough wind for sprints and to play the trumpet.
To play in the concert band, I had to tryout that summer. I auditioned with the band director Mr. Gilles. He had me play all the major and minor scales and sight-read several pieces. I learned a week later that I was accepted into the band. This was huge. I had played the French horn in the Junior High band.
My stint with the French horn came about when the Junior High band director Mr. Palmero decided that he didn’t like the sound coming out of my beat-up Conn trumpet. The horn was a gift from an uncle who used it, from its appearance, for anything but playing. Mr. Palmero had me switch to a rental French horn. This lasted two years.
That summer – the summer before high school – my father, bless his soul, bought me a brand-new Bach b-flat trumpet. The new horn and lots of practice paid off. And that part of my Junior High experience was behind me. But how could I forget those two years?
Junior High School had a social system of Greasers and Climbers. You were lumped into one or the other based on your appearance. Greasers, like my colorful friend Juan, wore a black leather jacket, black pants, black socks and shoes and a white tee shirt. The absence of color except for the tee was Juan’s Greaser uniform.
Climbers, like most of my friends, sometimes wore paisley shirts with white collars, bell bottoms and white socks, but mostly dressed in color. I wore simple button-down shirts and sometimes a paisley shirt with bell-bottoms and black socks. I walked around with a French horn case. I wasn’t sure of the privileges accrued to either group other than being liked for what you weren’t.
I remember Juan pestering me to become a Greaser. He even had his girlfriend Lucille tell me that she would doing anything for me if I would become a Greaser. This conversation took place one morning in one of my eighth-grade classes. Lucille, who sat in front of me, turned around and offered herself on the altar of Greaserdom. I declined the invitation. I had more than I could handle. Three girls wanted my attention – in the hallways and in the band. All three played an instrument.
Diane, who I sat next to, was first chair French horn. Mary K. was a flutist and Mary E. played the clarinet. In the social scheme of things, we were considered Climbers because we played in the band and dressed in more than black and white.
I liked the attention of Diane, Mary, and Mary, but I didn’t want to go “steady” as was their intention. I put “going steady” in the same category as having to choose to be either a Greaser or a Climber. I was an independent sort. I was wary of anyone pressuring me to do something I wasn’t inclined to do, as when I was told to play the French horn. I continued on the horn because it kept me playing music. But I should return to telling you about that summer before high school.
Several days a week I had cross country practice. I also practiced my trumpet every day and I worked a part time job at a photo store. At church, I was moved up into the Senior High Youth group.
Our teens group met on Sunday mornings and after church on Sunday nights. Those evening times included going out for pizza or ice cream. During these outings I noticed that the older girls in the group were cliquish and something of a mystery. I wondered what they were saying when they whispered to each other. They weren’t like the junior high girls. They weren’t passing me notes telling me what they were thinking. But that secretiveness, as I recall, made those times wait-and-see fun.
One of the first weekday outings for our group that summer was a picnic at a local park. When we gathered in the parking lot of the Bible church there was a lot of discussion about who was riding with whom. There were only a couple of drivers and cars. I was a freshman. I had no driver’s license or car yet. Neither did my best friend Bill, also a freshman.
A ‘63 convertible T-bird, radio blasting, pulled into the lot. The guy driving was Ken. I’d seen him in the Sunday meetings. He had said that he transferred from another area high school and would be a senior in the new high school. He asked Bill and I if we wanted a ride to the park. We agreed. I remember thinking that going my own way, in James Dean fashion, would be noticed by the girls.
After several group outings, Ken started calling me and asking me to come over. He said that he had a Triumph TR3 that he was rebuilding and that he needed some help. I told him I didn’t know anything about cars. It didn’t matter to him. He begged me to come over. I finally accepted his invitation one hot, boring summer afternoon. I thought why not learn about cars. I would be driving soon enough.
That afternoon I rode my bike across town to his parent’s house. I found the garage door open with Ken standing inside. He was holding an oily car part in his hand. The TR3 was parked in the garage with the hood up. I asked about his parents. He explained that his mother worked in a clothing store and that his father worked at the local country club in the men’s locker room. ‘They’re never home during the day’ he told me. I remember hearing this and feeling a bit uneasy not knowing the neighborhood or Ken that well. It must have shown. He immediately began talking about what he was trying to do.
As best as I can recall, he said something to the effect that the Triumph had a stock positive earth electrical system and he was trying to connect a radio. Positive earth and negative earth connections had me at a loss. I knew about magnets. They had positive and negative poles and that opposites attract and like polarities repel.
I remember becoming interested in seeing the sporty little car repaired when Ken said that he might let me drive it. To help him make the polarity conversion, I read aloud the steps in the Triumph manual as he made the changes. The first step, as I recall, was to disconnect and remove the battery.
After the polarity conversion was completed, Ken invited me inside. We washed up and Ken offered me something to drink. He handed me a glass of lemonade and we sat in the kitchen. We talked for a while and then I went home. And that is how things went the next two times I came over to work on the car. We cleaned the carburetor, worked on the engine, and talked afterward.
I learned that Ken liked golf, Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and Edgar Cayce books. All three of his likes were not in my universe. I told him about cross country practice, summer band practice, and my job. I didn’t have any time to read that summer.
When I was invited over a fourth time, we worked on the brakes. After we finished, he invited me in again for a drink. This time he offered me a Coke and some rum to put in it. I said no. Then he asked me if I wanted to play cards. I told him I didn’t know how to play cards. He said he’d show me. I thought that here was something else that I could learn, so I agreed.
Ken left the room and came back with a deck of cards. He began to tell me the different hands and their value and the rules of the five-card stud, his favorite game. He dealt the cards and I gathered them up, holding them fanned out in my hand just like in a TV western.
I quickly lost every hand I played but Ken convinced me to keep trying. After winning one hand he asked me if I wanted to bet on the next hand. I told him I don’t bet. He said it would only be for candy. So, I continued to play. When my pile of M&Ms disappeared, I said I had to get home for supper. I got on my bike and headed back across town toward home.
I should remind you that while I was meeting with Ken on free afternoons, I was still doing all the things I mentioned before.
Ken called again the following week. I came over and we worked on replacing the radiator. When that was done, we cleaned up and sat down for a couple Cokes. Again, Ken wanted to play cards. And again, we played several hands. After I won a few hands, Ken wanted to know if I wanted to play for stakes. I told him that I just like playing.
But Ken persisted, asking me if I wanted to “up the ante.” I told him no. After several more hands he asked me again and I said “what are you talking about.” He said that if I were to lose the next hand that I would have to do whatever he wanted and that if he was to lose that he would do whatever I wanted. The “stakes” as he called them sounded weird to me. But at the same time, I knew that I always had the power to say no, so I played along thinking that friends don’t mess with friends. What could he ask me to do? Buy him a Coke or an ice cream the next time the teens group went out?
I lost the next hand. He then told me that he wanted me to clean the house – sweep, vacuum, everything. I looked at him like he was crazy. He then said that I had agreed to the stakes and had lost and must do what he wanted. I told Ken that I wouldn’t clean his house.
He came back and said that I had to because I gave my word and because I am a Christian. He then left the room and came back to the kitchen with a small men’s Speedo swimsuit. He told me that he wanted me to wear the Speedo while I cleaned the house. I had no idea that Ken would impose that on me. I remember a feeling of revulsion and saying “No way!”
I would not do what he wanted. I’d pay the bet some other way. Rattled, I got up and headed for the door. I promised to come back another day and help him with the TR3. That was the best I could offer. I got on my bike and sped off toward home.
Some weeks passed. At the start of August, twenty days before school started, I got a phone call from Ken. He wanted me to come over. He said the Triumph was ready to roll. I agreed to come over, thinking that this would be a harmless way to honor my bet and be done with the whole business. And maybe I’d have the chance to drive the car, as he had said.
I headed over to his house and found the Triumph parked on the street. Ken walked out of the garage and asked me if I was ready for a ride. We got in the sports car and Ken started the engine. He shifted into first and then turned on the newly installed radio. He drove the TR3 out of the neighborhood and headed for the nearby highway. The convertible sports car responded quickly, moving effortlessly through five gears. But since I hadn’t learned to drive stick shift, he wouldn’t let me drive the car.
We returned to his house an hour later. Ken parked the car in the garage and we went in for a Coke. He asked about playing cards again. I said I wouldn’t. Then he said that he had a roulette game in his room. Ken wanted to show me. I went with him to his bedroom thinking that I would see this thing he was so interested in and then head home.
When we got to his bedroom, Ken uncovered the roulette game from a box that was stored under a bunk bed. He spun its center wheel, showing me how it worked. He handed it to me and I sat down on his bed to hold the wheel on my lap. I spun the wheel to see where the ball would land. As I did, Ken sat down next to me. I quickly moved over to make room for him. Ken then moved closer, put his arms around me, and started wrestling me down to the bed.
At this point in the story, a reader might view me as naïve or even stupid for hanging around Ken after the Speedo incident. I was both and wound up tight. In church, Ken acted one way and with me he acted so weird. I do remember feeling mortified at being attached to what happened and for not picking up what Ken was doing.
I never told my parents about Ken. I had thought that I was on my own and what would they understand anyway. And I remembered the sting of humiliation I felt once before.
My mother had asked me to do something – maybe wash the supper dishes. I said that I wouldn’t. I was being defiant. She got my father involved. He had me go into my bedroom and pull my pants and underpants down in front of my mother. Then he smacked me hard with a wooden stick.
No twelve-year old boy wants to pull down their pants. Not in the Junior High locker room. Not ever in front of their mother. I deserved the punishment but not the process. But I digress.
I would remind the reader that I was fourteen years old that summer and about to enter high school. And it was the sixties. There was no internet, no social media. I had to figure things out myself with the information that came from an eighth-grade sex education class and a birds-and-bees sit-down with my parents.
The Sex-Ed talk, the graphic charts, the film strips and the short movies made the class squirm and giggle. I squirmed again when my parents took me aside to talk about sex.
They showed me a series of prenatal pictures from the 1965 April issue of Life magazine. On the cover was a photograph called Foetus 18 Weeks and the words “Drama of Life Before Birth.”
My father talked about how a woman becomes pregnant. He talked about waiting until marriage to have sex. He told me about nocturnal emissions. He said that I should masturbate if I can’t contain myself. He told me how. And then he ended our talk saying that I should never ever let a man put his penis in my mouth. I had never had such a thought and it wasn’t mentioned in the sex ed classes. This sounded like Drama of Life After Birth and something bizarre.
Things were changing rapidly in my life and in the world. Like any teenager, I wanted to fit in and be accepted. I thought the acceptance of an older friend would be a good thing. I believed in friendship. Hanging around with Bill, my best friend, I learned to value friendship as the most important and most freeing of relationships. And I still do today. I can’t tell you why being free is so important to me. I can tell you that friendship is not suffocating.
Trying to be a friend to Ken kept me coming back one more time. But as I found out, he wanted to be a predator and not a friend. I should return to what happened that afternoon.
Ken, taller than me, leveraged himself on top of me on the bed. He used his feet against the footboard of the bed and his tall frame as a lever to pin me face down. I kept thrashing about, trying to push myself out. I was telling him to stop. He grabbed one of my legs and pulled it up onto the bed. I tried to roll out sideways but couldn’t. He kept forcing my shoulder back down. Then I saw him grab a rope from the wall side of the bed. He must have hidden the rope for a time like this.
Ken tried to loop my neck and hands to the bunk bed post. I fought to keep the rope off of my neck. Then, with his full weight on top of me, I felt Ken’s pelvis thrusting back and forth on my backside. In that moment, with Ken rubbing himself on me and me thinking that my life might end, I felt a huge surge of adrenaline.
I pushed myself straight up from the bed with all of my strength. Still face down, I put one leg on the floor and then the other. I had to forcefully wrench my head out the headlock he put on me. When I finally pulled myself free from the rope and his grip, I ran out of the room, headed straight for my bike, and fled. That summer.
How do these things I’ve told you not mess with someone’s head? If I told you that this story is true and you know me, then you know it is true.
“I’ve learned a lot in these last four years. Most importantly, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. One in six men have an abusive sexual experience before they turn 18. Secrecy, shame and fear are the tools of abuse, and it is only by breaking the stigma of childhood sexual abuse that we can heal, change attitudes, and create safer environments for our children.”
“Stay woke, keep your eyes open” is heard in a recording of Black folk singer Lead Belly. He’s talking about his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys”. Radio host Lana Quest says it’s the first documented usage of the term.
Lead Belly, born Huddie William Ledbetter, advises all “colored people” to stay alert to deception–especially of law enforcement—after the injustice done to the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. “Staying woke” was a basic survival tactic.
“Stay woke, keep your eyes open” @ 4:30 mark.
“Woke” and “stay woke” have their origins in African American Vernacular English. But since the time of Lead Belly, “Staying Woke” has been co-opted to become the watchwords of identity politics and the politics of class struggle or wealth distribution.
What is “Woke” Today?
Professor Robert George of Princeton University, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton, attempted to define “Woke”:
Recently, on Gab social media, Lindsay posted the following challenging the praxis of “Wokeism”:
“DEI violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Corporations do not have the right to subject their employees to systematic psychological abuse. Public institutions have less standing. Compelling a worldview in addition to speech through psychological torment should be a criminal offense. DEI programs compel the adoption of a systematic worldview that answers fundamental questions about the world and man’s role in it while demanding certain duties of conscience. They demand people act in the world through the view that the world is ordered by systemic oppression.”
Lindsay begins by describing wokeism and its philosophical roots. We then learn from the other panelists about the weaponization of Critical Race Theory and about the machinery that’s built up in our government to continue the woke programs. Government employees, fearing for their jobs, obey the mandates of compelled speech. I was recently made aware of one such example:
“The Department of Health and Human Services, headed up by Biden transgender Admiral Rachel Levine, has enforced a mandate requiring all employees to use preferred pronouns and “acknowledge the gender identity of their colleagues.”
“This is what Woke’s Kingdom is like,” said Marcuse. “Once upon a time a professor sowed seed of critical theory in the minds of his students. Every night he went to bed; every day he got up; and the seed sprouted and grew without much effort on his part. Social media produced the growth by itself: first the Tweet, then the “Likes”, then the complete thought reform. But when the crop of activists is ready in goes the media’s call for radical activism, because the revolution has arrived.
-The words of Jesus (Mk. 4: 26-29), converted to the secular world view.
~~~~~
Codified “Woke”
Every social institution has been affected by “Wokeism. A handful of 60s and 70s laws have reached into our legal system, our education systems, and our corporations like invasive weeds. Legislative outgrowths have had their effect on the landscape of human resources and admissions. Institutional wokeness has made space for some groups and some thought while choking off all others.
Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, wrote in his 2020 book “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”, that The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became a “rival Constitution”, incompatible with the original one. It “emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears,’ and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.”
“Over time,” Caldwell noted, “more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. Eventually all of them were.”
In The New Criterion’s October 2023 issue, editor Roger Kimball, Introducing “The new conservative dilemma: a symposium” with The abnormal as the new normal, references the above legal history and comments about the situation we find ourselves in:
“The hypertrophy of the Civil Rights Act did not take place in a vacuum. Its progress was directed by the essentially Marxist ambitions of those radicals who plotted the “long march through the institutions” of the 1960s and beyond. . .
“If the Civil Rights Act is the engine behind the transformation of liberal society into an illiberal, proto-totalitarian compact, the designers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—from Frankfurt School Marxists like Herbert Marcuse on down—provided both the plan and the fuel. The result is a weird, almost surreal situation in which the most common realities and institutions are undermined, transformed, inverted. What is a family? What is a man or a woman? What is free speech? We used to be able to answer with confidence. Can we still?”
What Happened to Woke?
“Stay woke, keep your eyes open” was an early call for Black people to be aware of deceitful practices and prejudiced people and to be awake to racial and social injustice. We all should “Stay woke” and keep our eyes open to see human rights injustice and to fight it.
“. . . across a broad range of political beliefs, one recurring theme is that “wokeness” has demonstrable social, even quasi-religious, power. The writer James Lindsay has argued exhaustively that “wokeness” is essentially a religion where faith in social justice ideology stands in for belief in a deity, and that regular attendance at social justice protests has replaced the role of religious rituals for many progressives.”
Woke fundamentalist thinking thrives across the political spectrum. Monologues of shouting and abuse emanate from those who are certain that they can’t be wrong, that truth and justice are all on their side, and that there is nothing to learn from their opponents, who must be evil or deluded.
Woke fundamentalist thinking, which demands policing of speech and opinion, is antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. Woke Is the Handmaiden of Totalitarianism claims Thorsteinn Siglaugsson.
There’s a lot to take into account regarding the current state of Wokeness:
Consider, says Siglaugsson, that “One of the key characteristics of woke ideology is its utter disregard for reason; for rational thinking, and we see this perhaps most explicitly in the absurdities in the narrative around Covid-19. To the woke, all that matters is their own personal perception, subjective experience.”
Consider that intellectually bankrupt ideas have achieved acceptance in our culture. Truth, abandoned for Woke fundamentalist thinking, has taken on the postmodern understanding of the politics of power.
Consider that Woke conflict theory—separating the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes— with zero-sum conflict, offers no ability to agree or understand one another.
Consider that the Woke are antagonistic as everything is understood in terms of conflict: oppressor vs. oppressed power plays. The Woke, thereby, fragment culture as every relationship becomes transactional. “If I don’t get what I want you’re racist and I’m outta here.”
Consider that the Woke self is incoherent and contradictory as it is based on internal feelings. “What’s in here is more important than what’s out there.”
Consider that the Woke won’t let anyone speak into their lives. As such, there is no accountability and therefore no need for repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. There is no need to be reconciled with others and with truth.
Consider that in Woke thinking there are good and bad people. In Christian thinking there is good and bad in each one of us.
Consider that the Woke self is extremely fragile and needs constant affirmation. In the current culture, having power over others is seen as affirmation.
Consider that the Woke self is illusion, its outworking a virtue-signaling performance.
Consider that many on the job are undergoing critical theory consciousness-raising struggle sessions forcing a disconnect from reality and causing anxiety and depression, and, perhaps, suicide.
Consider that many on the job are undergoing Woke diversity training, e.g., being compelled to use preferred pronouns, even though compelling pronouns and worldviews are First Amendment violations.
Consider that our children are being taught, by the Woke, that the country they live in is racist and that all white people are racist.
Consider that Woke school boards and librarians want to place deviant pornographic material in the hands of our children.
Consider that the Woke advocate for pediatric sex changes.
Consider that the “egalitarian” Woke locked down schools for COVID, disproportionally affecting black and brown kids.
Consider that the “oppressor vs. oppressed” Woke support Islamist terrorist regimes.
Consider that the nonsensical Woke mock big business and worship Big Pharma.
Consider that there is something mentally off in the Woke push to defund the police, in eliminating bail, and in releasing violent offenders back into the public to await trial – all done under the rubric of oppressor-versus-oppressed ideology.
Consider that there is something mentally off in listening to climate alarmists and their insane and unscientific push for “Net Zero” emissions, an Eco-Woke version of the oppressor (mankind, fossil fuels) versus oppressed (earth) ideology.
Consider that there is something mentally off with Woke protestors. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Comrades march in solidarity.
Consider that there is something mentally off with aWoke government looking at plans to “cull” 200,000 cows to meet its climate goals to satisfy the European Union’s (EU) net zero requirements.
Consider that Woke Climate alarmism is mental health abuse of young people. Should anyone be concerned about having children because alarmists have convinced them the planet is ending?
Consider that there is something mentally off with a Woke government on track to pass a massive ‘hate speech’ bill criminalizing social media posts likely ‘to incite violence or hatred’.
Consider that wokeism is characterized by thinking unconditionally or un-contextually, in binary. Behavior is to be condemned regardless of its reasons. And so, people are having to walk on eggshells around the Woke fault-finding terrorists.
Consider that “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
And, consider that
. . . Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .
Excerpt from the poem The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
~~~~~
The Woke kingdom has burgeoned, promoting surreal incumbering effects. And so has mental illness. Correlation?
Consider also that Woke-derived mental illness has produced enablers:
“In fact, the culture of woke in academia is referred to as the Critical Social Justice Theory (CSJT). CSJT adherents seek to identify an enemy and project their own intolerance and guilt onto the enemy. Most of these CSJT adherents are members of the demographic that they are against, which is generally the rich, white elite. They justify themselves as being allies of the oppressed and often speak in a self-deprecating manner to show they are “woke” and striving to be less like the oppressor class. This mentality and the activism it has spawned have created a class of mental health practitioners who are more interested in “social justification” of maladaptive behaviors than actual social justice.”
Princeton professor Dr. Margarita Mooney Suarez shares her expertise as a sociologist and experience as an educator to talk about woke ideology and cancel culture and how they’re affecting the mental health of young people. She talks about the rise in loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide in pre-teens, teens, and young adults, and she shares a potential solution to the problem: refocusing on beauty.
Bishop Robert Barron speaking on “The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism.”
“Wokeism” is arguably the most influential public philosophy in our country today. It has worked its way into the minds and hearts of our young people, into the world of entertainment, and into the boardrooms of powerful corporations. But what is it precisely, and where did it come from”
Bishop Robert Barron speaking on “The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism.”
~~~
“Will Cain sits down with Environmental Progress founder and author, Michael Shellenberger, to discuss why the worshipping of wokeism as an ideology is inherently dangerous to a society, as well as what Michael and Will believe are the real greatest threats to the American experiment.
Will and Michael look at issues such as climate, energy, food policy, as well as drugs, mental illness, homelessness, and crime to give an overarching view of places where well-intended but naive policies have had disastrous unintended consequences.”
I would like to ask the young women in the picture and the women of the WEF video “Where are you going with this?’ and “How does doing/saying this make you feel?”
World Economic Forum: “Climate affects gender and gender affects climate.”
Mentally Disordered Laws for Mentally Disordered People:
“Reduxx has learned that a trans-identified male was arrested in Perry County, Illinois, after making threats to commit a school shooting and murder children on behalf of the transgender community in response to transphobic “bullying.”
. . .
“According to Perry County court records, Willie has not yet entered a plea on his charge of resisting arrest, but Sheriff Howard explains that even if he is found guilty he will likely walk away with a fine.
“It’s more or less going to end up going to be a hearing. Now with the state of Illinois having the SAFE-T Act, which went into effect on September 18, those types of crimes are no longer containable. You just bring [a suspect] in for booking, processing, and biometrics and then you release them with a court date and it is all handled by the courts from there on out.” (Emphasis mine.)
Willie’s next hearing is scheduled for January 2, 2024.
Dozens of U.S. states are suing Meta Platforms (META.O) and its Instagram unit, accusing them of fueling a youth mental health crisis by making their social media platforms addictive.
In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the attorneys general of 33 states including California and New York said Meta, which also operates Facebook, repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms, and knowingly induced young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use.
…
But the states said research has associated children’s use of Meta’s social media platforms with “depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and many other negative outcomes.”
“In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco. The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.”
Ward No. 6., a story by Anton Chekov, opens with this description of an outpost hospital 150 miles from a train station. This provincial hospital with a lunatic asylum annex, worlds apart from “sane” society, is the setting for the reader to examine the disturbing dehumanization taking place in Russia and, perhaps, everywhere else.
Chekhov wrote the story with reformist concerns after he visited a far east penal colony of the Russian Empire – Sakhalin Island.[1] Chekhov’s aim was to survey the prisoners and publicize their conditions. His compiled notes became the book Sakhalin Island.
Chekov, as guide, invites us onto the premises of the provincial hospital and into its mental ward. He would have us understand suffering in the presence of it and not in the abstract. So, he has us listen in on conversations between Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, who is in charge of the hospital and asylum, and inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov.
With a phrase similar to Dante’s opening of the Divine Comedy – “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – Chekhov forewarns us about our entry into Ward No. 6: “If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go along the narrow path.”
As we follow our tour guide, he shows us the hospital’s neglected and unsanitary conditions and then introduces us to the brutish Nikita, who I consider one of the “nettles”.
“The porter, Nikita, an old soldier wearing rusty good-conduct stripes, is always lying on the litter with a pipe between his teeth. He has a grim, surly, battered-looking face, overhanging eyebrows which give him the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is short and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, and is convinced that there would be no order in the place if he did not.”
After walking past the cluttered pitiful state of the entry-way conditions and the fearful porter, we enter the annex.
Here, the “walls are painted dirty blue, the ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without out a chimney . . .The wooden floor is gray and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, smoldering wicks, bugs, and ammonia, and for the first minute this stench gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
“The beds in the room are bolted to the floor. Sitting and lying on them are men in blue hospital dressing gowns, wearing nightcaps in the old style. These are the lunatics.
There are five of them in all.”
Chekhov describes the inmates and then begins to focus on the two protagonists, inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov and doctor Andrei Yefimich Ragin. We learn about both from their dialog. As we listen in, we soon begin to wonder who the patient is and who is the doctor.
Early in life Ivan Dmitrich Gromov was severely flogged by his father. His mental state became more unstable with personal misfortunes. Later in life he sees convicts being led away by armed guards. This was not an uncommon sight for Gromov to witness. But this time he reacts with pity and unease and transference. He begins to conceptualize that like the convicts, it is also his lot in life to be clamped in chains and punished for some crime. This inordinate thinking, a persecution complex that becomes a paralyzing fear of some random moment someone will come down on him for something, lands Gromov in Ward No. 6. He tells Dr. Ragin that he has “persecution mania.”
Though he’s an inmate because he’s out of touch with reality, Gromov is very much in touch with the mental anguish caused by his fixation and the physical pain delivered by the blows of Nikita. Ward No. 6 reinforces Gromov’s cycle of fear and pity.
Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, on the other hand, is not in touch with the human condition. Passive and cynical, he is unable to bring reforms to the hospital.
In conversations with Gromov, Ragin justifies his indifference to others’ plight by suggesting that everything is subject to chance. For instance, he posits that there is no difference between wearing a doctor’s smock and an inmate’s smock.
To further justify his coolness to the human condition he references Ecclesiastes – “it is all futile, senseless” – and quotes Marcus Aurelius: “Pain is just the idea of pain: make an effort of will to change that idea, reject it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.” The inner self should dictate one’s experience according to Ragin.[2]
The doctor’s inner self has him ignoring the unsanitary and detrimental conditions of Ward No. 6 and the plight of his patients. Dr. Ragin “knows such surroundings are torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients, but what can be done?” His stoic outlook of mind over matter is, in practice, one of heartless neglect toward others.
He increases suffering, instead of relieving it, by remaining aloof and disconnected from it. He has intellectualized reality to justify his inaction and seeks further intellectualization to relieve him of his post’s boredom and purposelessness.
Adding to the doctor’s disinterest is what our guide tells us: “probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this annex.” As one day is no different than another in this outpost hospital, Dr. Ragin becomes disenchanted with his doctor routine.
When he first came to the hospital, Dr. Ragin “worked very diligently. He saw patients every morning till dinnertime, performed operations, and even practiced obstetrics. . .. But in the course of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony and obvious uselessness.”
The doctor extrapolates from his daily routine and reasons “why interfere with people dying if death is the normal and prescribed end for everyone?” and “If the aim of medicine is to utilize drugs to alleviate suffering, the question necessarily arises: why alleviate it?” With similar thoughts, he reasons away the need for himself to be involved in the lives of suffering people. Why should anyone be spared pain when “their lives have nothing of importance in them and would be entirely empty, like the life of an amoeba, were it not for suffering?
“Oppressed by such reflections, Andrey Yefimich let things go and gave up going to the hospital every day.”
To avoid the messy, tedious, and nonsensical reality around him, Dr. Ragin leaves work early and goes home to his books and beer. He withdraws from the physical world to seek mental stimulation. As he reads he is wowed by recent medical discoveries and yet makes not one application to his own hospital. He blames society for the mess he has to deal with.
Evenings consist of conversations with his postmaster friend Mikhail, the only one in town who doesn’t bore the doctor. (Is Ragin more Epicurean in practice than Stoic?)
This routine changes when one day Dr. Ragin follows an inmate, the Jew Moiseika, returning to the annex from his daily wandering in the town. The doctor notices that Moiseika is walking around with bare feet in the winter. Inside, he tells Nikita to give Moiseika some boots for the cold weather. Dr. Ragin, we learn, is not unaware of what’s around him.
From his bed Gromov hears the doctor’s voice, jumps up and reacts with loud vitriol at his presence. The doctor goes in to see who is making the fuss about him. After Gromov calms down, the two begin a dialog that Dr. Ragin finds pleasurable: “What an agreeable young man!” The doctor, breaking with routine, visits Gromov again the next day.
The doctor encounters Gromov lying in bed holding his head in terrible pain. Gromov is suffering with a splitting headache. He reasoned over and over again since the day before that Dr. Ragin was a “spy or doctor who has been charged to test me – it’s all the same -.” Gromov’s persecution mania was triggered.
Dr. Ragin responds, reasoning that if true and Gromov is arrested and sent to prison then he is no worse off being right where he is. This response frees Gromov up a bit and the two have a bit of relaxed conversation. Gromov wishes to be in a better place – outside in “the country somewhere” and “to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache.”
“It’s so long since I have lived like a human being. It’s vile here. Insufferably vile!”
The doctor responds, not with an antidote for Ivan’s headache, not with a ride in the country, but with a philosophical take on how to think about things – with simple equivalency.
“There’s no difference between a warm and comfortable study and this ward” and “Peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but within him.”
Gromov questions this. The doctor continues.
“The ordinary man expects the good and the bad from external things – from an open carriage and a study – but a thinking man derives them from within himself.”
Gromov rejects the doctor’s philosophical reasoning. The doctor responds, telling Gromov that “One must strive for the comprehension of life, and therein lies true happiness.”
Gromov understands nothing of what the doctor has been saying and inferring: Comprehension? External, internal? Life is just a mental exercise, a thought experiment, detached from the tragic dimension of human existence? Gromov gets up, looks angrily at the doctor and speaks:
“I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every irritant. And I do react! I respond to pain with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is precisely what is called life. . . . How is it that you don’t know that?”
Gromov continues, commenting perceptively about the Stoics. He then asks why Dr. Ragin why he preaches Stoicism. “Are you a sage? A philosopher?” The doctor responds “No …. but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable.”
Gromov, the inmate, then wants to know how the doctor considers himself to be “competent to judge comprehension and contempt for suffering”.
“Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of what suffering is? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed as a child?”
“No, responds the doctor, “my parents had an aversion to corporal punishment?”
Gromov tells the doctor that his own father, “a harsh, hemorrhoidal government clerk with along nose and a yellow neck” flogged him cruelly. Sizing the doctor up, Gromov then proceeds with his analysis of the doctor, excoriating his competency to understand anything about Gromov’s life or life itself.
“No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has terrorized you nor beaten you; you are as strong as an ox. . .. You are by nature a lazy, flaccid man, and so you have tried to arrange your life in such a way that nothing should disturb you or force you to budge.”
I’ll stop here and leave you with Gromov’s cri de coeur and Dr. Ragin’s inability to come to terms with suffering. Even when the doctor does act to relieve suffering, he thinks that he will be paid back for his trouble. He lends his postmaster friend money after his friend suffers gambling loses. But the doctor is never repaid and soon becomes destitute. It appears from all that happens to the doctor as the story unfolds, that the doctor’s friends and associates also hold to “It’s all the same” thinking.
This story is rich with insight and worth a read. And though one may not be interested in reading a story in a Russian setting, consider that cultures change but human nature doesn’t change much from place to place or age to age.
“It’s all the same!”, first spoken by Gromov when he encounters Dr. Ragin (“a spy or a doctor”) is oft repeated and inferred by Dr. Ragin as he explains his philosophy to Gromov. You’ll have to read the story to see how the doctor’s “It’s all the same” philosophy works out. He holds on to it to the end of the story.
““Ward Six” is affective and effective largely because Chekhov makes proper, judicious, and artistic use of the very faculty that is impaired in his two heroes, Gromov and Ragin, the faculty for contemplating similarities. Their respective disorders, which are two extremes of the same continuum, prevent them from experiencing fear and pity in a healthy, moderate, cathartic fashion.”[3]
As you read Ward No. 6, ask yourself these questions:
Is “society” at fault and therefore responsible for the ills and disorder of society or are individuals responsible?
If one assigns “society” as the cause for “systemic” failures, is the individual therefore absolved of any personal responsibility?
Is detachment from reality a sign of mental illness?
Do you spend your time in the laboratory of thought and have never played baseball or wrestled with another human being?
Does lying to oneself promote mental health?
Is it healthy to be being disconnected from physical reality via drugs or the TV and the internet – supposed mental stimulants that will lessen our boredom?
“It’s all the same!”: Is that a motto for your life? How has that worked out for you?
If we say chance or fate determines things, do we give up believing we can make a difference?
Do false equivalencies, such as occur in Ward No. 6 and that also operate in our culture, lead to mental illness?
A momentary transposition of one’s reality into another through imagination is healthy. Day dreaming is healthy. But what about the permeant transpositions into unreality that is occurring around us today?
Have you ever asked God to heal your imagination?
(As mentioned before, Chekhov is my favorite writer. His stories (and plays) show rather than tell. Chekhov doesn’t moralize or preach. As with Ward No. 6, he lets readers see and hear for themselves and make their own judgements. I appreciate this way of writing. For one thing, I am not a fan of preaching. I had my fill growing up. I attended churches where preaching, and not the Eucharist, is the pinnacle of the service. I’ve moved on to an Anglican church.)
[2] When Chekhov wrote Ward No. 6, he was reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. A couple of quotes from that journal apply to Dr. Ragin’s disposition: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”; “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
[3] Liza Knapp, “The Suffering of Others: Fear and Pity in “Ward Six,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014), 629
“We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.”
“Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve…” from the Preface of Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple, 2015.
Theodore Dalyrymple is a pen name used by retired prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels.
“The name ‘superfluous man’ refers to an important and recurrent character type in 19th c. Russian literature. It denotes an idealistic but inactive hero who is aware of and sensitive to moral and social problems but who does not take action; in part because of personal weakness and lassitude, in part because of social and political restraints to freedom of action.”
– “usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective action. Although he is aware of the stupidity and injustice surrounding him, he remains a bystander.”
“This episode of Health Care News focuses on the recent repeal of the Certificate of Need and financial credentialing in the healthcare industry . . . and how it will enhance competition in the healthcare market, ultimately leading to reduced prices.”
The World Health Organization and its partner organization, the Bill Gates-controlled GAVI, announced Wednesday that they will be flooding Africa with 18 million doses of malaria vaccines.
“. . . multiple federal laws were broken to change the recording metrics for COVID-19-deaths. There is also evidence of multiple acts of what appears to be willful misconduct by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies throughout the COVID-19 crisis.”
A group of young musicians who hail from homeschooling backgrounds have crossed states and blended musical styles to form a unique band with a mission: to keep the classics alive.
You might be aware of the TV miniseries Mysteriesof the Unknown, a show that seeks answers to our history’s mysteries.
I want to propose another miniseries: Mysteries of the Known Knowns – a show that seeks answers to the things we know we know from our recent history.
Here are six suggested episodes with background references:
Episode 1 – Why are we being used as lab rats?
How is it that government entities demand our accountability about all things COVID BUT the manufacturers of the vaccines are NOT held accountable for what they dispense? If the risks are not discussed, how can there be informed consent?
“Dr. Vliet further clarified that Remdesivir, a failed Ebola drug that proved ineffective and highly toxic, is used as the FDA’s approved COVID treatment, and is associated with organ toxicity, making patients sicker and more likely to require a ventilator, and hence more likely for the hospital to get a larger bonus payment.”
If these agreements were retroactively rescinded would the vaccine mandates go away?
Episode 2 – If it can’t be questioned, is it science?
Bureaucrat overlord Anthony Fauci has effectively declared “I am the Way, the Science and the Life. No one comes to COVID freedom except by me.”
Another self-appointed COVID messiah, NIH director Francis Collins, told Fauci to rain down fire on scientists who don’t fall in line and obey them without question. Collins, now ‘retired’, wanted to shut down all scientific debate. And so it is that YouTube, Twitter, and their ilk are banning scientists who question “the science”.
If it can’t be questioned and debated, is it really science?
Episode 3 – Are the people of the world being subjected to COVID terrorism?
Background:
What a lovely new world we are living in when you go out for a meal and a squad of police barge in, persecute a little boy then demand to see everyone else’s papers. This is the vax passport world so many are begging for. #NotAboutAVirus#NOVAXPASSPORTSpic.twitter.com/ZQFnybs4ly
Episode 4 – Is COVID Absolutism behind the Current Psychic Epidemic?
How is it that countries with the majority of their populations vaccinated are in panic mode? Why are there calls for more panic, lockdowns, passports, and mandates? Is science, logic or even altruism behind this? OR, is the desire to create a new social order under totalitarian control behind creating a fear-based populism?
Why are people going along with the manufactured panic? Why do “the masses whole-heartedly accept everything that Dr. Fauci or other national and global health officials proclaim”? (See article below)
Why the collective psychosis? Why accept mandatedmental illness?
Background:
A recent web article shares the theory behind mass formation psychosis posited by Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. “He explains the [four basic] societal conditions under which a population ends up willingly sacrificing their freedom.”
“A lack of societal bonding. It is easily argued that members of Western society struggled with loneliness long before the pandemic, and then with the ongoing lockdowns, isolation, and general fear of one another”, the lack of community continues.
“The second condition is met when the majority of people view their lives as being without purpose or meaning.”
“Free floating anxiety is the third condition for the rise of mass formation.” Record numbers of anxiety/depression medications are being prescribed.
“The fourth condition is high levels of frustration and aggression, with no discernible cause.” Open hostility on social media and on the streets is evident.
The following link and video go into greater detail about mass formation psychosis:
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, on CNN’s “The Lead”, said that rising prices were a “good thing” because it meant more people were buying goods.
Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Inflation is skyrocketing as I don’t need to tell you. The prices for home heating costs, cars, groceries, furniture, rent, gasoline are hitting Americans right in the wallet. The White House response has been generally to say, ‘Hey, inflation shows we’re coming out of the recession. It’s a good sign.’”
The made-for-TV melodrama General Fauci has aired for a year and a half. Its storyline of a global pandemic, mimicking the fantasy narratives of the “We’re-all-gonna-die-unless-somebody-from-science-saves us” pandemic movies of recent years, has a twist. Instead of the pandemic creating zombies, the pandemic mitigation methods – masks and vaccines – creates zombies.
The main character of General Fauci is scripted as the main character of pandemic policy for the nation. His background in funding gain-of-function research and of telling people what to do is the basis for his moral high ground authority. Entire episodes are viewed through the eyes of the main character.
The doctor believes that he can bring about a Great Reset of humanity if only people would do what he says. The supporting cast, media and other hand-wringing types, is an approving Greek chorus. But the audience is kept guessing as to what the doctor is saying, as noble lies come out of both sides of his mouth.
Each daily soap episode presents the same cast of grim-Woke actors and the same set and props. Each daily soap episode is designed to play on emotions to gain viewership. Each episode is a storyline to be continued to gain repeat viewers.
A subplot of the General Fauci soap was added last November: insurrectionists install a feeble-minded puppet dictator in the White House. The Great Reset of humanity is placed in his hands.
Before General Fauci aired, a Washington-based Dark Shadows style soap production aired for over a year. All My Collusions depicted the creepy, campy, and cultish world of psychotic Democrats.
Now, after a year and a half airing of the tedious General Fauci, viewer’s questions arise: “When does it end?” and “Is there more to life than meets the media eye?”
In answer to viewer’s first question, the word on the street is that a new soap opera is in the offing. As the General Fauci series winds down, another melodrama will replace it: a climate justice series called “The Days of Our Earth”
The new soap will present the daily ordeals and hardships of Mother Earth as she deals with the effects of climate change. Fearing the immediate end of the earth, Dark Green religionists join the Build Back Better Brotherhood to save Mother Earth by ridding her of excess carbon-based humans. Script writers have been working on the soap for several years.
*****
Fluff. Ubiquitous fluff. Cheerios for breakfast. Disneyland for vacation and TV productions for 24 hour-a-day viewing. Fabrications of fluff abound in art, architecture, and cinema. Because of fluff’s pervasive immediacy, you may not have noticed that it is a replacement of what is real. Fantasy objects are the substitute. These offer a quick detachment from reality and immediate gratification as real emotions become involved.
As people subject their healthy truth-seeking imaginations to today’s pandemic of fantasy, more and more fluff is required to be injected into their minds. This past year we’ve seen that political correctness and scientism abhor a vacuum. Both have gone wherever people let it in. And, so has Marxism.
Now under the cover of the “Build Back Better” (BBB) promotion, Marxism proposes, using historical materialism as its determinant, salvation via a collective will. We are to believe that through BBB, man will have the ability to perfect himself. And, that BBB will overcome the world’s ills: pain, suffering, poverty, conflict and sadness. And that the earth will be saved from mankind. And through BBB, technology will produce a transhuman man who will be immortal – basically, a nihilist who’s all fluff for all time.
Despite its almost universal marketing by college and university professors and by the “Build Back Better” political harpies, Marxism is a dangerous fantasy drug. Those who take Marxism into their lives will feel a sense of security and power at first. But they will soon come to feel great loss and emptiness. For, the Marxism addicted are injecting the fluff of nihilism into their system.
Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski, called a “thinker for our time” by philosopher Roger Scruton, was exiled from Poland in 1968 for his criticism of Marxism and Communism. He had firsthand knowledge of the fantastical machinations of Marxist ideology. Consider the following passage from his 1976 essay On the So-Called Crisis of Christianity:
Christianity is thus the awareness of our weakness and misery, and it useless to argue that there exists or could exist a “Promethean Christianity,” that is, that Christian faith could be reconciled with hope for self-salvation. Two great ideas of the nineteenth century which, despite all that separates them, perfectly embodied this Promethean expectation –those of Marx and of Nietzsche – were anti-Christian in their roots, and not as a result of accidental historical circumstances. Nietzsche’s’ hatred of Christianity and of Jesus was a natural consequence of his belief in the unlimited possibility of mankind’s self-creation. Nietzsche knew that Christianity is the awareness of our weakness., and he was right. Marx knew this too, and from the young Hegelians, he took over and transformed the philosophy (more Fichtean than Hegelian) of self-creation and futuristic orientation. He came to believe that the collective Prometheus of the future would reach a state in which his thought and action would be indistinguishable and in which even “atheism” would lose its reason for existence, since people’s self-affirmation would be entirely “positive”, not negatively dependent on the negation of God.
*****
To answer the soap viewer’s second question “Is there more to life than meets the media eye?” we must look elsewhere. . .
Have a good look at the birds in the sky. They don’t plant seeds, they don’t bring in the harvest, they don’t store things in barns – and your father in heaven feeds them! Think how different you are from them! Can any of you add fifteen inches to your height just by worrying about it?
And why worry about what to wear? Take a tip from the lilies in the countryside. They don’t work; they don’t weave; but let me tell you, not even Solomon in all his finery was dressed as well as one of these. So if God gives that sort of clothing even to the grass in the field, which is here today and on the bonfire tomorrow, isn’t he more likely to clothe you too, you little-faith lot?
So don’t worry away with your ‘What’ll we eat?’ and ‘What’ll we drink?’ and ‘What’ll we wear?’ Those are all the things the Gentiles fuss about, and your heavenly father knows you need them all. Instead, make your top priority God’s kingdom and his way of life, and all these things will be given to you as well.
So don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow can worry about itself. One days’ trouble at a time is quite enough. (Matt. 6:26-34)
Long before the melodrama of General Fauci, long before “emergency use” vaccines, and long before historical materialism’s death toll of millions, the Son of Man walked 30-some years in an unsanitary disease-filled world. All manner of health threats – smallpox, parasitic infections, malaria, anthrax, pneumonia, tuberculosis, polio, skin diseases including leprosy, head lice, scabies and more – existed in the first century.
Jesus was fully aware of the pain, suffering and groaning of his creation. He was fully aware of the reality that people were dealing with. He knew that many people of that time had only the bare necessities. Many lived hand-to-mouth. What did Jesus offer when he saw the growing crowds and went up the hillside, sat down, took a deep breath and began to teach them? (Matt. 5:1-2)
Jesus did not offer vain words and soap operas to play on emotions. He didn’t paint people as victims. He didn’t peddle ideology. He didn’t offer the Power of Positive Thinking. He didn’t offer critical theory. He didn’t offer diversity, equity and inclusion training. He didn’t pander for their attention with talk about skin color or gender or sexual preference. He didn’t offer collective Promethean self-salvation.
Jesus didn’t tell the crowds to rise up as one collective will to revolt and destroy what is and build a socio-economic system to produce the outcomes they desired. No.
What did Jesus offer? Jesus offered the kingdom of God – a physical-spiritual reality that Marxism denies. He offered a new Torah that fulfilled the old Torah. He offered a change of focus. Outsiders are now insiders. The first will be last. Washing feet, and not stepping on feet to get ahead, is the kingdom way.
Jesus spoke in terms of individual human agency. He said that his followers would be blessed if they acted in the ways he described. They would know the happiness and joy of life in the kingdom of God (not available under Marxism (cf. Psalm 4: 7)).
He offered awareness of reality from the perspective of a shepherd caring for his sheep. Jesus’ hillside discourse is found in the gospel according to Matthew (Matt. 5, 6 & 7). The first verse of Matthew’s gospel records that Jesus is a descendent of David, a shepherd who became king.
As we read in the Matthew passage above, Jesus offered the world as it turns – a cosmology of Creator love and care. He pointed to aesthetic flora and forage-to-mouth fauna as empirical evidence of his Father’s love and care for the evolutionary creation he put in motion some 13.8 billion years before.
“When does the melodrama end?” It’s up to you. People believe what they want to the believe. Psalm 1 tells us that there are two paths that one could follow.
“Is there more to life than meets the media eye?” It’s depends on where you look. Psalm 103 relates a worldview of good – blessing and benefit, compassion and concern, and righteousness and redemption – as man relates to God.
As the world turns you may feel like you are in a dryer drum on an Air Fluff cycle. In such a state you easily become discombobulated and distressed. You will want to take to heart Psalm 4 – David’s plea for deliverance from fluff – vain words and lies – that disturbs his sleep.
Turn off the Air Fluff cycle and remove the lint from your life. Have a good look at the birds in the sky. Take a tip from the lilies in the countryside. The unchanging One who put the universe in motion, feeds the birds, and dresses lilies in lavish beauty will look after you as the world turns.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. James 1:17
“Episode_983 Lock Step of Tyrants … Dr. Naomi Wolf on Vaccine Passports and Nigel Farage”. Released: 2021.“Episode_986 The American Generals Speak Part III”. Released: 2021.
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The following is not a soap opera. Pastor Artur Pawlowski was recently arrested by the Canadian Stasi for his staunch defiance of the pandemic lockdowns. Pastor Pawlowski conveys the reality of the self-salvation ideology of Marx, Nietzsche, and the collective Prometheus. He speaks of God’s salvation.
“{The AFLDS is] seeking temporary injunctive relief against any existing or further authorization for use in children under the age of 16, of any of the COVID-19 “vaccines”1 that have been approved under the Emergency Use Authorization (“EUA”) . . .”
Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and Professor of Medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine and he is warning against the Vaccine.
Facebook exposed in global effort to silence dangers about Vaccine.
[Michigan] is working through a process to make permanent its workplace COVID-19 rules, enforced through the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Will the legal dept. save us from some COVID totalitarianism?
“The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has put employers on notice that should they attempt to require employees to receive injections of experimental COVID-19 gene-therapy vaccine a resulting adverse reaction will be considered “work-related” for which the employer may be held liable.”
Like humans, flowers inherit their appearance from genes. Pigments are “born” into these plants, producing a range of colors across the spectrum. The same chemical, carotenoid, that produces pigment in tomatoes and carrots, also produces yellow, red, or orange color in certain flowers. Another chemical, anthocyanin, is responsible for producing red, pink, blue, and purple-colored flower petals. While many people see these plants as purely decorative, flowers aren’t colorful just to be pretty – they need their color for survival.
It didn’t take long. This morning I found the following YouTube notice (shown below as a screen capture). The “removed’ video was posted in Forcing Dysfunction on Sunday.
In the “removed” video, Dr. Carson spoke about the benefit of hydroxychloroquine as used by an African population – the people had a very low rate of COVID cases. He also spoke encouragingly of herd immunity.
Apparently, a site called YouTube is not about your narrative. It is about YouTube publishing a forcing function narrative on you.
Youtube’s mission statement? “Ignorance is strength.”
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” ― George Orwell, 1984
The following video – The Manufacturing of Mass Psychosis, Can Sanity Return to an Insane World? – may explain YouTube’s menticide machinations. It certainly explains what has been going on the past 399 days.
Think about this video when you are ordered to submit to more mandates from the Fauci/CDC/Biden regime.
Watch before narrative publisher YouTube takes it down.
The following took place during my thirteenth year . . .
A week before Christmas Day, a gaggle of us self-conscious teenagers loaded into three cars. We headed to Elgin State Hospital, formerly called the Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane. Our church’s youth group leader had decided that, in the spirit of Christmas, his charges should bring hope and joy to the less fortunate.
Four of us sat bunched together in the back seat of one of the cars. We kidded each other about who was the crazier. We cackled and fidgeted and sniffed the mimeographed sheets of Christmas Carols and became giddier. None of us knew what to expect. “But for the grace of God” is all I heard the youth group leader say before I got in the car.
The high school senior driving our car asked us if we wanted to hear about “Elgin State.” We became quiet and ready to squeal like when the four of us sat at a campfire last summer. Jeff slowly spun out his words and waited for our reaction.
“They say the place is . . . haunted … horrific experiments had been performed there . . . spirits of the unclaimed dead walk the cemetery grounds and, . . . in the buildings, . . . the criminally insane live there.”
It didn’t take much. Jeff’s description of Elgin State and the winter wind that howled through Jeff’s rusted-out car gave us goose bumps. I wound and unwound the pretty purple printed sheets. Lise snapped her gum. Mary kicked the front seat and Joan kept biting her nails.
The three cars drove through the front entrance and down a long driveway towards the largest brick building I had ever seen. I suddenly felt out of place. I saw no signs of Christmas anywhere.
We parked along the front of the building. The youth group leader led our group of sixteen through the front door. He announced us at the front desk. Soon an older gentleman came down the stairs.
Dr. I-Forget-His-Name was bald and wore thick-rimmed glasses. In his white lab coat, he looked like the mad scientist I’d seen in a movie that I wasn’t supposed to watch but watched anyway at a friend’s house. Up close, I could see small blood vessels on his nose and cheeks. Whispering to Lise, I wondered if that is what happened when you work here. I tried not to stare when he escorted the group upstairs.
On the second floor he directed us to a double-door entrance. We walked through it. The room before us was bigger than any church sanctuary I had been in. There were large windows along the length of the room. They were foggy, providing a pale spectral light. None of the patients stood near them.
There were no curtains around the windows. There were no pictures on the walls, no paintings, and no Christmas tree or decorations. The furniture, wooden chairs and tables, was scattered around the room on the dull linoleum floor. The hall seemed soulless and indifferent toward the fifty gowned inmates within it.
The patient’s voices, moans, yelps, and shrieks sounded like they were coming out from a deep cave. Many sat staring off blankly. Some of them bobbed their head endlessly. Those who walked around seemed content to be walking in no specific direction. Our appearance at the double-door made no difference to them.
We gathered in two rows just inside the doorway and began signing Jingle Bells. Our voices reverberated and then seemed to go off somewhere. Our captive audience didn’t stir. We followed with Silent Night. There were a couple of moans of recognition. Then we sang The First Noël.
The First Noel the angels did say Was to certain poor shepherds In fields as they lay In fields where they Lay keeping their sheep On a cold winter’s…
Out from the hallway behind us came a naked man. He began shouting and writhing right in front of us. One of the girls shrieked. The patients whooped and hollered.
Two men with white coats tried to grab the man. But he squirmed and threw them off again and again. He jumped and shouted and flung his arms right in front of us. He wanted to be right in front of us.
More white coats came to help. They surrounded the man and subdued him. He was dragged from the room.
It took a few minutes for our youth group leader to get us back to singing. When we did, we kept looking behind us to see what was next. But nothing happened after that.
When we finished singing our host escorted us down stairs. At the door, he thanked us for coming. On the way home we had a lot to talk about. Jeff said nothing.
That night I told my parents about my experience at Elgin State. Father said he was reminded of the Gadarene demoniac. Mom said “That poor man.”
Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I was allowed to stay up late. I sat with my father as he watched the newsman recap what had happened in 1965. Something was said about demonstrations and Vietnam and The Great Society. But I sat there thinking about “that poor” wild “man” in Elgin State. He sure reacted to The First Noël.
“Coroner Richard Jorgensen issued a warning Thursday that the number of suicides in the county between Jan. 1 and June 30 rose from 44 in 2019 to 54 in 2020, a 23% increase.
…This year overdose deaths are 52% higher than the same time last year, with the majority occurring after the COVID-19 measures were implemented in the state.”
“The fallout of what happened with the quarantine is going to be pretty bad … for people’s mental health and people’s livelihoods, and that is not a good recipe.”
Above are just two local headlines. One can extrapolate the local effects of the COVID-19 mitigation to a national scenario.
At the beginning of the lockdown the messaging coming down from our overlords was that hospitals and medical resources would be overwhelmed if we didn’t obey the stay-at-home orders. Yet, we who are locked down (those at risk and the healthy) were not told that we would be overwhelmed. That was not in their consideration. As indicated above, there has been an increase of depression, anxiety and substance abuse leading to overdoses and death. Who would have thought that imposing social isolation, mask muzzling, loss of employment, loss of one’s business, etc. would have had such a devastating effect on humans? Our nanny overlords did not.
If it bleeds it leads. I have no doubt that the 24/7 news coverage of cases and deaths related to COVID-19 (Tales from the Crypt) exacerbates mental health problems, especially for those with pre-existing mental health problems. That coverage and the constant PSAs telling us to wear masks and stay home has got almost everyone spooked.
The line for early voting yesterday morning was outside the door, down the sidewalk and down another sidewalk. Some sixty people, standing apart in the UV light of the hot sun, were wearing a mask. I did not. I did wear one inside the county building to cast my vote. I didn’t want create a scene.
(There is no medical science behind wearing a mask outdoors. Yet, medical-scientism demands, like its counterpart climate-scientism, mindless herd-submission to its specious dogma.)
Personally, I am infinitely more concerned about the effects of the lockdown on humans than about the effects of COVID-19. More and more COVID-19 cases are reported. So what? More and more people are being tested. People get it and build immunity to it. Deaths are reported but are the deaths only caused by COVID-19 or by pre-existing conditions and COVID-19? We are not told.
We all know that those with pre-existing conditions -respiratory illness, compromised immune systems, the elderly and, the obese, like Illinois’ governor J.B. Pritzker – should be quarantined. The rest of us should be set free. The lockdown should have ended two weeks after it was started.
Along with the excuse given for the lockdown: “to keep from overloading the hospital and the essential workers” (“workers”, a term used by Marxist sympathizers), was the “flatten the curve” excuse. The conditions for ending the lockdown were mutating. It mutated again with “we’ll wait for a vaccine”. We don’t need to wait for a vaccine to end the restrictions. The only vaccine I want is one which inoculates me against contracting bureaucrats into my life.
People need to get back to their livelihoods. Restrictions need to be lifted off of businesses and churches. No one should be deprived of a right to earn a living and to be fruitful. Kids need to be in school *(God protect them from the Progressive/Marxist/BLM indoctrination virus.) The paranoia imposed on us from the media and the overlords must stop. End the lockdown now! We are a free people who know how to protect ourselves and others. We’ve made it this far. Stop the spread of fear. Flatten the rhetoric.
It is not good for man to be alone. The COVID-19 mandates and our inability to cope with isolation creates a public mental health crisis. Mitigate this.
We need to protect the vulnerable – that is all of us – from the exasperating fear foisted on us by the “If it bleeds it leads” media and the tyranny of isolation imposed by the overlords who continue to de-humanize the population with their mandates.
“I am a left-leaning New York City public defender who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries and Hillary Clinton in the general election. I have never voted for a Republican candidate. I chose my career because I wanted to help those most defenseless in our society: indigent people accused and convicted of crimes and facing the awesome power of the state.
Until I saw the catastrophic effects that the lockdowns were having on the very people I sought to help…”
In a radio interview discussing her article, Ms. Younes, a lifelong Democrat, said she is voting for Trump based on the COVID-19 restrictions the Biden/Harris ticket would impose if elected.
“As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.”
Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Many more attempt suicide. Suicide occurs throughout the lifespan and is the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds globally… There are indications that for each adult who died of suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. –Mental Health, Suicide Data, World Health Organization
Overdoses killed young and middle-aged Americans at a breakneck pace as the country battles a crippling opioid crisis, adding to the first two-year drop in life expectancy since JFK was President.
The numbers quoted above are not insignificant. These instances of mental illness are not insignificant. And, these statistics represent only a small fraction of the de-humanizing effects of mental illness. Most of the effects of mental illness are hidden from the public eye until a person’s mental illness reaches a peak. The media then reports the violence done to others or done to one’s self in the form of suicide. Mentioned briefly by the newscaster: mental illness and the need to find a way to deal with it.
Again, the numbers quoted above are not insignificant. The quotes tell us in effect that mental illness influenced a person’s choice to self-harm. The quotes (and newscasts) do not tell us the choices that led to a mental illness that in time led to an act of violence. A post about mental illness could go in many directions. Here, I will take the path less traveled. I want to talk about what I see as the genesis of most mental illness – people’s choices.
Certainly, there are forms of mental illness which are not based on a person’s choices. Some prominent forms of mental disorder such as Bi-Polar Disorder have been ascribed primarily to a person’s genetic make-up. Some mental disorders are related to a chemical imbalance. Either abnormality can result in abnormal brain structure and function. Much progress has been made to mitigate the effects of these disorders. Some mental disorders may have come about through a child’s early environment. Talking in therapy and building good trust relationships can bring about healing.
Beyond physiological and early childhood causes, there is a spectrum of mental illnesses due to a person’s choices, choices that have been assessed and weighed based on one’s belief system and emotions. Each of us make deliberated decisions using our free will. We may choose to act in a mentally healthy way or in a mentally harmful way. We may choose to turn the other cheek or we may choose to imitate revenge (Copy-Cat Revenge). We may choose to endure pain or we may choose to commit copy-cat suicide (the Werther Effect). Choosing to choose to act against God, oneself and others is evil-based mental illness. Evil-based mental illness involves a person’s choices.
Adam and Eve made a choice and learned of evil through their disobedience. Their son Cain made a choice when he murdered his brother Abel. God, acknowledging Cain’s mental distress, let him know that his choice figured in his distress:
Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”-Genesis 4:6-
One’s choice makes all the difference for one’s mental state. And, when a person makes the wrong choice, there are public and private consequences. There are mental health consequences. A descent into madness is one of the consequences.
“This is the interpretation, Your Majesty, and this is the decree the Most High has issued against my lord the king: You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox and be drenched with the dew of heaven. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes. The command to leave the stump of the tree with its roots means that your kingdom will be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules. Therefore, Your Majesty, be pleased to accept my advice: Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your prosperity will continue….
Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.
At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever. – Daniel 4:24-27, 33-34 (emphasis mine)
We live in a world where choice is king. And, people want to reign as king or queen of their choice. What you won’t hear these choice-driven folks say is that they are responsible for the choices they make. If their choice doesn’t work out the way they planned they blame others, including the government. Scapegoating is a characteristic of evil-based mental illness. For example, I was once accused by LGBT advocates on Twitter of likely going on to cause the depression and suicidal death of gay community members because I spoke out against homosexuality. The advocates of the LGBT will tell you that any resistance to the homosexual lifestyle equates to depression and death for the LGBT. People want choices and want to rule in them but it their choices which cause the mental breakdowns, depression and worse. Resistance to accountability is another characteristic of evil-based mental illness. The Apostle Paul insists on accountability to the Lord as he reminds the Ephesian church that there are those who by their choices have darkened their minds:
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. But that isn’t what you learned about Christ. -Ephesians 4:17-20
A darkened mind, evil-based Mental illness, starts with small concessions to evil. One acknowledges and then accepts these concessions and compartmentalizes them in part of the psyche. They are filed away from the conscious and away from public view. One goes on to absolve and protect oneself from outside reference with a half-truth: “It’s a hard life and I must do what I have to do to make it”.
One goes on to concede more ground to evil because the appetite for defiant free will choice has been whetted and there have not been any immediate consequences. The addiction to compromise has begun. The conscious is silenced. One’s mental health begins to deteriorate because thoughts are confused and growing darker; the light has been switched off. One becomes duplicitous. A public face is put on because one’s sanity is on shaky ground but others must see you as proudly self-assured and in control. And what better place to hide your self-deceit and look respectable:
Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one’s evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture? … I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them. – Martin Buber
When mental illness is discussed, evil-based mental illness should also be discussed. But I believe the reason evil-based mental illness isn’t discussed is because it involves putting people’s choices under scrutiny. Twitter users become afire when I speak against homosexuality as a lifestyle acceptable for the church. They have told me that I am not like Jesus; I am judgmental. In truth, as a Follower of Jesus, I am trying to help the world around me become fully human. In the process, I’ve come to learn that Evil is defensive of its territory – humans.
Because Evil is nothing and has no substance, it must have access to human choice to act. Evil can, by human will, pervert what God created and called good. A glaring example of this hideous conversion from the good and absolute to sliding scale values and Epicureanism is the growing Christian acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable good. In truth, it is a queering, a perversion, of the good.
It is a curious state of affairs today and a clear indication of evil’s degenerative effect: there are those today who demand rights for this and that while at the same time say they have no control of themselves or they can’t help themselves in their behavior. They want special human rights and the right to live as animals at the same time. They take Pride (Month) in this. De-humanization (e.g., giving over your free will and conscious to animal impulse) is a guaranteed effect of the choice to dwell in mental illness. Renouncing sin and turning back to the One true God will begin restoring your humanity and sanity. Just ask King Nebuchadnezzar.
The church should be the place for evil-based mental illness to be addressed. Sadly, many mainline churches have been comprised and now affirm evil as good, thereby increasing evil-based mental illness among its members. Read the Word and receive the Eucharist. The Word and prayer can help put you back in your right mind.
I am laid low in the dust;
preserve my life according to your word.
I gave an account of my ways and you answered me;
teach me your decrees.
Cause me to understand the way of your precepts,
that I may meditate on your wonderful deeds.
My soul is weary with sorrow;
strengthen me according to your word.
Keep me from deceitful ways;
be gracious to me and teach me your law.
I have chosen the way of faithfulness;
I have set my heart on your laws.
I hold fast to your statutes, Lord;
do not let me be put to shame.
I run in the path of your commands,
for you have broadened my understanding. -Psalm 119: 25-32
Are You a danger to yourself or to others? If so, what choices have you made to bring you to this place? You are dead to rights accountable for the wrong choices. But your life doesn’t end there. Have more fear of what you may end up doing than talking to someone. Seek out a Christian and begin talking. Ask God for wisdom and do so with no doubt of receiving it, as a matter of mental health. For, “A person who doubts is like a wave of the sea which the wind blows and tosses about. Someone like that should not suppose they will receive anything from the Lord, since they are double minded and unstable in everything they do.”
Interactive media has influence on your mental health, if you let it. Added 6/19/2018:
Gaming disorder is defined in the draft 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.
For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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Cindy Wity 
Fear and Loathing in Ward No 6
July 9, 2023 Leave a comment
“In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco. The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.”
Ward No. 6., a story by Anton Chekov, opens with this description of an outpost hospital 150 miles from a train station. This provincial hospital with a lunatic asylum annex, worlds apart from “sane” society, is the setting for the reader to examine the disturbing dehumanization taking place in Russia and, perhaps, everywhere else.
Chekhov wrote the story with reformist concerns after he visited a far east penal colony of the Russian Empire – Sakhalin Island.[1] Chekhov’s aim was to survey the prisoners and publicize their conditions. His compiled notes became the book Sakhalin Island.
Chekov, as guide, invites us onto the premises of the provincial hospital and into its mental ward. He would have us understand suffering in the presence of it and not in the abstract. So, he has us listen in on conversations between Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, who is in charge of the hospital and asylum, and inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov.
With a phrase similar to Dante’s opening of the Divine Comedy – “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – Chekhov forewarns us about our entry into Ward No. 6: “If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go along the narrow path.”
As we follow our tour guide, he shows us the hospital’s neglected and unsanitary conditions and then introduces us to the brutish Nikita, who I consider one of the “nettles”.
“The porter, Nikita, an old soldier wearing rusty good-conduct stripes, is always lying on the litter with a pipe between his teeth. He has a grim, surly, battered-looking face, overhanging eyebrows which give him the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is short and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, and is convinced that there would be no order in the place if he did not.”
After walking past the cluttered pitiful state of the entry-way conditions and the fearful porter, we enter the annex.
Here, the “walls are painted dirty blue, the ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without out a chimney . . .The wooden floor is gray and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, smoldering wicks, bugs, and ammonia, and for the first minute this stench gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
“The beds in the room are bolted to the floor. Sitting and lying on them are men in blue hospital dressing gowns, wearing nightcaps in the old style. These are the lunatics.
There are five of them in all.”
Chekhov describes the inmates and then begins to focus on the two protagonists, inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov and doctor Andrei Yefimich Ragin. We learn about both from their dialog. As we listen in, we soon begin to wonder who the patient is and who is the doctor.
Early in life Ivan Dmitrich Gromov was severely flogged by his father. His mental state became more unstable with personal misfortunes. Later in life he sees convicts being led away by armed guards. This was not an uncommon sight for Gromov to witness. But this time he reacts with pity and unease and transference. He begins to conceptualize that like the convicts, it is also his lot in life to be clamped in chains and punished for some crime. This inordinate thinking, a persecution complex that becomes a paralyzing fear of some random moment someone will come down on him for something, lands Gromov in Ward No. 6. He tells Dr. Ragin that he has “persecution mania.”
Though he’s an inmate because he’s out of touch with reality, Gromov is very much in touch with the mental anguish caused by his fixation and the physical pain delivered by the blows of Nikita. Ward No. 6 reinforces Gromov’s cycle of fear and pity.
Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, on the other hand, is not in touch with the human condition. Passive and cynical, he is unable to bring reforms to the hospital.
In conversations with Gromov, Ragin justifies his indifference to others’ plight by suggesting that everything is subject to chance. For instance, he posits that there is no difference between wearing a doctor’s smock and an inmate’s smock.
To further justify his coolness to the human condition he references Ecclesiastes – “it is all futile, senseless” – and quotes Marcus Aurelius: “Pain is just the idea of pain: make an effort of will to change that idea, reject it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.” The inner self should dictate one’s experience according to Ragin.[2]
The doctor’s inner self has him ignoring the unsanitary and detrimental conditions of Ward No. 6 and the plight of his patients. Dr. Ragin “knows such surroundings are torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients, but what can be done?” His stoic outlook of mind over matter is, in practice, one of heartless neglect toward others.
He increases suffering, instead of relieving it, by remaining aloof and disconnected from it. He has intellectualized reality to justify his inaction and seeks further intellectualization to relieve him of his post’s boredom and purposelessness.
Adding to the doctor’s disinterest is what our guide tells us: “probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this annex.” As one day is no different than another in this outpost hospital, Dr. Ragin becomes disenchanted with his doctor routine.
When he first came to the hospital, Dr. Ragin “worked very diligently. He saw patients every morning till dinnertime, performed operations, and even practiced obstetrics. . .. But in the course of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony and obvious uselessness.”
The doctor extrapolates from his daily routine and reasons “why interfere with people dying if death is the normal and prescribed end for everyone?” and “If the aim of medicine is to utilize drugs to alleviate suffering, the question necessarily arises: why alleviate it?” With similar thoughts, he reasons away the need for himself to be involved in the lives of suffering people. Why should anyone be spared pain when “their lives have nothing of importance in them and would be entirely empty, like the life of an amoeba, were it not for suffering?
“Oppressed by such reflections, Andrey Yefimich let things go and gave up going to the hospital every day.”
To avoid the messy, tedious, and nonsensical reality around him, Dr. Ragin leaves work early and goes home to his books and beer. He withdraws from the physical world to seek mental stimulation. As he reads he is wowed by recent medical discoveries and yet makes not one application to his own hospital. He blames society for the mess he has to deal with.
Evenings consist of conversations with his postmaster friend Mikhail, the only one in town who doesn’t bore the doctor. (Is Ragin more Epicurean in practice than Stoic?)
This routine changes when one day Dr. Ragin follows an inmate, the Jew Moiseika, returning to the annex from his daily wandering in the town. The doctor notices that Moiseika is walking around with bare feet in the winter. Inside, he tells Nikita to give Moiseika some boots for the cold weather. Dr. Ragin, we learn, is not unaware of what’s around him.
From his bed Gromov hears the doctor’s voice, jumps up and reacts with loud vitriol at his presence. The doctor goes in to see who is making the fuss about him. After Gromov calms down, the two begin a dialog that Dr. Ragin finds pleasurable: “What an agreeable young man!” The doctor, breaking with routine, visits Gromov again the next day.
The doctor encounters Gromov lying in bed holding his head in terrible pain. Gromov is suffering with a splitting headache. He reasoned over and over again since the day before that Dr. Ragin was a “spy or doctor who has been charged to test me – it’s all the same -.” Gromov’s persecution mania was triggered.
Dr. Ragin responds, reasoning that if true and Gromov is arrested and sent to prison then he is no worse off being right where he is. This response frees Gromov up a bit and the two have a bit of relaxed conversation. Gromov wishes to be in a better place – outside in “the country somewhere” and “to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache.”
“It’s so long since I have lived like a human being. It’s vile here. Insufferably vile!”
The doctor responds, not with an antidote for Ivan’s headache, not with a ride in the country, but with a philosophical take on how to think about things – with simple equivalency.
“There’s no difference between a warm and comfortable study and this ward” and “Peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but within him.”
Gromov questions this. The doctor continues.
“The ordinary man expects the good and the bad from external things – from an open carriage and a study – but a thinking man derives them from within himself.”
Gromov rejects the doctor’s philosophical reasoning. The doctor responds, telling Gromov that “One must strive for the comprehension of life, and therein lies true happiness.”
Gromov understands nothing of what the doctor has been saying and inferring: Comprehension? External, internal? Life is just a mental exercise, a thought experiment, detached from the tragic dimension of human existence? Gromov gets up, looks angrily at the doctor and speaks:
“I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every irritant. And I do react! I respond to pain with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is precisely what is called life. . . . How is it that you don’t know that?”
Gromov continues, commenting perceptively about the Stoics. He then asks why Dr. Ragin why he preaches Stoicism. “Are you a sage? A philosopher?” The doctor responds “No …. but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable.”
Gromov, the inmate, then wants to know how the doctor considers himself to be “competent to judge comprehension and contempt for suffering”.
“Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of what suffering is? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed as a child?”
“No, responds the doctor, “my parents had an aversion to corporal punishment?”
Gromov tells the doctor that his own father, “a harsh, hemorrhoidal government clerk with along nose and a yellow neck” flogged him cruelly. Sizing the doctor up, Gromov then proceeds with his analysis of the doctor, excoriating his competency to understand anything about Gromov’s life or life itself.
“No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has terrorized you nor beaten you; you are as strong as an ox. . .. You are by nature a lazy, flaccid man, and so you have tried to arrange your life in such a way that nothing should disturb you or force you to budge.”
I’ll stop here and leave you with Gromov’s cri de coeur and Dr. Ragin’s inability to come to terms with suffering. Even when the doctor does act to relieve suffering, he thinks that he will be paid back for his trouble. He lends his postmaster friend money after his friend suffers gambling loses. But the doctor is never repaid and soon becomes destitute. It appears from all that happens to the doctor as the story unfolds, that the doctor’s friends and associates also hold to “It’s all the same” thinking.
This story is rich with insight and worth a read. And though one may not be interested in reading a story in a Russian setting, consider that cultures change but human nature doesn’t change much from place to place or age to age.
“It’s all the same!”, first spoken by Gromov when he encounters Dr. Ragin (“a spy or a doctor”) is oft repeated and inferred by Dr. Ragin as he explains his philosophy to Gromov. You’ll have to read the story to see how the doctor’s “It’s all the same” philosophy works out. He holds on to it to the end of the story.
““Ward Six” is affective and effective largely because Chekhov makes proper, judicious, and artistic use of the very faculty that is impaired in his two heroes, Gromov and Ragin, the faculty for contemplating similarities. Their respective disorders, which are two extremes of the same continuum, prevent them from experiencing fear and pity in a healthy, moderate, cathartic fashion.”[3]
As you read Ward No. 6, ask yourself these questions:
Is “society” at fault and therefore responsible for the ills and disorder of society or are individuals responsible?
If one assigns “society” as the cause for “systemic” failures, is the individual therefore absolved of any personal responsibility?
Is detachment from reality a sign of mental illness?
Do you spend your time in the laboratory of thought and have never played baseball or wrestled with another human being?
Does lying to oneself promote mental health?
Is it healthy to be being disconnected from physical reality via drugs or the TV and the internet – supposed mental stimulants that will lessen our boredom?
“It’s all the same!”: Is that a motto for your life? How has that worked out for you?
If we say chance or fate determines things, do we give up believing we can make a difference?
Do false equivalencies, such as occur in Ward No. 6 and that also operate in our culture, lead to mental illness?
A momentary transposition of one’s reality into another through imagination is healthy. Day dreaming is healthy. But what about the permeant transpositions into unreality that is occurring around us today?
Have you ever asked God to heal your imagination?
(As mentioned before, Chekhov is my favorite writer. His stories (and plays) show rather than tell. Chekhov doesn’t moralize or preach. As with Ward No. 6, he lets readers see and hear for themselves and make their own judgements. I appreciate this way of writing. For one thing, I am not a fan of preaching. I had my fill growing up. I attended churches where preaching, and not the Eucharist, is the pinnacle of the service. I’ve moved on to an Anglican church.)
[1] Chekhov spent three months at Sakhalin Island interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers under the ruse of taking a census. For more details of his trip see Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony – Hektoen International (hekint.org).
[2] When Chekhov wrote Ward No. 6, he was reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. A couple of quotes from that journal apply to Dr. Ragin’s disposition: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”; “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
[3] Liza Knapp, “The Suffering of Others: Fear and Pity in “Ward Six,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014), 629
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Audio: Ward No. 6 : Anton Chekhov : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
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“We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.”
“Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve…” from the Preface of Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple, 2015.
Theodore Dalyrymple is a pen name used by retired prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels.
Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple | Goodreads
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Dr. Ragin – “superfluous man”
“The name ‘superfluous man’ refers to an important and recurrent character type in 19th c. Russian literature. It denotes an idealistic but inactive hero who is aware of and sensitive to moral and social problems but who does not take action; in part because of personal weakness and lassitude, in part because of social and political restraints to freedom of action.”
A short note on the term ‘superfluous man’ and its examples – Literary Ocean
– “usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective action. Although he is aware of the stupidity and injustice surrounding him, he remains a bystander.”
Superfluous man | literature | Britannica
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“This episode of Health Care News focuses on the recent repeal of the Certificate of Need and financial credentialing in the healthcare industry . . . and how it will enhance competition in the healthcare market, ultimately leading to reduced prices.”
Killing “Certificate of Need” Laws (Guest: Marcello Hochman, M.D.) – The Heartland Institute
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World Economic Forum’s Ward No. 6:
The World Economic Forum has declared that by 2030 fashion will become completely obsolete and all humans will be vegan, whether they like it or not.
12ft | WEF Says Fashion Will Be Abolished by 2030: “Humans Will All Wear a Uniform”
Informed Dissent:
God help us . . .
The World Health Organization and its partner organization, the Bill Gates-controlled GAVI, announced Wednesday that they will be flooding Africa with 18 million doses of malaria vaccines.
WHO & Gates Inc announce plans to flood Africa with ultra dangerous malaria “vaccines” (dossier.today)
“More pandemics are coming” – bioweapons expert Dr Francis Boyle (biznews.com)
Ozempic, Hormone Mimicking Drugs & Their Side Effects (rumble.com)
Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Study is Removed Within 24 Hours – The Daily Sceptic
U.N. To Seize Global ‘Emergency’ Powers With Biden’s Support (thefederalist.com)
‘What Is the Sin Committed by Christians?’: The Persecution of Christians, May 2023 :: Gatestone Institute
“. . . multiple federal laws were broken to change the recording metrics for COVID-19-deaths. There is also evidence of multiple acts of what appears to be willful misconduct by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies throughout the COVID-19 crisis.”
Call to Action>>>>
Sign The Petition To Investigate The CDC! (standforhealthfreedom.com)
The Biden Crime family:
‘Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations against president’s family – YouTube
New video suggests Jill Biden knows exactly what is going on in her family… – Revolver News
Electronic message from Hunter Biden demanded payment from Chinese businessman: ‘I am sitting here with my father’ – NaturalNews.com
Climate Alarmism vs. Climate Reality:
Greenpeace Founder: Anti-Carbon Dioxide Agenda Is a Hoax – Slay News
2015 Annual GWPF Lecture – Patrick Moore – Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide? – YouTube
Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm | Your Wyoming News Source (cowboystatedaily.com)
Obamas complained about being black and oppressed from luxury yacht in Greek islands – Disclose.tv
Coming to America – as a result of open borders:
A group of young musicians who hail from homeschooling backgrounds have crossed states and blended musical styles to form a unique band with a mission: to keep the classics alive.
Listen To Our New Single! (ffm.to)
L-O-V-E – YouTube
Man Caught Drinking Bud Light Insists He’s Not Gay – YouTube
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Filed under Health Care, mental health, Russian Literature, social commentary Tagged with Anton Chekhov, healthcare, mental health, suffering, Ward No. 6