On the Collective Ressonance

 Nine days from now, it will be the day after the United States presidential election, and the collective breath is being held...but not just because of the virus.

I am hoping that nine days from now that I will have the ability to be on the internet and make some report of this unfolding history. It seems that, quite literally, anything is possible. The general consensus of my friends is that there are good odds on the chance that some sort of civil war will happen eight days from now. It could, and most likely would be, very locally based. The FBI has come out and said that they expect, THEY EXPECT(!!!!), violence to happen upon and after the election. Yeah. Please, and I cannot ask this of all of you who read this enough, PLEASE think about that.

We are all within the digital Information Age. History recorded in present tense and now be recorded by the masses. Fine. I have no problem with the absolute egalitarian paradigm of the digital age. But, I must speak my own mind, even if no one reads this while I still have a pulse. I am telling you my narrative within this plague. And, know that I am doing everything I can to be as present as the narrator of "The Plague". I am not taking sides. I write this as someone who is under personal honor to do their job with al this death around the country.

I am asking this: that anyone who reads this after the fact, after the election, after all that follows,... I ask of you this.

Look, I am typing this in present tense. I do not have a clue as to what is going to happen, the same way you are not sure what will happen to you when you awake from sleep tomorrow. While you may awake with the odds with your past and present, I can tell you that I do not. may you never ever know the place I am in, for I have spent most of my life within the space you now have the grace to be within.

A new Supreme Court Judge, who will most likely make severe damage for generations to come, has been placed into office today. This was done via THE RULES. I shall scream to you here and now that THE RULES mean nothing if there is no conscience among those who are in power.

To those who care about the resonance of shall ultimately in harmony within present tense, today, and the next eight days, are within the arms of....not the conductor, but the ones who own the symphony. We play the notes,. But if the space we are to play has been designated as worthless, nothing else matters.

I shall come back here on Election Day. Allow me to say, the number of infections from the virus is more now that ever before. I shall return to give you the tally of those who have bowed to physics to those who bow to human desire. 

This is our collective ressonance.

Convergence of Dissonance

 I just heard on the news that the next four to twelve months is going to be a dark time with the virus. We are also having a presidential election two weeks from today. Make no mistake about it, we are having a convergence of dissonance.

I need to say something here about the news coverage. As one cannot find an absolute centralist view of what is going on, I will say here only that I do not listen to the conservative media outlets. So, while I have no idea what is going on in that world, I can at least talk about the one I know.

By the time this gets posted, there will be 221,000 dead from the virus. Wearing masks is still very political. What has caught my attention and driven me a bit crazy these past few weeks is how the news keeps talking and talking about the most obvious points that should change but they know it will not. There is a constant flow of redundancy going on and it is not helping matters. Over and over and over all one hears is the obvious and it is past wearing thin.

The problem is that there is an election coming up and most people are holding their collective breath to see what will happen. The present political situation has made any change in what is happening impossible. In the book "The Plague", at least the consensus of political people had a unified measure of attack, even if it was faulty and needed help by volunteers organized by Tarrou. The focus for an aid in the crisis was there. We don't have that now. And it is too late.

We are heading into winter and the flu season. The East Coast got slammed hard in the initial wave, along with the west coast. But now the rest of the states are flaring up and it is going to be messy. The amount of hospitals in the less densely populated states is not near what will be needed. Among the stream of redundancy on the news, this is now becoming part of the verbal wave.

Personally, this is a rough time. I have a bad feeling that the election will cause severe damage, no matter which ways it goes. It will only be a matter of degree as both sides are getting charged up. In all my life, I have never seen such things except on the news from other countries. 

This will sound harsh and perhaps insane, but I am going to say it. Because this virus is not as lethal as a real plague, it is possible that unification of the populous will never happen. The president survived it and is literally traveling the country every day to have rallies in support of the election. No one in power has gotten it and been humbled. Even the famous have been spared,...for the most part. There are a few people who died from it, but, thankfully, it has been relatively untouched.

There is no signal from any major point to somehow make wearing a mask and making sacrifices in the short term so that the long term will be much easier. This pandemic has done what most times of trial do: bring out the worst and best in people. The confrontation with the fear of mortality is either risen above or drowned within. This sea is now boiling with all the ingredients of a storm in place. 

Yes, that all may sound dire, but I assure you that this dissonance is real and makes rest impossible.

When the Long Road Floods

 Even when you are on the long road, floods stop you in your tracks.

I have not posted in some time because a great deal of stress has been going on in my life. Nothing pandemic related in absolute terms, but it has been a painful few weeks. Suffice to say, that matters little to the biology of what is going on. We are cresting and about to surge into new heights of infection. Why? Well, because the desire for what people want to do is far greater than what they should do.

Just so we are on the same historical page, yes, that sounds insane but it seems that is the way the United States has always handled such things. When one looks at the history of the Spanish flu and the AIDS crisis, we have had a history of the same behavior. Having been very much alive and aware during the AIDS crisis of the 1980's, I can tell you that the medical community was literally clueless as to what the hell was going on. How do I know this? My father was a dentist and I can very clearly recall the night he got called to an emergency meeting of the New Jersey Dentists Association. When he came home late that night, he looked rather broken and dazed, yet still stoic as was his usual presence. "Dad," I asked as he sat down slowly on the couch by the back door, "do they know what this is about and what to do?" He paused and said slowly , very slowly, "No. They have no clue."

My bones filled to absolute zero. This was a doctor who worked with spit and blood every single day, the two fluids that carried the then death virus. He was within the inner circle, one that was not touched by the media. When he told me they were basically at the whim of the virus, I understood how screwed this was.

But back then, AIDS was literally a death sentence. If you got it, 99.99% of the time you died a very long and painful death. But it was a virus that was mainly transmitted by acts that were denoted as sins by the politically religious. Sex, gay and straight, along with intravenous drug use (sharing needles with infected persons) was the main cause. basically you had to willing exchange fluids with someone to get it. And, I assure you this was the general vibe from the culture then, if you got this disease, you deserved it. I mean, if anyone chose to live such a lifestyle and contracted it, they were believed to be paying for their "crime". Again, trust me. I lived through this.

It was only after people who got blood transfusions for medical procedures and were inadvertently infected with the death virus when the tide of the media shifted. But they did so in the same way a middle school kid picks sides in a fight: one side is perfect and the other deserving of it. Long story short, it made those whose actions willing placed them in harm's way as the enemy and those who were innocently infected. In then end, when the populace understood that they were in harm's way, they finally cared.

The problem with this pandemic, if you can call it a "problem", is that this is not a real plague. The odds of death are nothing like the Black Death or AIDS. Not even close. But we are finding out that those who survive can have long lasting issues. So, in the harshest of terms, the odds of living are within the fair of the populace. Living. Not being damaged for life. 

What I am trying to get at is that due to the fact that there is a political element to not taking precautions as basic as a facemark (I cannot believe I just typed that reality), we are now about to enter another flood. But, just like the weather, it is not simply one factor. The political climate is literally at a crisis point. No joke, no cute sayings. We are at a definitive crossroads with the political state of this country. But we are also at an economic one. Wall Street is doing amazing, but that must fall to the math of cycles as well at some point. It will fall. And we are also at the starting point of a new wave of infection. We here in the Northern states may be spared another mass grave experience, but one cannot think so kindly towards fate.

We are literally dealing with a flood on this long road. We are crawling towards an election that everyone sees as an intimate game changer in every way. But biology and physics don't care. You get the cute kittens and the rainbows but you also get the spread of a virus. 

Right now, you wait in a safe place and you walk when you can, making each step very carefully so you are not swept away.

We All Must Bow to Gravity

 As I write this, we are officially in the second day of a crisis that we all knew could happen but somehow didn't believe it would.

The president of the United States has come down with the virus and is in the hospital...with very little being said on the situation. To add to the drama, any official information that is being given is contradictory, cryptic, and vague. As the twenty-four hour news channel screams its repetitive drone at me, here is what I know of the situation.

Around 1 AM on Friday morning, news came out that the president had the virus. He is 74 years old, very overweight, does not exercise, barely sleeps, and, according to certain sources, had a mild stroke sometime last year that was never officially announced. These risk factors place him in a very dangerous position as far as his mortality goes. 

The news yesterday started with statements that he was fine. It then went to the announcement that he had a slight fever, was fatigues, and was given an experimental plasma therapy treatment. Hours later, it was told he would be taking the helicopter to the hospital. This was a move done to make the pictures look good and not have him seen weak. He walked to the helicopter, dressed in a suit, looking a bit fatigued. And that was pretty much then end of all the news about him for the day. 

While this was spinning around in the late night, more and more people in the inner circle of the president were told they have the virus. Within minutes, people were connecting the dots and showing the web of people he was around and how it may have gotten passed to people. The people at the events were without masks, all standing in defiance of the science of masks and distance help stop the spread. These meetings, especially one in the Rose Garden of the White House for a Supreme Court prospect announcement and a very very expensive donation meeting for the president in New Jersey the night before the announcement, seem to suggest that this whole thing has become a super-spreader event. On simple terms without judgement, a core group of wealthy and powerful people who flaunted their position that the virus was a joke are now getting the news of having it. 

The narrative of this plague has done a shift that I cannot articulate, except to say that there seems to be a collective hum of schadenfreude and caring about what the hell is going to happen. Everything feels different, like we are all finally on the same page in some way. The instability of reality within the collective consciousness is now resonating with the singular moment of the leader having the virus we have been fighting against. Just two days ago, it seemed we were just swimming within the murk of the pandemic reality. Now, we are all focused on a singular person with it.

I am not going to be nasty or opinionated about this situation. That is not how Camus wrote "The Plague" and I will follow his lead. But this crisis has placed us all within the story of watching a character who raged against the reality of this pandemic now in a hospital under absolute secrecy as to his condition. This character seemed to believe he could drive recklessly in traffic and not be hurt. At some point, chance and gravity shake hands and the crash happens. As I am typing this, I am hearing all the past news clips of him ranting about how it was all a joke, a lie, a crisis long gone. The crash happened and now we are all craning our necks to see what the hell the damage was.

I don't look at his getting the virus as an act of cosmic vengeance. I look at it the same way I do wing suit flyers, people who dive off anything very high up wearing a suit that, when splayed open, makes them look like a flying squirrel. It is dangerous, very dangerous. They know they are tempting fate by doing this, but do it anyway. Their deaths are usually gruesome, especially when they attempt to fly through formations at full speed. They are doing something dangerous and the odds of something bad happening are increased exponentially. This is what the people who have denied this virus do and carry themselves with similar hubris.

But there is at least one difference between the flying squirrel people and the virus deniers. If a diver dies in a crash, outside of family and friends mourning a deep loss, no one else is effected. That is to say, their actions will not kill anyone else, even if the thrill seekers survive. The virus can harm and kill others without knowing. You could be doing everything you can to stay safe and if someone has the virus and it somehow gets past you, well, things will change. 

I have said over and over again that what we are dealing with is chemistry and physics, regardless of how one chooses to view the concept of the existence of a Supreme Being. There seems to be this belief that one can deny physics via faith. While I will not negate the possibility of miracles and the deep thoughts of C.S. Lewis, by definition, miracles are exceptions, not the rule. We bow before God, asking that the laws of nature be suspended.

But we should be humbled each day and bow before gravity because science shows we were not able to survive without it.