(Happy Despite Them) – The other day, Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted:
“Took a nature hike today with the family. Still a shocking amount of mask-wearing by fit young people in the middle of a nearly empty trail through the woods. Need more of you to forward that @DLeonhardt email.”
Took a nature hike today with the family. Still a shocking amount of mask-wearing by fit young people in the middle of a nearly empty trail through the woods. Need more of you to forward that @DLeonhardt email.
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) April 25, 2021
I just have to get a few things off my chest – sorry, MBD, your tweet is the res.
Lots of responses, lots, to his tweet, on a scale from “why do you care” to “you’re a monster.”
Well, you should care because of reality – it actually matters if everyone around you is performatively mentally ill and/or deluded. Noticing such things is actually a survival tactic, and you have way more to fear from a society of wackos than a non-existent outdoors drop of Covid.
Wearing masks all the time, indoors or out, has a clinical name: Illness anxiety disorder, commonly known as Hypochondria. (Voluntarily, that is. Involuntarily, one is just a victim of what Bishop Schneider aptly called “Sanitary Dictatorship” – if one is, say, a worker at Lowes, or a child.)
One response to MBD’s tweet referred to wearing a mask “just like I used to in my job as surgeon.” This is just more delusion. I’ve had surgery, lots – I bet you have too. The surgeon didn’t wear a mask when he talked to us in his office or walked to his car – or when he came to our bedside on his rounds, in company with eight or so other doctors (residents, interns). Perhaps he wore it in the OR, but if he did, it wasn’t your bandana or your gaiter. It wasn’t even your N95 that you keep in the car console. So let’s just drop that.
But the point is, in a hospital there is vulnerability. In a time of uncertain heightened viral activity, there is vulnerability. This vulnerability is limited (and carefully defined masking provides limited protection), and if we act as if it’s not limited, we are being hypochondriacs (or falling victim to those who leverage fear against us).
Hypochondria is quaint and silly when it’s your great-aunt Tilly and her bag of supplements, OTC remedies, and sketchy leftover prescriptions. When it’s a mass delusion, you have a problem.
The biggest problem is that children are being seriously harmed by everyone around them thinking that at any moment we are all going to die of something that has pretty much receded and never seriously threatened most of us when it was a thing.
Hypochondriacs are notorious for being made anxious by children – by their health, exuberance, and liveliness (and yes, hygienic iffiness). In the past, we protected children from these poor objects of pity (often by gently mocking them until they subsided if they were impervious to more mature and subtle hints). Today they are running rampant – over our children.
MBD mentions his child’s school, that it’s installing plexiglass around the desks. He correctly identifies this action as “superstitious overcautiousness” (well, it’s hypochondria, a clinical condition, driven by politics, but close enough).
He also mentions that parents can’t go in the school at all.
That is madness. I hate to keep using these words, but truly, if two years ago authorities told you that you couldn’t enter your child’s school, well, they wouldn’t have dared. Most sane parents reasonably balk at relinquishing their children to an entity that refuses them access.
I would advise that you simply do not send your child anywhere that bars your entry. The reasons should be obvious, although the collective loss of mind troubles me and I am not sure you get it.
What he calls “deep blue suburbia” has a way of distorting your perception if you live there or aspire to. But its denizens move the goalposts until you find yourself accepting so much that is counter-rational that someone from even twenty years ago would not recognize what is going on – would be literally at a loss to understand.
I want to be clear: sending a child to “learn” in a place where he has to do any of these things day in and day out – wear masks, stay distant, sit behind plexiglass – is to inflict upon him the destructive effects of others’ mental illness. (In this, it is similar to gender ideology, to which this COVID tyranny bears much likeness.)
The original tweet, the one I mentioned first, apparently approvingly tags David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Leonhardt seems fairly reasonable about the risk of COVID to children, but he also seems to think that we should vaccinate and then we can stop the sanitary theater of masks and distancing.
But it is essential that everyone understand that vaccines are simply the higher level of this dystopian video game we are stuck in, this political manipulation of mass hypochondria for the ends of power.
The first level of this nightmarish game was to stay home, even at the risk of our jobs and overall health. We were promised that to do so would take care of the problem and no other measures would be necessary. As you will recall, it was to be for two weeks. (Read The Price of Panic to understand where the models and so-called remedies came from and how based on reality they were/are – hint: not at all).
The second level of the game was to wear masks. A touching reliance on masks quickly took hold. People who had to get very close to other people and shout to be heard seemed to think that they were protected or were protecting others by wearing them. We had to shelter in place and wear masks, and when outbreaks still occurred we were berated for not doing both these things enough. [Update: the CDC as recently as 3/22 has advised wearing masks indoors at home even for the vaccinated, just to let you know how this part of the game is going]
Soon we were masking little children and trying not to think about what sort of anti-hygienic experiment that is.
The third level is vaccines. Pace Leonhardt, we are still also playing and will continue to play the first two levels while thinking ourselves as being on this higher plane. [Update: the game intensifies, we have seen, with four boosters and so on]
We will subject ourselves to this experimental protocol (one which pushes out, in a sort of public health Gresham’s Law, the simpler but more effective curative protocols) in the naive hope that we will somehow return to a normal that we can barely remember – but most importantly, have been taught to fear.
That fear is the price of hypochondria. Since risks are real (however small) and we will all die, once a person gives in to this mental illness, it will never seem rational to abandon it.
And our children – the poorer they are, the more so – have and will continue to suffer immensely for it. Rational, non-insane people need to stop going along with this madness.
Leila Marie Lawler is the author of The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life, recently published by Sophia Institute Press. She blogs at Like Mother, Like Daughter. This article was published on her site Happy Despite Them.