On the 4th of March 1933, the then
President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his inaugural
speech and in the context of the worst world depression ever experienced,
stated as follows: “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”[1]
He was of course referring to the financial crisis, and in
particular the way in which it was being dealt with, by simply creating more
paper money and lending more and more…an unscrupulous system which had only one
desired result: To bring the people to its knees in abject poverty and reduce
then to standing in queues as beggars would, for bread. Then the rich would
lead and those without would be forced to follow. Unable to think beyond the
need for their next meal or desperate to find a mechanism to feed their
families, they followed, like sheep whoever offered some distant vestige of
hope.
As I drive around my beloved country, South Africa, I view long
lines of people standing in Covid vaccination queues and I see their vacant,
distant and almost hopeless stares and I am wont to believe that little has
changed in almost 100 years. Bring the people to their knees and they will
follow as they have no other choice. Forget about their right to choose,
institute regulations which give them virtually no leeway, no space to make a
choice. Use Government power to flood the news channels with the only allegedly
accurate news there is. Ridicule via cloned scientists any contrary views that
oppose the world government stance. Have newspeak from the mouths of
brainwashed presenters who adulate the leaders and let the people watch via hours
of monotonous same speak ideology which espouses one way only, to vaccinate
with a vaccine that is not a vaccine.
Fortunately in Roosevelt, America had a powerful, God-Fearing
President who stood in the way of the money changers… and a man who knew how to
live with a disability- to make a wheelchair out of a lounge chair.
How we need men and women of similar strength today as we
muddle our way through the murky waters of an apparent virus threatening (again
apparently) the very existence of mankind. Scientific evidence says- and we are
subjected to statistics churned out from a government machine that delights in
contesting election results in the same way using the same machinery that only
casts doubt and more doubt on the very statistics that program tomorrow and
tomorrow.
Lockdown is the way to go. Save the world, the planet by
lockdowns. Millions of lives have been saved by the lockdown allegedly. Stop
mingling, socialising is evil, speak to me through
Whatsapp/Instagram/Tiktok/Facebook/sms or whatever medium you wish to use, but
not face to face. And so we dig deeply into our self -destructing deprivation
of the other. The hermit shall survive, sackcloth and dust and deep draughts of
hot water to liquidate the virus. Shut down your soul and exhale only. Your
mask will cover your thoughts and government the rest.
Allow the fear to ingrain itself so that it becomes the thing
you protect yourself against and make no decision outside of the fear. For you
fear not the virus but you fear that which you are told to fear. That man in
the mall is talking on his phone and he has removed his mask, call the vaccine
security police. But leave the woman at the sidewalk table next to him as she
is eating and the virus does not enter a restaurant.
As these words drip onto the page more statistics lurch onto
the whiteness of the unfulfilled page, the tabula rasa of our tomorrows and
they scream at us to listen that lockdown does not work, that vaccines are at
best panaceas against the unreasoning fear of an airborne dread which is
somewhere out there in the Autumn/Winter/Summer/Spring air be you in which half
of the hemisphere.
I write with more than a modicum of despair.
