...or something better beginning.
My wife was telling me how weird it felt celebrating the 4th of July this year. The red, white, and blue LEDs line our front door frame and stars-and-stripes bunting flap from our porch rails but it’s not the same. She’s not the only one who’s noticed this.
That’s because this year’s Independence Day doesn’t celebrate anything living. Certainly not our “freedom.” This 4th of July 2021 marks the first post-mortem birthday of a sick old relative who died the previous autumn. We are just beginning to come to terms with our new lives in another country.
I’ve seen this country referred to as AINO, America In Name Only, but it’s an ugly acronym and I doubt it will stick. I prefer Post-America. It reminds us there was an America once, that what we’re living in still looks like America, except it’s not. Something happened to change all that. Post-America is what happens next.
As for what happened in the first place, that depends upon your interpretation of reality. We live in a such a time in which there are several to choose from. For a most relevant instance, there are a disturbing amount of people out there who believe the last legitimately elected U.S. President was an actual Nazi installed by Russian agents. Seriously. This deliriously evil, yet oh-so-stupid agent of democracy’s destruction (I’m not making this up) deliberately set blacks, whites, and browns against one another. He ignored the pleas of Scientists and Experts® and allowed a Deadly Mystery Virus to kill hundreds of hundreds of thousands of thousands of people. He tore children from their parents’ arms at the border and stuffed them crying in cages. He soured everyone’s milk, poisoned the well, and let the air out of random people’s tires all over the world.
That last sentence is the only part I made up but I’ll bet someone somewhere believes it. Such is the emotional instability of these people that, to this day, the mere mention of the 45th president’s name (even the number 45!) causes them to melt down into terror, rage, hysteria, or all of the above and something else.
This is the point in which I advise such people who happen upon this blog to click away from here. You won’t, though. You can’t. You need your hatred of the Unbeliever, like an addict needs his fix. It’s one of the more morbidly fascinating phenomena of the last sixteen months or so, but here’s also where I give warning that any emotional upset you suffer henceforth is on you. Too bad, so sad, sucks to be you.
That I should be so racist, sexist, Nazi stormtrooperist to be unafraid of the former reality TV show star turned President of the United States! That was the thoughtcrime that lost me the last two friends I’ve known since the 1980s. To one, I refused to affirm his Grand Inquisitorish question/demand that President He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had done more than anyone else to exacerbate “racism” in America. I told him I didn’t appreciate his tone, that nothing he brought up was worth arguing about, and ghosted out.
There may be rapprochement with that one. It won’t be the same between us, but maybe we’ll at least talk. As for the other guy, I made the mistake of speaking of websites I had seen and the interesting attitudes and opinions I was coming across so contrary to approved mainstream thought. This got me screamed at in all-caps. This is not a direct quote, but close: “WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT NAZI RACIST MISOGYNIST SITES LIKE THIS? ARE YOU A NAZI NOW?”
I was thinking, well, compared to being an easily provoked, chest-thumping blustering bully like you, I’m comfortable with being a Nazi racist misogynist. It’s not like those words mean anything anymore, other than I’ve upset another hysterical and belligerent ideologue with no argument besides “You have been in the company of immoral people and entertained their immoral ideas as ‘interesting,’ therefore you are immoral, too. BURN THE HERETIC!!!!!! WITH EXTRA EXCLAMATION POINTS SO EVERYONE KNOWS WE MEAN BUSINESS!!!!!!”
This misadventure deserves a post on its own and may yet get it. The point is we live in different realities. These long-grown, nigh-elderly men shriek at phantoms and imagined hobgoblins and take their shame of their powerlessness and other lifetime disappointments out on a friend who has the temerity to be dismiss the monsters under their beds. Their former friend walks away beneath the light of another sky.
For the record, this is how I see what happened over the last 16 months.
For the first time since whatever it was that really happened on 11 September 2001, the United States of America was a happy country. I watched with my own eyes as the dead rural crossroads town I moved to in July 2016 came to life one reoccupied old building at a time. The years 2017 through 2019 were the best, the happiest, the most alive I remember since the mid to late 1990s. Everyone was going about their business with no worries. The only people upset with anything were the mass media and its consumers. They were obsessed with the former reality TV star who inexplicably (to them) beat their unlikeable, even downright hateful preference for the U.S. presidency. We were constantly reminded what a Nazi racist misogynist he was, how all the smart and cool TV and movie stars and pop singers and late-night TV comedians despised him, etc.
To be sure, He Who Must Not Be Named was a loud, natural alpha who loved the spotlight, the kind that can’t help rubbing some people the wrong way, but we had no problems overseas—no new wars!—and the economy was breaking records. The 1990s economic boom was dependent upon the then-emergent technology of Internet shopping and instant worldwide communication via email. The record-shattering three-year boom from 2017-2019 was simple joy.
This, of course, could not permitted to stand. Not with an election year coming up. What, me, conspiracy theorist? Of course not. Everyone knows it was an absolute coincidence that everyone in the Roman Senate happened to be carrying their best stabby sticks that day in March Julius Caesar showed up to speak before them. And they all decided to greet him the way they did because sometimes these things just happen, okay? Stop talking crazy.
Therefore the following things just kind of happened. In January 2020, videos from China showed purportedly sick people falling down dead in the streets. A mysterious and awful disease was going around a wet market in Wuhan, China. Something to do with bats being made into soup that jumped to humans. Now the virus was coming here. It was scary and terrible and made no sense whatsoever but people fell for the idea of this being some kind of extinction-level event pandemic.
We all know the joke about “15 days to flatten the curve” becoming 16 months. I remember this time last year rolling my eyes at Colorado’s fruity, obtuse governor extending the mask mandate one more month and, with fruity imperiousness, declaring “the summer of no parties.” The lockdowns and mask mandates and other arbitrary restrictions did their job of smothering the economy and immiserating the people. All those high school seniors looking to enjoy their last year playing sports, all those children who should have had normal, fear-free school years…I’m dismayed more people haven’t made more of this near war-crime atrocity of a hoax.
People lose their minds over this, bleat faked numbers and shaggy dead grandma stories, but the pandemic was a hoax. The ambulances were not wailing back and forth in the street every other minute. You’d hear that in a pandemic. This was not a pandemic. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. They would be in a pandemic. This was not a pandemic. Some hospital personnel were sent home because priority was given to this phantom pandemic. Those beds were never close to being filled to capacity. They would be in a pandemic.
This was never a pandemic.
How many more people died of cancer and untreated ailments because those specialists were sent home and their appointments canceled? We’ll never know and we don’t want to know. I’m not kidding when I say this was a near war-crime of a hoax. Your “scientists and experts” on cable news lied. People suffered and died. Childhoods were interrupted. Businesses and family dreams were destroyed. Elderly people perished alone without their families around them for no good reason whatsoever except that increasing the misery pleased the people pulling these rules out of their backsides.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, a violent career criminal died of an overdose in police custody, the media declared a Racial Reckoning, and statues were torn down and city blocks were looted and burned across the country. I’m already over 1,400 words and have no time for that, or the stolen election. Suffice it to say we’re under a decidedly hostile occupational government that has seized power through infiltration, fraud, and multiple acts of terror. Others will come up with their own very convincing dates for the end of the United States of America, but I’ll make it simple and call time of death on the night of the last national election day, 3 November 2020, when the polls shut down across the land to await the truckloads of fraudulent ballots that would seal the coup.
Vice President Mike Pence finking out and certifying the coup on 6 January was a foregone conclusion. I’m semi-proud to say I predicted this on Facebook. Everyone around this president had already finked out on him, what was one more? Some fault the former president for not “crossing the Rubicon” and invoking the Insurrection Act, but no one in government, no one in his administration, none of the numerous judges he’d appointed had his back. There was nothing left for him to do but disappear to one of his golf courses and let the insurrectionists have their way.
And here we are. This is my reality. Is it yours? Some actually believe the child-creeping dementia patient installed in the White House is sentient and making policy as opposed to reading from scripts for the camera. Some believe shutting down the Keystone Pipeline and ending our long-fought for energy independence is a good thing. I know some are even stupid enough to believe we’re coming to terms with a “racist” past and everything will be better because middle-aged men in women’s clothing are being given authority over others, even in our armed services.
It’s not my problem. Not my immediate problem, anyway. I know what I’ve seen. I know where I stand. If I want everyone else’s opinion I’ll go to the major media sites and see what the name of the boogeyman scaring everyone is today. Meanwhile, it’s the first 4th of July in Post-America. My wife bought some ice cream and chips and dip for the occasion. We’re enjoying them.
I’m celebrating, without reservation or regret. I’ll sing happy birthday and take a slice of cake, but only after enjoying what’s coming off the grill, which I know won’t be some obscenity of “Impossible Burger” plant waste or a patty of mashed, ground insects. I’ve read some comments complaining that they realize how mindless their 4th of July celebrations were in years past. That’s great. Holidays should be a time of reflection. By all means, please reflect. Don’t kick yourself for what you should or shouldn’t have done back in the day. Now is now. Think on that.
I advise everyone to practice gratitude. Unlike last year, we have toilet paper. The mask mandates are falling away. We’re still permitted to eat meat. So far. The police won’t be breaking up any family barbecues due to fake-pandemic assembly restrictions.
We’ve got all that and each other. We know who’s brave and true, clear-eyed and thinking straight, and who’s a craven snitch who jumps and whines at trigger words. Our tribe has learned a lot of hard lessons over the last 16 months. But we’re smarter than we were before. If we’ve lost friends and family to the genuine pandemic of competing realities and the mind-blinding rage that sparks when these competing realities collide, that’s the nature of this particular beast of the apocalypse.
Make no mistake, this is the beginning of a long, difficult passage. There is no going back to the way things were. We’ve turned corners, watched much water go under the bridge. We have even more corners to go, more turbulent waters coming.
Are you still breathing? A time is coming when cake and barbecue and breathing will not be taken for granted. Raise a glass for your losses while you still have one to raise. Enjoy what material freedom you’ve got now until the next round of media-generated terror gets going. It’s on the schedule, it’s in the pipeline, it’s on its way. How you deal with it depends upon where your head and heart are at.
For now, for today, shout gratitude we’re still here. Gratitude for not being as alone as the media would have us believe. Others saw the same reality we did. They’re doing what they have to do. Just like I am, just like you.
We’ll talk about all this and more later. For now, happy Independence Day. You’re as free as you want it. America is gone; God bless America. Long live the Americans left to observe its passing. For now, by the grace of God, we’re still here. I daresay that’s a good thing. A very, very good thing. Here’s a toast for today, a toast for what’s next.
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