ALAN writes:

A year ago I could not have dreamed I would write what follows, but here it is.

Part of the fallout from the COVID Scare and the Totalitarian Lockdown are friendships destroyed and civil relations ended among family members.

One of my former friends and I have not spoken since last summer and I doubt we shall ever do so again, because he is a green light in response to virtually all official claims made about both and I am a red light.

But the following is about a different friend.

Jim and I were grade school classmates and fellow altar boys more than 60 years ago.  At that time, his family lived two blocks from the ice cream parlor that I wrote about three years ago [“Scene from a Vanished World,” The Thinking Housewife, Nov. 9, 2018].  After our grade school years, we fell out of contact for 50 years.  We met again at a class re-union in 2014.  Jim and his wife Kathy have invested countless hours in planning such re-unions, keeping track of classmates, and keeping all of us informed about deaths—a measure of dedication for which we owe them a great big debt of gratitude.

I could never hope to meet better people than Jim and Kathy.  The moment I met him that day in 2014 and without any hint from me, Jim said he remembered how my father played baseball with us boys on the grassy fields and baseball diamonds at Marquette Park in the summers of our school years. How could I not like a guy like that?

Last year Jim told me he had got the COVID Monster and spent several weeks recovering. I had no doubt that he had got something; I had no doubt he was telling me the truth; what I doubted was what that “something” was.  If he was told it was the COVID Monster, the question arises: Was it?  Or was it an ordinary seasonal flu purposely re-named?  Or something else wholly unrelated?

I insist that these questions are imperative because of the extraordinary, unprecedented, totalitarian lockdown that Americans have been forced to endure and that most have accepted as valid and reasonable.  Excuse my dissent.  I don’t buy a word of it, nor a word of the Washington party line.

Of course I never learned precisely what it was that caused Jim to feel miserable for several weeks. The important point is that he got better, as most people do after getting a seasonal flu.

Last week Jim sent me an e-mail asking whether I had got the vaccine yet. I have not told him that my answer is NO, I do not trust the people who are pushing those alleged vaccines. I would not trust anyone or any group who holds a syringe in one hand and a gun in the other (representing the police power of The State) and says to me, “We are here to help you.  We are here to see that you take the vaccine.”  Any and all such claims cause my red light to blink on.

Eleven years ago, Lawrence Auster wrote:

“For the first time in my life, I feel that I am not a free person, and that we are not a free people.  When I say that we are not free, I obviously do not mean that we cannot (at least for the moment) say what we want and do what we want and go where we want.  I mean that….we are living under a lawless regime of power holders who are hostile to us and ruthlessly seek greater and greater control over us…..”

          [“What Has Happened To Us,” View from the Right, March 27, 2010]

Imagine what he would say if he were here today and could see that Americans can no longer “do what we want and go where we want” because Mommy Government forbids us.  Worse yet:  Americans agree to obey Mommy Government.  Could he imagine any scene more ludicrous than grown men and women agreeing to wear face masks for a year?

The COVID Scare is a pretext for the greatest ad hoc expansion of government power and erasure of individual rights and freedom of movement and association in this nation’s history.  If anyone had attempted to impose an equivalent Totalitarian Lockdown on the American Founding Fathers, they would have known the right word for it:  Tyranny.

A few years ago, Jim treated me to lunch and afterward we drove through the neighborhood where we lived as boys. There was a popular restaurant there that had been in business since 1913.  Jim remembers it as well as I do.  We sat one block from it that day when we stopped for ice cream and reminisced about our school years. The Grand Avenue streetcars turned the corner right outside its doors.  It survived Prohibition, a fire in 1968, eight years between owners, and copper thieves. But it couldn’t survive the Totalitarian Lockdown Edict.  Its owner closed it for good last year because of the COVID Scare, he said. Not true. No “virus” forced him to close it.  Like other business owners, he was ordered to close it by state or local government and would not have been able to survive when his customers’ rights of freedom of association and movement in an open marketplace were extinguished overnight by that edict.  The word for that is not “virus”; it is Tyranny.  It also wiped out our class re-union last year.

Jim and I were in second grade when Americans contended with the Asian Flu in 1957-’58. It killed a lot of people and made others sick for a while. But within three months or so, it was gone. Did we “catch” that flu?  I can’t even remember. So if we did, it was insignificant. Was a Totalitarian Lockdown ever even contemplated? Did either the American  government or establishment medicine say:  To FIGHT THE FLU, we must suspend the rights of Americans, destroy their businesses, force them to wear face masks, and close the open marketplace? They did not. If the Eisenhower Administration had proposed any such measures, it would have been met with loud and rigorous opposition from a population who were not a nation of sheep, as Americans are today.

It is a sorry state of affairs indeed when most Americans are afraid to speak the word Tyranny when they are immersed in it up to their face masks.

Could I tell Jim that I believe the problem before us is not one of life or death because of a nasty “virus,” but one of liberty or tyranny because of a nasty, wholly out-of-control government — and not sever our friendship?

Could I express my skeptical estimate of the situation to Jim or our other classmates — and not sever friendships?

I don’t know.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Alan said,

Last week Jim sent me an e-mail asking whether I had got the vaccine yet. I have not told him that my answer is NO, I do not trust the people who are pushing those alleged vaccines. 

You could just tell Jim that no, you have not gotten the vaccine. That’s it. Then go on to another topic as if everything is normal.

That is what I will do with my various long-time friends, acquaintances and relatives if they should ask me if I’ve had the inoculation. Just “No, I haven’t.” Then the ball is in their court. If they get ornery, then all bets are off:  a polite debate might ensue, with us still staying on good terms. But if my polite answer turns into a quarrel, it won’t be me who started it. It will be their response to my “No, I haven’t,” that determines my own subsequent words. I’m not frightened of “friendships” ending because of the other party’s unfortunate beliefs – because that’s what this whole thing is: a belief system. Bigger than any standard issue religion. People are more terrified of getting the corona flu than they are of burning in hell for eternity.

Laura writes:

Good advice.

Laura adds:

Alan respects and likes Jim. He should just let him know he’s not going to get the shot, but not discuss it further.

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