Communication Breakdown

On conversing with squirrels and other pandemic events

As I was walking down Fort Street on a foggy Tuesday morning in staid old Victoria, I encountered one of the cute gray squirrels that live on the huge Garry Oaks native to this region. It eyed me warily, twitched, and skittered off in the other direction, while I carried on to the Market. On the way back, it was still there, still twitching and still in the wrong place, too close to dangerous cars and bikes. There were trees nearby, and I thought I should convince it to go there, for its own good. To be safe.

“Come on, get out of here, you’ll get run over, you silly thing,” I coaxed. It sat frozen, twitched its tail, and didn’t move. “Go on, move, we’re all rooting for you,” I shouted, unaware of two ladies (without masks) coming the other way. As they passed, one of them turned around and called, “We won’t tell anyone that we caught you talking to squirrels”, breaking into peals of laughter. My squirrel eventually scampered off into an underground garage, but never made it to the safety of the trees. We had a major communication problem.

Mulling it over, it seems to me the perfect parable for what’s happening to us in the Covid Wars. When confronted with danger, we do one of three things: fight, flee or freeze. It’s a visceral response, baked into animals and humans. My squirrel did all of them in succession though it clearly didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Squirrel, either. In any event, we might as well speak Squirrel since we have succumbed to this primitive response in the face of fear, deliberately stoked by governments around the world. The outcome is a serious, ongoing communication crisis. We’ve taken our positions, and it’s now become a power play of fearsome dimensions. The Canadian government has dispatched its goons in the shape of heavily armed police to clear out the truckers while at the same time stealing their money and threatening legal fines, as the premier of Ontario did yesterday. And Trudeau was making another speech loaded with empty and predictable phrases about how Canadians are all in agreement etc. I won’t repeat it here because it makes me gag. I literally cannot watch this holier than thou clown who calls himself our Prime Minister.

But to get back to my handy parable: it’s remarkably simple to group people into those who will fight, those who flee and those frozen in fear, unable to move. It’s especially relevant on a personal level. Everybody I know is losing old friends and no longer talking to certain relatives. It’s very painful to discover that your best friend or sister lacks a mind of her own, frozen in fear. Or that a close relative who flees serious discussion about the greatest disaster of our lives nonetheless harbours opinions with a whiff of fascism. On the opposite end are those who will fight, like the beleaguered truckers, like writers on substack, and me. This crisis is forcing us all to show our true colours, and it’s a nasty shock to find that they clash, that they don’t ‘talk’ to each other.

We’re now a society of the walking wounded and that is entirely the result of the deliberate fear porn that our dear leaders have used to ‘manage’ the pandemic.  The dreadful personal cost of Covid-19 remains mostly unacknowledged. Only the Spectator did so in a recent piece on how the British government sponsored gruesome images of old people on oxygen support, with the accusatory caption: can you look into their eyes? Propaganda, Goebbels style. And it works.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-s-unethical-covid-messaging-must-never-be-repeated

The cost of fear mongering has been one of my ongoing concerns, so this evisceration of who was and is behind this despicable and dangerous government policy of fear porn fascinates me. Reading the backstory was dispiriting. It points the finger at certain behavioural psychologists who have become a massive influence on public policy, and hiding in plain sight. There’s a global, mind-boggling industry devoted to figuring out how to nudge, coerce, and frankly bully Joe Public into compliance with what the government has decreed is in your own best interests. Fear of death, fear of infection and fear of uncertainty is the most potent weapon in this fight for ‘minds and hearts’. It turns out that women are especially likely to respond to this tactic because they are hardwired to protect the vulnerable. The babies and the toddlers. And of course, that is a good thing. Except that in this case, we’re talking about adults. As the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson remarked,

“…protect the infants—an easy moral victory—but we’re not infants. Or are we?”

He adds that the feminist security response and focus on ‘being safe’ above all else has taken over in the public sphere because so many administrators in public health are, in fact, women. That’s certainly the case in Canada. But he goes further:

I don’t think people like living in fear, but they like to believe they’re on the side of compassion and security when uncertainty and threat looms…”

That comment was an Aha moment for me. Of course, we all want to be compassionate and feel safe, who wouldn’t? It’s just that in this particular situation, this desire has been turned into a nasty, illiberal club with which to beat anyone who dares to question public health measures, such as the vaccine mandates. Thank you for clearing that up, Jordan. Here he is talking to Dr Julie Ponesse, fired for being ethical. And she was a Professor of Ethics at Northwestern University.

Seriously. No matter how you slice the Pandemic, we disagree on the fundamentals, which is why we can’t agree on a way out. After two years, we should have come to some clear conclusions, but instead, we’re more polarized than ever. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think this was a deliberate strategy of Divide and Conquer by those who are profiting from this global calamity. It’s an old, proven tool and it has performed very well again. Who are these people and who is aiding and abetting them, possibly without knowing what they do?

First up is Justin Trudeau in league with Big Pharma, notably Pfizer. Few people in Canada recall that even before there were any ‘vaccines’ against Covid-19, Trudeau declared that they were ‘the only way out’, while hiding the fact that he personally had invested in the new technology that was being perfected at the University of BC as well as in Europe. He has now dug in and is going on the attack against not only the truckers but the entire country. You MUST get vaccinated or else. The conflicts of interest and the heavy-handed tactics displayed here are worthy of any corrupted, authoritarian regime. Trudeau is also in league with the big banks, who are not above stealing money from citizens and truckers. It’s just another tactic, a nudge to make you comply. I have a serious problem understanding the complete media silence on what is, surely, the most stunning display of arrogance, cynicism, and naked aggression we have ever witnessed in Canada.  

And it is Trudeau who is refusing to engage in dialogue, not the truckers, who have not been able to mount a coherent PR campaign to explain what they are doing and why. We still get smear pieces in places like the New York Times, linking the truckers to ‘far right organizations’ and talking weirdly about how ‘racist’ and ‘violent’ they are. I can tell you from first-hand experience that they are nothing of the kind because I was there, a week ago, in front of the BC Legislature, with thousands of happy people and trucks, horns blaring. They were handing out ear plugs but I decided that all that noise was the sound of freedom, and I was thrilled to hear it. The atmosphere was unlike any other protest I have ever seen, and I have seen a few. It was like a giant, warm family reunion, with kids and dogs and people literally dancing in the street. And as for the ‘counter protesters’, I counted maybe a half dozen signs, clustered next to the eight policemen, all standing in a row, watching impassively. There was no violence, no fear, no aggression, only sheer joy. Not that anyone was reporting that inconvenient fact.

Which brings me to the utterly corrupted and compliant Mainstream Media. Let’s not forget that a free, independent and above all, honest journalistic class is one of the essential underpinnings of any democratic state. Their job is to ‘speak truth to power’. Alas, too many have abandoned that and become the willing mouthpiece of governments and institutions. They have lost their bearing and become utterly unreliable, spouting half-truths, outright lies and an astonishing amount of what we used to call ‘bumpf’ in the PR industry. It’s the stuff that governments and industry hand out to the media, hoping they will print it even if it’s BS. And people know this. Everybody knows this and it is one of the reasons why we no longer listen to each other.

I used to believe that FOX News is a piece of garbage; I have had to revise that opinion because even Tucker sometimes makes sense. I just never checked before. The so called left leaning MSM News or CNN, is now in the illiberal camp, accusing anyone who dares to question the ‘official narrative’ of being liars and possibly, murderers. The public, meanwhile, is doing its own research if they have the time, reading only Substack writers or just tuning out the entire cacophony. Few and likely dwindling in numbers are journalists who do their jobs. One of them is the Canadian born Leah McLaren, writing for the Spectator on the Truckers:

From where I sit, here in the Crazy Land of Britain, the outraged truckers have an obvious point. Canadians have every right to be angry at the current regulations for the simple reason that they don’t make sense when weighed against the risks.

Elsewhere, she characterizes Canada as a ‘culture of earnest and astonishing decency’. You wouldn’t know that by listening to the hate speech emanating from our prime minister. We’re living in the Tower of Babel, and it’s making us squirrelly indeed.

Another failure of the MM is the lack of discussion about legitimate concerns over the vaccine unknown unknowns—long term effects, spiking of the immune system, serious adverse effects, including thousands of deaths. Doctors who have spoken up have been vilified, some have lost their licences and their livelihoods. We literally do not know the facts because first of all, filling in the official VAERS forms is difficult and the criteria for what is and is not an ‘adverse reaction’ is murky. Furthermore, Pfizer will not release the raw data on the vaccine trials until we’re all safely in the grave. Secrecy is a sure-fire way of inflaming suspicions, so that is the result. The ‘vaccines’ are paid for with taxpayer money, so not releasing vital information seems, well, churlish. Also, legally problematic as well as ethically dubious. But our government and other rich countries aren’t budging on this; apparently, we the great herd that is being bullied to get jabbed, has no right to real information. Informed Consent, something sacred to Human Rights and enshrined in law, has been trampled on. So, no wonder there is not just miscommunication, but no communication worthy of the name. Instead, there is stonewalling and smearing by people who know better. Shameful and shameless tactics that serve only to undermine public trust in our beleaguered institutions but work just fine for Pfizer.

How are we going to get out of the Tower, stop talking to squirrels and begin communicating in earnest again? The politicians, the talking heads and above all, ‘The Science’, have failed to show a viable path. And anyone who believes that ‘Science’ can solve the moral and ethical dilemmas of the Covid Wars doesn’t understand what it is. Science is a method, its findings are debated and tested, there is a lot of disagreement, and therefore, it can only advise, it cannot and must not, set moral precedents or political policy. For example, on the Nakedemperor substack, there is an excerpt of an article by Paul Hsieh in Forbes, which suggests that maybe a ‘morality pill’ that makes people more compliant, is the answer to the Covid crisis. Sounds simply perfect. That’s how ‘moral’ Science works for you.

Instead of obsessing over ‘the science’, we might want to listen to ‘the poets’. And the musicians. They have had a very bad Pandemic because they have lost their community. And don’t tell me that online performance is just as good as a live gig: that’s a lie if ever I heard one. There’s absolutely nothing that comes close to the ecstasy of a live performance and the magic that happens during a live concert, an intimate reading, or an electrifying speech. Nothing digital can or should replace that, but it is illegal for the unvaccinated. They are barred from enjoying live music because it is falsely claimed that they ‘endanger others’. The truth is, they only endanger themselves, and it is their right to do so. Vaccinated people spread the virus just as much as they do, but somehow, this information hasn’t penetrated the fog of the Covid War. The Truckers are right: it all has to stop. If nothing else, they have demonstrated honesty and true compassion as well as courage on 18 wheels. Nobody can take that away from us; Canadians can point to them as proof that we are indeed a free society though for how much longer nobody knows. If we let him, Trudeau will dismantle it for us.

The question remains: Whattodo?

Not long ago, I came across this poem by the Persian poet Rumi—and it resonated.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

There is a field

I will meet you there

I haven’t found that metaphorical field yet. And as far as I can tell, our politicians are neither looking for nor discovering one. But I hope that for the sake of our common future, our fractured relationships, and our failed politics, we will not only search everywhere, but land there and start communicating in polite English, with serious intent, humble wisdom, and occasional laughter. Because failing to do so will deliver hell on earth.