Resurrection Now

It's happening at a table with new friends

Though a lapsed Christian, I have always loved both Easter stories. The one in which Christ rises from the dead after three days, and the other, pagan one, about the undeniable resurrection of Nature complete with rabbits, flowers and birds. Together, they offer the ultimate in hopeful visions. For Christians, Agnostics and Pagans alike, Easter is a time of renewal, renaissance, and revival. We are granted another beginning, both personal and universal. Though not in a celebratory frame of mind, I discovered more or less by happenstance an antidote to fierce melancholy as well as an antigram of the word Resurrection. I am sharing them with you, my faithful old and new readers as Easter eggs of despair and hope.

Because the pandemic is officially over but its aftermath continues to devastate our society, this Easter more than any other, feels like a failed resurrection. Even the weather seems like a perfect mirror of widespread misery with a cold, dry spring. But feeling despondent at this time of year seems particularly unpleasant. I want to feel hopeful, I want to believe in the possibility of a world I can feel relatively positive about. But the first thing I found when I looked up Resurrection in the Oxford Dictionary, was their Blog, explaining how you how to turn any word into its opposite by rearranging the letters. This is called an ‘antigram’:

For those not familiar, an antigram is an anagram that has an opposite or contradictory meaning to the original word or phrase; the quotations we’ve chosen give the examples of ‘funeral’ / ‘real fun’, and ‘honestly’ / ‘on the sly’. An anagram of ‘dictionary’ is ‘idiocy rant’.

So, I started playing around with Resurrection and this is the collection of antigrams hidden there:  no rescuer/no sunrise/error in situ, u-correction.

Well, that sums it up nicely. Nobody is riding to our rescue, there is no metaphorical sunrise, and maybe we will all be ‘corrected’, again. I’m afraid that this is a fairly common view here in Substackland. And I would have accepted it except for stumbling on an antidote to this gloomy antigram view: Making New Friends. To replace the ones we have lost to propaganda and fear. This isn’t easy, though I recommend ruling out people who are still wearing masks as contenders. Sometimes, a random remark and a knowing smile will alert you. Chance encounters can be wonderful. Ask the universe to help you find them. I did, and recently found myself knee deep in conversation with three people I hardly knew at a table in a café. I know the owner a bit, and she introduced me to someone who then introduced me to an old friend of his and lo and behold, I found myself talking and laughing and swearing with relative strangers for two whole hours. Making eye contact, comparing pandemic notes, sharing tales of vaccine jousting. Or watching the satirical Trudeau impersonator John Stetch, normally an accomplished pianist and musician. I truly believe that our unholy woke PM, the silly but dangerous JTrudeau, should watch Stetch every morning, as a kind of corrective. Here is a clip that shows ‘Justin’ doing his bit for washing machines and humanity.

Shared laughter is liberating; it stretches aural tentacles of freedom in all directions. Watching Stretch certainly stretched our laughing muscles and sharing this video felt exhilarating and kind of supernatural. Because I haven’t done much of that in three years or more. It also felt like a way out of pessimism and gloom, something positive and life affirming that I am actually in control of. I hope that was the beginning of my personal resurrection from the pandemic scourge. Laughing together is the way out so here’s another toast to laughter because it sustains us and forges bonds with perfect strangers. More than anything, it keeps us sane. He who laughs last laughs best…

Yet I can’t help noticing that during Year One of the Pandemic Aftermath, I almost forgot how to socialize and have innocent fun. Me, the woman who spent fortunes on marzipan eggs that we hid in the trees and that sometimes got stolen by crows or simply misplaced. Watching my grandchildren find a gold foil egg hidden among the branches was enough to make me believe in resurrection as a general principle. Maybe not the Christian version, the belief of the bodily resurrection of the righteous, of which I am surely not one, but the big picture one, that is about Nature’s eternal cycles of which we are a part.

For those of us with ‘unacceptable views’, our cultural resurrection so far is lacklustre, and taking a lot longer than three days. Though there are daily revelations of misdeeds by people we used to trust, like doctors, health officials, even politicians and pharma CEOs, I see no signs of a general waking up. In Canada, we’re wedded to the status quo. The next election is a year away, and public acknowledgments that crimes have been committed—are being committed— in the name of ‘safety’ and ‘vaccines’ that are supposedly ‘safe and effective’, has been postponed indefinitely. The MN continues to ignore the calamity hidden in the stats on ‘excess deaths’, and ‘sudden deaths’ of young people in their prime. If I wasn’t living through it, I would say this is surely taking place in the realm of science fiction.

We’re just going about our daily lives while all around us, the signs of a society in disarray are growing. Whether it’s the official sanctioning of Drag Queen Story Time with government funds, the assaults by transgender mobs on normal women who speak up, the strange behaviour of police who fail to stop looting or defacing of public monuments, or the ill understood ESG fuelled hit to the pocketbook of small investors. Not to mention the ‘online safety bills’ getting passed in most western countries. You know, to keep us ‘safe’ from ‘disinformation’. Because we cannot be trusted to figure out anything for ourselves. Big Brother/Mother is here to help. And then there’s the deeply sinister plan to digitize our currencies and thus end any thoughts of liberty whatsoever. It’s the most perfect people control device ever invented, make no mistake. And don’t even get me started on the proxy war in Ukraine. Nobody except an elite that has run out of options and sheeple who cannot think for themselves wants any of this. But who is going to stop them? Me? You? Elon? The latter has just decided that Substack links are no longer allowed on Twitter. They are ‘disinformation’ and so, another myth about a good guy bites the dust.

We shall see…

And finally: May you discover a couple of new friends—good eggs— among your Easter chocolates this year!