A Bridge Over Fear

[kimberlysteele]

I am a braver person than I used to be.  At age 16, I stood idly by when my best friend at the time was being denigrated within our own vicious clique of backstabbing frenemies.  Frightened of “everyone” not liking me, I failed to defend her.  We weren’t friends after that.  I did all sorts of other awful things as a tween and teen that were a result of moral turpitude and general spinelessness.  Like the Rush song proclaims, by choosing not to decide I still had made a choice.  My young existence was a constant battle of sinking to the lowest level of my Midwestern Nice, Just Do As You’re Told, Don’t Rock The Boat programming while battling the cognitive dissonance that whispered true tales of my sniveling cowardice into the opposite ear.  

 

Bravery, like Joan of Arc, dies hard.  Once the path of bravery is forged, there is no turning back.  Perhaps knowing this deep down is what scared me away from brave acts as a young person.  Bravery also has its rewards.  For me, it has meant having my own wholly independent business, marrying the person I wanted instead of the ones who had money and connections, and various odd rescues and rehabilitations I could not have managed if I had a smaller set of cojones.  My bravery has only become extremely difficult to live down in the post-COVID era where cowards have run amok.  The universal sign of the coward, the mask, is mandatory in my state of Illinois via the executive order of the current governor, the tax-evading billionaire scion of a hotel empire named J.B. Pritzker.  This order was ruled unconstitutional by a court in Clay County, Illinois, but that was but one civil court.  On Tuesday, October 20, he crippled the Illinois economy by closing restaurants just as they and the rest of the small business economy were showing faint signs of life.  The cowards are currently still winning in my corner of the world.

 

Cowardice is The Blob

 

The problem with cowardice is its amorphousness.  Cowardice does not stay in its lane and neither do the consequences of cowardice.  Mandatory shut down orders were not supposed to take a wrecking ball to small businesses (or were they?), but this is exactly what they did.  If large corporations were looking for the perfect way to crush their local, small business competitors in a wholesale orgy of state, city, and county government-backed destruction, they could not have found a better way of doing it than COVID lockdowns.  Walmart and Amazon are doing fine.  Small businesses like mine are not.  I am a music teacher.  I have run a successful, one person teaching studio for the last 24 years of my life.  I haven’t had this few students since I began fresh out of college.  If things stay the same way they are right now through 2021, I will have to close my business. For this reason, I have began to push back against COVID mentality.  I slip off the mask when I am in stores.  I don’t require the mask inside my business.  My protests against mask-wearing have resulted in the alienation of decades-long friends.  One former fan of my books took it upon himself to wish disease and death upon me and my family.  

 

Cowardice is amorphous.  Every person who wears a mask in public, including me, is a living symbol of submission to an insidious groupthink that is barreling us towards the edge of a new Great Depression.  I have begun to push back because it is finally time for normal people to draw the line in the sand.  If more people do not act like me, I will lose my livelihood like millions of other Americans.  I will join the bread line.  I don’t want it to come to that, so I push.

 

I mentioned that I believe the consequences of cowardice are amorphous.  I am also pushing back because I don’t want the karma of those who perpetuated COVID panic.  This karma is no small thing.  To understand how bad is the looming karma of COVID panic pushers, we first have to look at the ways they have benefited under the current reign of fear.  

 

Curse of the American Salaryman

 

There’s a certain type of house one encounters frequently out here in the suburbs.  The style is boxy and superficially old-fashioned.  Typically there are four to five bedrooms on the top story, a two to four car garage, and an association-controlled, postage stamp lot.  A facade of fake brick on the front and grey-beige siding on the other sides is common.  Inside the house, you’ll find an average American family.  There are one to four children (any more is considered a bit weird, but it has been known to happen) and both parents work.  Only in the very largest versions of the house can one parent, usually the wife, afford to stay home.  The nucleus of these neighborhoods is the local school, which is nearly the sole reason for the insanely high property taxes and home prices all around it.  The same cookie cutter houses way out in the country would cost half as much or less, but then there wouldn’t be a population willing to move into them because the school wouldn’t exist out in the sticks.  In order to afford one of these suburban boxes of ticky-tacky, you need a combined household income of 100K at the entry level.  Not only is this required to get a mortgage, you also need a bunch of extra stuff like insurance, cars, and a family wireless plan.  

 

There is an odd acknowledgement that suburban life is a living hell.  In the film Vivarium, a young married couple visit a new construction housing complex with thoughts of a potential purchase.  They find themselves stranded in a bland, sunny subdivision called Yonder where all of the IKEA-ish houses are one of two or three models, one of which sports a plaque: Number 9.  Quickly learning they are imprisoned in the subdivision, they journey down its eerily empty streets that stretch into infinity.  They set fire to Number 9 and do everything possible to escape, all of which is in vain.  A package arrives with a baby in it, which the couple reluctantly adopts.  Months drag by and the child grows freakishly fast.  The young couple, deprived of other people outside of their alien, energy-draining child, quickly grow apart.  The husband becomes obsessed with digging a hole in the astroturfed backyard as the wife’s life becomes hopeless, child-centered, automatic drudgery.  I won’t give away any spoilers save that the film does not end well.  

 

Vivarium is literally a film about the loathsomeness of the suburbs.  The salaryman is the young husband, who digs a hole everyday — obviously symbolic of salary class work — and kills himself before his time to do it.  Meanwhile, the young wife is saddled with a completely disloyal, non-human child who throws violent tantrums when his routine isn’t followed to the letter, which to my mind was a subtle way of mentioning the unmentionable: the tyranny of raising a severely autistic child.  Isolation and sameness turn what looks pretty enough from the outside into a living hell.  

 

Though it’s not all terrible, salary class life is mostly awful.  Like Vivarium, going outside is pointless.  There is no connection with nature, only endless suburban sprawl and a job mining astroturf.  There is no connecting with other people — salary class work is largely a dog eat dog endeavor.  It is empty, hollow serfdom in the service of moronic, capitalist Montezumas who brag to other CEOs about their latest private jet vacation.  The salaryman rarely sees his loved ones.  His work is a constant game of musical chairs.  When another chair bites the dust, he is forced to take on all of the duties of his former co-worker with no additional pay or benefits.  His commute?  Brutal.  Or at least it was before COVID came along.

Escape Via Throwing The Lower Classes Under The Bus

COVID gave the salary class the escape valve they were looking for.  For the salaryman, it brought the first opportunity his lot has had in nearly a hundred years to get a regular good night’s sleep.  In the case of people my age, Generation X, it has provided relief in the form of suspended college loan payments.  Many salary class kids have never spent quality family time with their parents, having previously been preoccupied with a 60 hour week schedule of school, sports, clubs, and lessons. Salary class wives have been granted time with their husbands and children, and for many, a much-deserved moment of appreciation for all they handle while their husband is out busting heavies at the office.  The army of working salary class women, like their male counterparts, find it much easier to telecommute and order takeout than to try to do it all.  Being a working mom stinks.  You’re saddled with the responsibilities of Atlas — you not only win the bread, you have the thankless job of having to make it into healthy sandwiches.  To add insult to injury, you’re the one who cleans up the dishes afterward!  

 

For these reasons and more, the salary class is still clinging to endless lockdowns and mandatory masks with everything it has got.  Never mind that small business entrepreneurs quickly going the way of the dodo — we need endless funny money so the salaried suburban Costco shoppers can afford their La Croix Pamplemousse Sparkling Water (the snooty LaCroix brand was founded by a Wisconsinite, by the way) and their bulk frozen cauliflower rice.  Everyone must wear a mask, including solo bike riders, because there must be the appearance of compliance with fear porn culture at all costs.  If you have the remotest aspirations to the salary class — like the former fan of my books who is dirt poor — you had better toe the line.    

 

The salary class and its aspirants do not like to be told “no”, and when someone like me says the N-O word, the reaction is hysteria and death threats.  No one is more used to this than Donald Trump.  Donald Trump swooped in like Krampus to squash their dreams of Progress in the form of fully automated luxury welfare communism in 2016.  They have thrown the most epic of tantrums ever since. 

 

The salary class, as vacuous and detached as the in-dwellers of Versaille in the latter half of the 18th century, has failed to understand the fragility of its bubble.  They have already popped much of the frothy economy that dropped a yoga studio on every corner and towns with 13 car dealerships within the same five mile radius.  Just as Louis XVI didn’t connect the dots between his own attitudes towards the peasantry with the ill will that separated his head from his body at the guillotine, the salary class cannot comprehend that what’s good for them is not benefiting the lower working classes.  The salary classite believes that since she can stay home watching Netflix, so can every else.  Let 'em eat cake!  The idea that she herself could end up disenfranchised or homeless due to her own disastrous cluelessness doesn’t occur to her, because up until now, there was no limit to the amount she could screw up and have someone (family, friends, government) come in and fix it for her.  Now that the salary class and its COVID lockdowns have messed up the economy royally, she does not understand that she is next.  She has thrown entrepreneurs like me under the bus and does not see how close the wheels are skidding towards her own well-heeled feet.  

What's Next For Fearmongers

I walked away from the social justice left because I think they've got a tsunami of bad karma about to crash upon their shores.  I ran a vegan meetup group for ten years.  I ended it somewhere around July 2020.  Vegans are some of the most toxic Trump Derangement sufferers.  Like it or not, my preference to avoid the consumption of all animal products gives the social justice left the idea that I am on their side.  I am not.  I am a patriot and I'm willing to die for the cause of free speech; they feel differently.  They think it is perfectly fine to wish harm (lately in the form of COVID) on Trump and his supporters.  I do not wish harm on Nancy Pelosi or the Democrats despite their blatant hypocrisy and obstructionism. I don't wish harm on Hunter Biden, who is blatantly guilty of treason.  I don't wish harm on Ghislaine Maxwell, proven child groomer and trafficker.  I don't do that anymore because it helps no one, including me.  What I do instead is try to act in a way they currently don't seem to be capable of acting: where they freak out, I am calm.  When they start flinging bad intentions around, I wish for them to be blessed, as they truly need it.  

I think the social justice left and everyone who empowered it via their fear mongering is about to get served.  For some, Trump Derangement will be the reason they open their wrists into warm bathwater, regardless of whether Trump wins or loses.  It's a classic double-bind: if he wins, the Great Satan has conquered.  If he loses, their anti-populist cheating apparatus will have succeeded, leaving them with no boogeyman to resist.  The reserves of spite they depend upon for sustenance will have to bubble up from elsewhere.  Either way, I believe the consequences rolling out over the next couple of years will be severe for them.  I believe TDS sufferers everywhere will find their support networks disintegrated, and their streams of taken-for-granted comfort and wealth interrupted, perhaps permanently.  This is only natural law at work: they who spent the last five years asking the Universe to visit misfortune, disease, and death to visit Trump and his supporters will find misfortune, disease, and death barging into their domiciles.  They made a grave mistake to wish misfortune on regular people simply for the crime of disagreeing with them. 

So many of these people haven't the faintest clue how to be poor.  They are not ready for the death of a breadwinner or for a sudden cutoff from family and inheritance money.  Making a living has been mouse find cheese to them.  They have lived beyond their means all this time, and the last thing they are is Stoic about what they cannot control. 

I will be saying nothing to them.  I have cut them off; I do not donate to them the privilege of my company.  They are welcome to read this blog if they want to know what I think.  Nevertheless, if I did say something to my former social justice pals, it would be this: "After spending five years lobbing your own turds at the opposition, don't expect for your yard to be clean and your hands to smell like roses."  

Of course I could be wrong.  The privileged clingers-on to masks and convenient anti-white race baiting could slide once again, slaloming around the hard limits and sucking off the grift from the same rackets as usual: Big Education, Big Pharma, Big Tech.  Only time will tell what new egregores lurk in the shadows, waiting to ride the next wave of mass consciousness.  The one thing I do pretty much know is that we should all hang on to our seats, because the next couple of weeks are going to be a rough ride.     

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Hi Everyone, thank you in advance for your comments.  Please refrain from commenting with profanity: four letter words that start with f, s, or c will result in an unpublished comment.  Damn and rhymes with witch are OK.  

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think the child in Vivarium is intended to be autistic, but rather to represent the tedium and struggle of trying to raise children without support. It's horrible, and the kid is alien, since you never spend enough time to truly get to know your own children in suburbia; not to mention the alien and artificial nature of suburban youth culture....

The lifestyle of the over-busy child may have permanently screeched to a halt

[kimberlysteele]

The whole scheme of pumping up kids' schedules with activities may be irrevocably over. The problem, of course, is that it is swallowing entire industries and a huge number of livelihoods as we speak. All of the people who worked as soccer coaches, swim instructors, dance uniform sales, karate studios? That stuff is over. I had another student cancel lessons for financial reasons today. Personally, my business is collapsing because of this. There's not a darn thing I can do about it and it's not my fault. I'm a great teacher and I'm amazing at my job. Students often stay with me in lessons for a long, long time, like 10 years at a stretch. As much as it sucks for me to have this happen, I'm glad this will finally force suburban parents to wake up and allow their children to have some unscheduled free time. The sad part is that because karate, soccer, and piano lessons cost money, these young people will spend most of their newfound free time playing video games and fiddling with TikTok. I hope some of them will manage to get outside and/or read paper books instead.

Re: The lifestyle of the over-busy child may have permanently screeched to a halt

[allenlincoln]

Oh I really hope this will finally end: it was one of the worst parts of my childhood (born mid-1990s, upper middle class family). I literally never had my own time growing up. It was always something planned by someone else, and so when I finally started being able to plan my own schedule, I had no idea how to do it. I hope that people aren't hurt too badly by the end of it, but it does need to end.

Re: The lifestyle of the over-busy child may have permanently screeched to a halt

[kimberlysteele]

Ugh, I'm so sorry to hear that! I had a typical 70s childhood -- we played outside and didn't come home until dinner time. I remember in the 80s when the pressure cooker scheme started ramping up. I had gifted student friends who didn't take a lunch because they were too busy working to get early college credit in high school. They ended up going to average to middling colleges. One of my friends who was exceptionally gifted dropped out of college her second year.

I agree, it needs to end. It already has ended in my working class neighborhood. Actually, I don't think it ever began here because nobody could afford it. Kids play outside in the classic 70s unstructured way. They walk and ride bikes. It's yet another reason why I love living here.

Great writing

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly, you are fast becoming one of my favorite writers on the internet. I hope you are writing a book - I would love to read more!

It's really weird because at first sight I am exactly the salaryman you describe. I have a solid middle class job and I was surrounded by the fake-liberal coastal elite. I even bought into the whole set of unquestioned beliefs - for a while.

JM Greer helped me - over many years, it was not easy to leave the mental prison. I grew up relatively poor and enjoyed it while my busy money-making life always stressed me. So I feel like I am going back - slowly and painfully. I don't talk to my elitist friends anymore - we drifted apart. I miss them sometimes but every time I went back and tried to communicate I felt frustrated. The combination of TDS and entitlement is hard to take.

Just wanted to thank you and keep on going!

Re: Great writing

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you so much, I had a rough day. Your vote of confidence means a great deal to me.

The Trump Derangement salary class people are absolutely frothing at the mouth psychotic at this point. I think they like their prison cells. They wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: Great writing

[methylethyl]

Ran across one on a blog I like to read, yesterday, and made the mistake of engaging. Like making eye contact with the crazy library lady... (shudders). Left a sticky, nasty psychic gunge that followed me offline and kept me awake most of the night. Did a lot of praying, and seem to have sloughed it off. Some serious bad juju going on there.

I seriously hope that the election clears the air. There is so much ill-will being thrown around right now, interacting with the general public is like living in a cloud of poisonous biting gnats.

Re: Great writing

[kimberlysteele]

I know exactly what you mean. Even in online interactions, I notice how foul they have become. "Sticky" is a good word for their general malaise. They've become slimebags. They all have a creepy, degraded feeling about them, and then they open their mouths and it's Trump this, Trump that, Trump-Trump-Trump. They are doing stuff that used to be beneath them. They have become selectively blind as well as stupid, for instance they can't admit Biden was the wrong choice. They are becoming violent where they wouldn't have done that before. I strongly believe they're being ridden by a demon or demons, but the second I say that, there's a whole chorus of predictable outrage.

I see it as a war. They want to end me and all small-time entrepreneurs so oligarchs can run the world via large corporations. They are fighting for Piscean unity/uniformity in the Age of Aquarius.

Nevertheless, many of them do have big hearts and I have to constantly remind myself that they used to be witty and fun. They are often exceptionally kind, for instance, so many of the vegans I (used to) know who are great writers, cooks, artists, and fabulously creative self-made businesspeople. I just can't go near them right now because they are in the thrall of a hideous entity. And of course they can't see what is right in their faces. I hope they get over it. I'd like to be friends again.

[allenlincoln]

I grew up in a suburb, and found Vivarium really chilling. It's an admittedly extreme representation, but the awkward fact is that it shows suburban life surprisingly well. So many people are against the film for such absurd reasons, which suggests to me that it hit a nerve....

[kimberlysteele]

I grew up in suburbia too -- I was lucky not to be in a Yonder-ish subdivision but yeah, the zeitgeist was definitely present and accounted for. I didn't realize it had touched a nerve. I can see why it did. Though it was a well-acted, high quality piece of filmmaking, I found it to be such an unpleasant experience, I will never watch it again. It is relentlessly nihilistic. I can see the possibility of it being used someday for a 24th century film class. Students will use it to reflect upon the grave mistakes of human civilization during the Peak Oil era.

[allenlincoln]

I lived in a Yonder-ish suburb growing up, and I'm grateful that I was right on the edge, around two miles away from what was a small town back before the nearest city sprawled out. I found Vivarium to be really well done as well, but dear gods I will never watch it again. It was far too unpleasant, especially because despite the impossible premise, it still felt way too real...

[kimberlysteele]

There's the end scene where the wife/mom sees another Yonder wife/mom top-riding someone in bed. Of course my sick mind went there, asking, "Was that the son?" Eeww. Between that and the ultra-depressing cuckoo imagery, I wish I had never seen Vivarium. Yuck.

Difficult times indeed

[abrahamjpalma]

Hi,
I think I kind of understand that wrath. I am everything you are talking against: salary man, living comfortable even during lockdowns, liberal (not the social justice fighter type) and complying with laws. So maybe I don't understand your situation at all.

I do wear face mask upon scientific advice and gladly. They said it reduces the risk of infection and I believe them, in the terms the information was given. So, whenever I feel that the conditions are risky, I feel better wearing it. Whenever I think the risk is bearable, I don't want to wear it. I understand that saliva droplets floating in air is the major way of infection, so by putting a barrier I am preventing my saliva reaching too far. I also understand that scientific knowledge on a new sickness might be incomplete or maybe wrong, but that's what we have.
Well then, any mask that is able to prevent your blowing from moving a candle flame should be more than enough for the purpose of preventing infection among people without symptoms.
I was comfortable with that too, and the face mask I wear is handmade, with a pocket for paper filter that I replace when it looks weathered. So far, I've only used four masks since March, mostly replaced by upgraded models.

Then our politicians panicked. We tried ignoring the disease for the summer so tourists come and we make our money, and in an effort to make tourist think our destiny was safe, in August they ordered to wear face mask while outdoors, no exceptions. They made up some rules that required face masks to be normalized so they can be used in protocols. A handmade face mask cannot prove any filtering or breathing efficacy, so they can't be included in protocols.
Now I am not comfortable at all. This is not protective measures based on knowledge, this is under-the-hat measures taken by scared rulers. Now I feel like I am being forced to comply with some measures that even doctors don't fully agree with. I don't mind some law enforcement when it is backed by facts, but this is putting my nerves on edge. I am encouraged to wear use and drop polluting face masks made of plastic, and wear it all the time so they are worn out after four hours. A normal person must replace his mask three times a day.
All this while our governments don't apply the truly real measures that are proven to be working in other countries: tracking contacts and helping people who must stay home. The worst is that I believe that there's an agenda to destroy our public health system, that has been systematically underfinanced the last decade and it is dramatically showing now. The private system is not up to the task, either.

I wish the pandemic could be ignored and we all keep going with our lives, but the countries that tried that route found that the toll on deaths and collateral public health issues was too high. We lost a thousand doctors between March and June even with lockdowns. During this summer we had to suffer inexperienced doctors, since the other ones were told to take a rest at home until fall. This resulted in higher death rates of other pathologies.
Even if governments were uncaring for people's lives, families care. I don't want my parents to die and I am seeing that the risk for them to die is over average. Even if the government didn't tell me to stop visiting them, I want to be careful. Call it fear if you want, I don't mind to admit that I fear that my parents could die too soon. I still send my kid to extracurricular courses, where I think the risk is bearable and his teachers need the job but I can understand parents who don't want to. Hopefully we will be sharing hugs and kisses in a few months again.

This behaviour inevitably leads to less consumption and weaker economy. It's a loss-loss situation. If you do something to stop the pandemic, the economy suffer making it hard to fight the pandemic. If you don't do anything, the health suffer making it hard to keep the economy. Which one is the lesser evil we can't say for certain.
Oil has already peaked, so it's useless to hope for a fast recovery after the pandemic either.
I think that you are right in that people don't have the stoicism that is required in this case, and that people that think they have rights to high standard livings will get very angry very soon. I'm trying to collapse now and avoid the rush, by the way ;)

I hope you find your calm and the strength to endure whatever comes.

Re: Difficult times indeed

[kimberlysteele]

I have nothing against salarymen and salarywomen, I was just trying to point out ingredients in the boiling stew of factors that motivate the upper classes to prolong the pandemic.

Forcing people to wear masks constitutes practicing medicine without a license, so I don't do that in my business. In the US, forcing anyone to wear a face covering is also a violation of religious liberty, so that means it is in violation of First Amendment rights.

Here's Dr. Reiner Fuellmich explaining what has happened on the international level:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/zarFW3hwuyBc/

I think the pushback against COVID hysteria is just getting started. Recently the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by thousands of doctors, epidemiologists, and other health professionals, put a fine point on it: "with special concerns about how the current COVID-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden."

https://gbdeclaration.org/frequently-asked-questions/

My husband and I are part of the working poor. We can't take time off right now even if we have the flu. Never could. That's the let 'em eat cake part. The salary class gets to stay home the moment their PCR test tells them they have COVID. The working poor have had no such luxury. I live in a working poor neighborhood -- only one household on our block has mask wearers, and that's because the wife is elderly and immunocompromised. Government money ran out for my husband and I long ago and it wasn't enough to take care of a mere one month's commercial rent. At this point, I have received loan money to cover my commercial rent payments for a little less than four months, and this money did not include utilities, which are $400 - $600 a month. I am expected to pay this money back, unlike the $1200 that arrived in April as a stimulus check. The local restaurant owner I talked to can't get any of the government money, despite the fact she's a minority business owner. The distribution of government funny money has been uneven. It tends to depend on if you banked with the "right" bank when the pandemic originally made landfall.

The people for whom the above paragraph's dollar amounts are chump change don't seem to understand that in the long run, I am in a much better position than they are. My mortgage isn't astronomical. I am healthy -- I'd better be, because I haven't been able to afford health insurance for the last decade (I did have it for a brief stint when my husband worked for a different company around the year 2016). But mostly I am in a better position because of the way I view my life. I am grateful. Being grateful is a method of constant sublimation. I understand that I am not owed any of it and that if it all vaporized, I'd still be happy because my worth is not tied up in the material things I own. We have a friend who was poor growing up and then rocketed up to the salary class. He and his wife bought a big McMansion, a massive house though they had only two children. Then she divorced him and took him to the cleaners. He is now stuck with a giant house that he's underwater in because it's not worth the price he paid for it. He's in his early 60s and the executive, high-paying job that he needs to keep all the bowling pins spinning in the air isn't available to him. Ageism is a real thing. He will end up couch surfing in one of his kid's apartments someday if he's lucky. At least he knows what it is to be poor -- such a thing won't end his world. We are all quickly falling into a much poorer average state of affairs, at least that's what I think. Those who bought into the COVID hysteria poured a bucket of gasoline on that process and lit a box of matches. They became the positive evil exacerbating the collapse of the bubble economy. Collapsing now is a very good idea. You'll be incredibly glad you did. Again, that's my opinion. I could be wrong.

Thanks for your reasoned exchanges. I appreciate your dissenting yet sane voice. I'm sad to observe how rare that is! Be blessed.

Re: Difficult times indeed

[lincoln_lynx]

You know we're on the precipice when our politicians won't cough up enough assistance to provide bread.

Re: Difficult times indeed

[allenlincoln]

I can't be the only one who's mind is going to the French Revolution right now, right?

Re: Difficult times indeed

[(Anonymous)]

Precisely. My husband works to support our family, while also going to school in a votech program to try and get a better job. We are getting by partly on savings from when he was working fulltime, partly on the generosity of my family (our house belongs to a relative), and partly on the annual child tax credit, which we hoard for emergencies like car repairs. Our margins are pretty small. We have emergency savings to fall back on, but every unexpected expense has us scrambling, recalculating, to make sure we can still make it until my husband graduates.

Grocery prices have been rising noticeably. An average shopping trip has gone from $180 to nearly $250, with very little change in what I'm buying.

Recently, my husband got a stomach bug. Because he had a fever, and it's work policy, he had to show a negative covid test before going back to work or school. It cost us $180 out of pocket to get the test, and he missed a week of work and school waiting for the results. PMCs are working comfortably from home and don't care about this. It was a major hit for us. We were scared. Between the test and the missed work, we were out a few hundred bucks, and a semester of tuition was at risk. If he'd tested positive, he would have been out of work at least two weeks, and may have had to drop the semester at school, setting us back at least six months and putting us in a dire financial situation.

When I see people clamoring for covid precautions until we eradicate the disease, all I can think is... I guess we are the disease they are trying to eradicate.

[ari_ormstunga]

It was instructive to discuss reactions to Covid with my girlfriend yesterday. She works in the medical field, drawing blood and giving shots at various locations. She said most of the factories she goes to (full of "deplorables") are filled with people who are friendly, casual, and well adjusted. Yesterday she had to go to the campus of a very liberal college to do flu shots. She said people were scared to approach her, wore layer upon layer of protective gear, and weren't capable of understanding basic instructions about how to get an injection. Hearing her describe it, all I could think was that these people really are having a psychotic break. I work in a tourist town and it's been more or less business as usual since about the 4th of July; I can't imagine living like the college liberals do. I wear a mask because it's required at my job and I work to support my family; it's something I plan to let dissolve into my Ring Chaos and I don't support it.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks for sharing this! In the buildup to the election, the tension gets worse and worse. They are absolutely terrified. In the rich college town where I work, every other person walking solo down the street (the few that don't drive everywhere) is wearing a mask. What sense does that make? Who are they expecting to catch COVID from, the stoplight? I am truly looking forward to this period being over.

[ari_ormstunga]

It's madness! She said the people at the college seemed to expect her to inject them without actually coming within 6 feet of her, or without baring their skin at the injection site. She said their anxiety was terrible to be around (she's very intuitive and sensitive to other people's moods). I am hoping that after the election, conjunction, and Grand mutation, things will calm down and settle into a new form... Hopefully one that doesn't have much resemblance to this one.

[kimberlysteele]

A performing artist/author talks about being cancelled by COVID and the PMC attacking her for promoting herself "when people are dying"

https://youtu.be/zJ0obZ3zlEk?t=131

[methylethyl]

The whole "people are dying" business is so strange. IMO this is the wimpiest pandemic ever. My town still has a mass grave in one of the older cemeteries, for the victims of the last cholera outbreak. Have people died in the covid outbreak? Yes. Do I know a single one of them? No. And I know a lot of old people, a lot of fat people, a lot of diabetics! I know a few people who got sick with COVID. They all survived and are now fine. We didn't need a mass grave. But everyone is still acting like it's the apocalypse. In my grandparents' day, everybody had a sibling or cousin or classmate who'd died from measles or polio or diptheria (plus the ones who'd become deaf, blind, or paralyzed but survived). And those things weren't considered pandemics! They were totally normal things that everybody just lived with. If Grandma were still alive, she'd wonder what the heck was wrong with us.

[kimberlysteele]

I live in an area that has an unusual number of cemeteries -- I like to joke that if you want to get to my house, you take a right by the cemetery, then a left by the next cemetery, but if you end up by the graveyard, you've gone too far -- and yes, there are lots of little headstones with dates that span 0-1 years, 0-3 years, dead by 11, 15, 22, 30, etc. It's quite obvious that this pandemic is a tool to keep people from asking why Hunter Biden FaceTimed a 14 year old Chinese girl while naked and smoking crack. Ghislaine Maxwell also just had 400 pages of court documents unsealed detailing her exploits along with those of Jeffrey Epstein. I'm glad my grandparents aren't alive to see this!

[allenlincoln]

I live in a city with over a million people in it, and a ton of people are freaking out over the fact that "OVER 300 PEOPLE HAVE DIED HERE!" It has to be all caps to catch the panicked nature of these people. So, a city of over a million people needs to be shut down because a little over 300 people have died? And locking everything down, closing public parks, shutting down public transit for a month, mandatory masks, and all the rest of it, doesn't go far enough because a few hundred people died?

Most of whom were residents in nursing homes, and I hate to say it, but people who end up there don't last long anyway. By all means, we need to fix how they are run; but if this is a pandemic to people, I shudder to think what will happen when public health breaks down in a real fashion....

[lp9]

Oh, I missed this post the other day! The neighborhood you describe sounds exactly like my husband's hometown (in Michigan). It's so soul-sucking. We can feel the energy draining from us every time we visit, as soon as the farmland starts to be swallowed up by subdivision after subdivision after strip mall after strip mall. The people we know living that life seem to be incredibly unhappy. Their whole life is work and traveling to kids' activities.

In some ways, I currently live in similar setting with regards to the people. We're in one of those coastal elite bubbles; in a small duplex on the edges of a fancy, historic neighborhood in a big East Coast city, but one that's been sliding down from its peak for decades. The aesthetics are much better - I get to look at actual Victorian houses and tons of massive trees - but the people are in many ways the same. At first, our neighbors were thrilled to have extra time with their kids, but now they're all drifting back to over-scheduling. I've been quite frustrated that the very cheap park rec leagues for kids are all cancelled, but the super expensive travel team leagues are all happening. So here it's like the more well-off families are pushing regulations on others (we have mask mandates, limited restaurant capacities, etc.), but picking and choosing what regulations apply to them.

We just try to get out of Dodge whenever we have a chance. Luckily my parents live on a farm in a different, less regulated state. We either go there as a family, or send the kids up to have some freedom.