Kimberly Steele (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kimberlysteele) wrote2021-09-15 12:06 pm
kimberlysteele) wrote2021-09-15 12:06 pm
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The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter Six: Vacuity and Substance
The scene: Inside Thornton's (gas station) in the suburbs of Chicago.
Her: You need to put on a mask!
Me: I don't do that.
Her: There's a MANDATE! You have to wear a mask!
Me: I know about the mandate. I'm not going to wear a mask. Do you want me to pay for my gas or not?
Her: (blood boiling) YOU... You check out with her... gestures to the young woman behind plexiglass at the register.
A pleasant transaction ensued. I gave the cashier my money, she made change, I thanked her, and I was on my merry way.
Sun Tzu says whoever occupies the battleground first and awaits the enemy will be at ease; whoever occupies the battleground afterward and must race to the conflict will be fatigued.
When I encounter a maskturbator like the gas station manager at Thornton’s, unlike the maskturbator, I am calm and ready. I know the battleground, I understand exactly why I am at war, and I am ready to be hauled off and murdered if necessary because of the courage of my convictions. Death means nothing to me. I am not afraid of it. The gas station manager had no such advantages. She was a terrified, cowed, petty dictator clinging to what little vestiges of power were afforded to her via a mandate. I can almost guarantee she hates her job and everything about it, including customers like me who stand up for their Constitutional rights. She is not ready to die and unlike me, she has made no peace with death, otherwise she would not wear a talismanic binky on her face because the government tells her it will prevent a pathetically non-lethal disease.
The approach outlined above, despite its innocuousness, is a way of forcing the enemy out into the open. We have gotten to a point where showing one’s naked face in a gas station is an act of civil disobedience against the tyrannical State. By demonstrating to the petty tyrant of Thornton’s I would not be moved, she was forced to expose the weakness of her cherished mandate.
I formed a group in early 2021 on Facebook called Speakeasy Illinois to support the owners of businesses and establishments like my own Kimberly Steele Studio that do not force anyone (employees or customers) to be injected with experimental gene modifiers or to wear masks. The group grew from 2 people in February to its current 4400 members today. The army I have amassed is mostly a secret one. The attacks are subtle and quiet. Members send reports from the front lines of which stores, gyms, and offices are face-friendly and which are not. We have our own bits of dialect: “patriot” or “patriotic” means there is zero pressure to mask or vax. FD means face diaper, which is lingo for the mask.
We strike when the enemy least expects us — one of the primary rules of Speakeasy Illinois is to avoid maskturbator/vaxturbator establishments in favor of their patriotic counterparts. Our main weapon against the proto-communists is to ghost their stores and ditch their venues. Nothing scares a maskturbator who complies with government orders (hoping to trade what freedoms they have left) like an empty house. Though many of my soldiers have wanted me to help them create harassment campaigns of going into mask-insistent stores and screaming “you’d better take my money!” it’s not an approach I endorse.
Ghosting their venues works like a charm. There is a theater where I live that puts on live musicals. Their most recent stunt has been to insist that every person walking in the door shows proof of vaccination. Their strategy has gone over like a lead balloon and now they find themselves struggling to put butts in seats. To pretend that it isn’t happening, they have resorted to giving tickets away for free in order to put bodies in chairs. Despite being in a state run by a lunatic leftist emperor-governor, we have put them in a position of either stopping their vaccine nonsense or going out of business. Sadly it looks like they will choose the latter.
This is what maskturbator panic looks like
“If I do not want to engage in combat, even though I merely draw a line on the ground and defend it, he will not be able to engage me in battle because we thwart his movements.”
The line in the sand I draw and encourage my Speakeasy infantry to draw is one of politeness. No matter what the enemy spews, no matter how rabid or stupid they act, we don’t sink to their level. We hold our heads high and proud. If the maskturbator absolutely insists, we loudly say “NO SALE!” and leave the establishment, preferably with a smile. Had the ridiculous Thornton’s manager called the police on me, I would have politely stepped outside the store, waited for the police, and then handed them the cash or card to take inside to the register person. Had the police arrested me and hauled me off to jail, I would let them make an example of me in order to use the outrage to further my cause. I am always ready to strike where they are vulnerable, shifting like water to avoid the substantial and strike the vacuous.
Our members show up in stores constantly without masks, which gives us the advantage of hollowing out the enemy via amorphous psychological warfare. Courage is infectious. My members constantly report others taking off their masks because they see us doing it in public. The enemy only knows how to hate and fear. They destroy and suffer the blowback of destruction; we build and enjoy the effects of construction.
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I guess I should consider myself blessed in that things have kind of returned to normal where I live; which is in a PMC neighborhood within fairly blue rust belt city, within a purple region, within a consistently blue state. Luckily blue collar people and other practical-skilled workers outnumber PMCs in the metro area overall.
Thankfully our statewide mask mandate expired back in May and hasn't been renewed since. Now businesses merely 'suggest' that people wear masks, i.e. anyone with half a brain ignores the suggestion and goes maskless in public places. Still lots of maskurbating, fear-driven, and virtue-signalling sheep though and I can safety guess they're all thoroughly vaxxed. I haven't put on a mask in public since the day the statewide mandate expired, and there's no way in hell I'm letting any gene-editing serum needle get anywhere close to my body.
I've been grocery shopping (among other ordinary errands) maskless since May and no one has given me any trouble or even any funny looks. Yesterday I dined out for the first time since the panicdemic started. My brother and I walked into a neighborhood restaurant, maskless of course. None of the staff were wearing masks; very few of the patrons were either. We sat down, had a very pleasant meal, was treated well by the establishment, no muss, no fuss. It felt like normal. Let's see how long this lasts. Our new governor (very recently assuming office to take the place of the meglomaniacal psycho-creep who was just forced to step down) could institute a new mask order at any time she feels like it and all the obedient sheep will dutifully comply.
I'm soon selling the house and moving to an outlying area where right-leaning and libertarian values are more the norm, in anticipation of our hopelessly-corrupt and compromised state government going full authoritarian again; at least in a less s-lib/PMC area, local officials and the people themselves are magnitudes less likely to comply with draconian mandates, much less enforce them or tattle-tale on neighbors and businesses for failing to comply. I really hope I don't have to end up moving out-of-state altogether. Western NY is my home and I really don't want to flee like a coward with tail tucked between legs. I think this is a modern American problem in general; when the going gets tough, people just up and run to somewhere else instead of making a concerted effort to try and fix the problem locally.
BTW, I absolutely love what you've been doing in your area. the "Speakeasy" name is very powerful and carries multiple meanings. Even though we don't have it so bad here (not at the moment, at least), I still think it might be a good idea to help create public awareness and help sympathetic people in my area avoid maskturbator/vaxturbator establishments in favor of their patriotic counterparts, as you put it above. Right now, as far as I can tell it's only the real bougie-trendy/hipster businesses that are still all-in on this insanity, but it would still be nice to develop a basic idea of where NOT to patronize.
Sorry for the run-on rant. I just don't have very many people I can talk about this stuff with in confidence.
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THIS. That was my equivalent to creepy voices in the head - to get a spate of news articles and divinations that made it look like a really good idea to move to a specific town that appeared to already be the exact type of town those of us here working in the community groups have been trying to make this one.
I have a deep personal bond with the land here, my home and garden, and even the town... though I would currently welcome many of the townspeople to get in the sea, I generally adore many of the others. The lady at the tea store is the funniest person alive; I laughed so hard at her angioscopy story I had to lean against the counter. That is a serious gift. So if Something(s) wanted to put me in the classic Jane double bind (Barenaked Ladies song lyrics: "Jane says that cowards stay and traitors run") that would do 'er.
So I am very carefully following the rules of engagement behind the most politically correct, covid-rule following, hostile to anyone who is not extraordinarily wealthy and old lines imaginable - because like hell they will take this place. The problem for them will be that they don't actually know what the rules of engagement are, though they think they wrote them.
When I was in middle school, I was very frustrated by the fact that people did not seem to follow the rules, which I tried to follow very diligently. So, I paid very close attention to the actual rules that I though seemed to be being applied - not the ones people said they use (like, it's bad to bully), but the real ones that incorporate what is and is not allowed based on various differentials of social standing, and then wrote those down to see if those rules made more sense. Since we are all, supposedly, no longer in junior high, there are of course much larger rulebooks at play, and it will be interesting to see which of us figured those out better, eh?
(Also, OMG, the play is Kinky Boots, my sides...)
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