kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with fear

True confessions: I still have Netflix. To be specific, my husband still subscribes to Netflix and I occasionally watch a movie or a television show on my computer from it as I do not own an actual TV. At any given moment, Netflix has at least fifty zombie-themed shows on it. If I subscribed to other streaming services, I’d have my choice of several hundred zombie movies and television series with which to waste a chunk of my time, and this is to say nothing about the plethora of zombie novels I could be reading or the zombie video games I could be playing. Zombies are such a dominating theme in our culture that it begs the question: Why is our culture so obsessed with the undead? What are we trying to work out of our collective system?

Fear of Death

I state the obvious (plus I sound like a broken record) when I say our culture suffers from an excessive fear of death. The reason most people cannot calmly and rationally process natural death and become complete emotional basket cases when presented with random or unnatural death is twofold: there is a general disbelief in reincarnation and because of it, most people have many dramatic misconceptions about the afterlife.

I didn’t believe in reincarnation myself until five years ago. It’s only due to my study of occultism that I’ve arrived at my current set of beliefs. When I was raised as a casual Christian, I held the equally casual belief that a life of good works would mean my immortal soul would spend an eternity in heaven and a life of debasement would mean an eternity in hell; a binary. I didn’t honestly believe in either one despite having an extremely vivid imagination. By the time I reached my late teens, it was obvious that hell was immediate and all around me in the form of severe depression, night terrors, and suicidal ideations. Christians and Christianity had zero remedies for my depression or nocturnal attacks from the creatures of my “imagination”, which of course I was told to dismiss as my own brain playing tricks on me. Imagine if I had been shown how to pray by an actual devotee of the Lord Jesus instead of being feared and hated for dabbling in witchcraft in a desperate bid for magical defense. Alas, it was not to be, and there were no competent witches leading the way either. By age twenty, I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became an atheist out of disgust and frustration. As an atheist, I faced the idea of death as an eternal void. From nothing I came and to nothing I would return. I was not bothered by such an idea, in fact, I welcomed it. No pain, no joy, just nonexistence on all levels.

The zombie’s dead-but-not-really-dead state reveals confusion about what happens after death. Instead of letting go of a deceased person’s mortal shell so their higher bodies can rest before reincarnating into new material selves, there is a fear that their spirits will become wraiths clinging to the mortal form shortly before being returned to the endless atheist’s void that lurks behind the Christian’s binary belief in eternal heaven or hell. The real death of Christianity happened when Christians began questioning eternal heaven and hell: to do so was a tacit acknowledgment of the potential superiority of Buddhism and Hinduism, at least in regards to beliefs about the afterlife.

Profit and Loss

Somewhere along the way, western culture lost the plot and let stigma about death run wild. The Irish wake and sitting Shiva were antiquated customs before the salary class lost its damn mind over Covid 19, nowadays, the suggestion of such practices as good ways of processing grief would get you laughed out of the socially-distanced Zoom room. Speaking of manufactured isolation, it’s no surprise that doctors and nurses who should have known better than to fiddle while Rome burned expressed their pathological need for peer approval by using their copious free time to choreograph complex dance routines in empty hospital wards, especially when said hospital wards were allegedly overburdened with Corona patients. At this very day and hour, medical professionals continue to make money hand over fist for each new patient admitted with the label Covid 19 victim stamped on his paperwork. The unaddressed stigma surrounding death has become so acute, much of the world has allowed the travesty of forcing those who are close to death to face it alone, or worse, surrounded by forcibly-vaccinated strangers who may or may not look after their needs between TikTok twerking parades.

Pod People

Scratch the surface of Resident Evil or The Walking Dead and the truth bubbles to the surface: hell is other people. The zombie trope comes from the fear that other people cannot be reasoned or empathized with and that the only remedy for their kind of stupid is an axe between the eyes. Atheism was satisfying to me because it engaged my inner serial-killer misanthropy. I wasn’t worried about being judged for what I felt, said, and did because there were no judges. It’s incredibly easy to feel like one of the smartest people on Earth as an atheist. The atheist is the ultimate Libertarian. Zombie movies are scary because they are reliably about mass infestations. The whole world of doofus poop-for-brains goes against the hero and her band of plucky survivors.

The above is why I say leftists are playing with fire as they try to usher in communism. They have given the average casual Christian and atheist every reason to believe himself a plucky survivor on an onrushing zombification of his part of the world. Leftists, in their Piscean fashion, are struggling to instill a hive mind, hegemonic, unified way of life. They are doing this utilizing most of the key features of National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism. In the eyes of the right, they are communist zombies: unthinking, dangerous, and diseased. I personally maintain that Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the Clinton family, and various other rich leftist figureheads will go to the modern equivalent of the guillotine in my lifetime. I don’t wish for this to happen because I don’t do that anymore. It’s just what I see as the logical progression of events when you inflame a bunch of average people to imagine themselves as heroic defenders against the zombie horde.

The Boy Who Cried Apocalypse

Another trope getting an ample workout these days is the Apocalypse narrative. In both the film and the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the world has become a hellish battle for survival for a seemingly-chosen few who have kept their souls and morality intact. Everyone else in the nearly lifeless hellscape of (possible) nuclear winter does things like rape little boys and eat newly delivered babies. The Road is not a story for those with weak stomachs!

It’s much easier to see one’s enemies as slavering, cannibalistic villains instead of considering them as flawed human beings capable of a spectrum of goods and evils. The Apocalypse narrative frames existence as Us Vs. Them, the Saved Vs. the Zombie Horde that’s headed to hell quite soon.

Enter a little boy born in 1983 named Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov, who died at age 11 from leukemia and prophesied the zombie apocalypse. The child, who was nearly canonized for his powers of prophecy and healing, said there would be:

global passports for the population, which will look like little grey plastic cards; in order to obtain this card, people will have to subject their right hand and forehead under machines which will mark them with the number (666). This was a warning that under no circumstances should anyone accept this number or mark, because this act will never be forgiven by God.

I have mentioned before that Christianity in its death throes is using Pedogate and the globalist conspiracy concept to use as a much needed adversary with which to strengthen itself. The leftist powers that be are not doing themselves any favors by calling their newest injectable enzymes “Luciferase”, despite their bioluminescent properties.

Only time will tell how the zombie trope will continue to act itself out in real life. Surely it’s a case of art imitating life at this point and not the other way around.

I'm putting off my usual post this week, which was the Seven Deadly Sins series, for a more pressing topic. I suppose most of you have read the debacle that is JMG's astrological forecast for the Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2021. If you haven't, to be terse, he describes it as "The most relentlessly malefic mundane chart I have ever studied". In a word, yikes.

As I stated in a recent Dreamwidth post and accompanying video, I believe that a Biden Presidency will usher in a Great Depression. Unfortunately, if Trump gets in, my Ogham (which are now pointing to the unlikelihood of a Trump 2020 - 2024 presidency, by the way) are predicting civil war, most likely in the form of insurgency and unorganized, bitter, guerrilla, small-scale flash points. I fear civil war, but the thing I fear far more is a second Great Depression. Frankly, I'm not ready. I'm quite scrappy, and yes, I have realized that our civilization is on the downward slope of Hubbert's curve for a while now, but until eight months ago, I did not have the free time to learn to do the laundry list of homesteady things that will be the bridge into the deindustrial future.

I'm still trying to process my anger at the people who have bought into the lockdowns and therefore helped to extend and worsen them. This is especially bitter as the holidays arrive. In my opinion, COVID hysteria was yet another botched attempt to get the Orange Man out of the Whitehouse after the failure of #metoo, impeachment, and BLM riots to do the job. The oddest part of it is that the people who will cause the next Great Depression in the US, the Biden-supporting globalists, the so-called Progressives, and all those who bought into fear porn, will soon find their own unacknowledged privileges crumbling if mass financial disaster arrives. The Professional Managerial Class needs to be on suicide watch. Those who were the most fervent partakers in the circus of rackets that puffed up the economy over the last 50 or so years -- the sickcare industry, colleges/universities, infotainment, and insurance -- will suffer the most intensely as their way of life goes the way of the Ford Edsel. I don't get it.

I'm finding it hard to focus on the positive, and of course there is plenty of it. I no longer care about money. This was a lifelong challenge of mine that has been bested. I have almost zero money anxiety issues at this point; I can't be bothered to care. Not even if I go hungry or homeless. I'll do my best to stop hunger or homelessness from happening of course (I've got an indoor cat and at least 2 outdoor ones plus a husband that depends on me) but I certainly won't blame myself if I lose everything as I might have done before. The PMC I mentioned earlier, however, probably won't be so calm. They also have a great deal more to lose.

Let's look at my skills, shall we? I will show you mine if you will show me yours.

I can cook from scratch from almost nothing.

I don't have any emotional reactions to my bank account when it says I have $8 to my name or that I'm overdrawn.

I live in a tiny house that costs as little as humanly possible in a modest neighborhood. We don't do associations or their fees here.

I am a somewhat capable gardener and I saved seeds this year.

I don't bore easily and if the internet were shut down and I couldn't drive or go to work forever, I'd still have far too much to do in this lifetime.

I'm robustly healthy. I walked 8 miles for fun on my 47th birthday this year and barely felt it.

I am a writer and musician.

I am not in debt except for my mortgage.

Now let's look at my shortcomings:

I don't like sewing machines and I cannot knit or crochet to save my life.

I don't own a gun and I wouldn't trust my marksmanship if I did.

I live in an area that was first to lock down and will be on the front lines when the economy tanks. Said area is overrun with psychotic Professional Managerial Class types.

I don't have any savings; what little I was able to save was eaten by the first lockdown.

If everything goes to hell, I'm going to have to figure out how to move two pianos.

I have not grown beans, potatoes, hard shell squash, or cucumbers successfully at this time.

I know how to can but I have never canned by myself.

I may be healthy, but most of my loved ones are battling one or more chronic diseases.

I have studied herbalism intensely but I have not done much in the realm of herbalism.

So that's where I'm at. I am stockpiling supplies despite being in a bad financial position. My goal is to put away enough rice, beans, pasta, sugar, vegetable oil, and canned fruit to last my husband and I six months. I have already ordered seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds because seeds and plant starts were nearly impossible to get in spring 2020 in Illinois. I'm going to embark on soapmaking after Thanksgiving -- that's one I have put off for a small eternity despite possessing the necessary supplies. I'm planning for a lean, homespun Christmas. My loved ones will receive a motley assortment of handmade gifts of homemade soups, salad dressing, sweets, bath bombs, macrame, and perhaps some Dollar Tree toys, I hope that's good enough because it is already turning out to be an exceptionally lean year. And of course I'll be praying for all who ask me to pray on their behalf to the gods as well as performing Orphic Hymns every day as per usual on my Youtube channel.

The terrifying part for me is trying to keep my Studio up and running if poop is hitting the fan because of either Depression or civil insurgency. Fingers crossed that neither of those happen. I'm already thinking of setting up my subscription library in the much underused commercial space as I have enough books to begin, I think. Mainly, my goal of late is to do constructive things instead of wallowing in anger at the PMC for crushing my business and other businesses like it. Today I arranged over 30 pages of music for my sheet music store.

Please let me know your thoughts and what you guys are doing to prepare, if anything. Of course as always I could be wrong about what is coming -- I sincerely hope to be wrong! I thank you in advance for refraining from profanity in the comments.

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.