Kimberly Steele

 

They gave me three cards.

The tree-letter they gave me symbolizing the Past was Onn or Community well-dignified.  The plant originally associated with Onn is Gorse, but as Gorse is not common to my area of the Upper Midwest, I have replaced it with the native plant Monarda or Bee Balm, a favorite of pollinators and human gardeners alike.  

Most of us have seen the breakup of one or more of our communities in the last 20 - 40 years, with especially marked disintegration since February 2020.  I am no exception.  I grew up in the 70s on a block where everyone knew each other.  I considered my neighbors, who consisted of older semi-retired couples and young couples either had children or planned to do so, as extended family members.  We thought nothing of giving each other spare keys just in case we locked ourselves out of our own homes.  There was a thing called Neighborhood Watch.  Those who were part of it put a little sign in the window designating it as a place to go just in case some creep in a van offering candy decided to lurk in our cloistered enclave.  Every year, the elementary school put out a self-published, mimeographed address book of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every person in school as well as the teachers and principal.  In other words, there was a sense of community that did not survive into the modern day.  

Tales of My Misspent Youth

I knew the halcyon days of 70s-early 80s community were done and over with around the time I quit my local teacher’s association after approximately six years of membership.  Hoping to prove my competence, I took on the duty of administering music theory testing for my local chapter.  An average of 300 students took the test per year and it was my unpaid job to organize a venue, testing, and grading among the other teacher-volunteers.  Many tears were shed as I came to the realization that the organization was sucking me dry.  it all came to a head when a particularly entitled teacher expected me to put 21 of her students through the test without any exchange of work while she and her husband went on vacation over the winter break.  She left a salty “How dare you!” voicemail that I have since forgiven but I will never forget.  Her Boomer outrage was one of my first object lessons in the predicament of the Professional Managerial Class, a set of people who want it all but who aren’t happy no matter how much they’ve got.  Had she been the only one who had tried her stunt, I might still be in the organization today.  She was far from the only one.

When I went vegan in July 2010, I found myself absorbed by a new, burgeoning community of animal rights activists.  This group had plenty of problems, but overall there was great camaraderie, especially locally.  I organized vegan potlucks, holiday gatherings, and even a charity vegan bake sale one year.  The juggernaut created by my group and others was enough to get plant-based burgers and other options on the menu of several major fast food chains.  Celebrities, eager to virtue signal, adopted veganism as a diet and soon realized that for a large number human beings, eating loads of plants can easily lead to better digestion, immunity, and the reversal of supposedly incurable chronic diseases.  Veganism made major inroads onto the health scene, with documentaries like Forks Over Knives, Cowspiracy, and What the Health skewering Big Pharma and yanking the curtain off its incestuous relationship with Big Agriculture and Big Government.  That’s why nobody was more surprised than I was when my former allies in the vegan scene went running with open arms to embrace unhealthy masking and Big Pharma’s latest cash cow, the MRNA inoculation in the guise of a vaccine.  People who I thought were made of stronger and better stuff sucked up what I thought was blatant hysteria — better mask and vaxx or you’ll show yourself to be a Trump supporter!  The vegan community has been blown to shreds over this issue. 

I was one of the lucky ones, for at least I did not have to come home to a spouse who wanted me to submit my body to medical experimentation.  I know plenty of people who are living with someone who volunteered for the Frankenlab Jab.  Members of my own family have gotten it.   The Plandemic has rudely ripped out much of the tolerant complacency that glued families and communities together: that’s what I think my Ogham were trying to say with Onn or Community representing a major factor of our collective past.

The second or Situation card symbolizing the present day is Tinne or Defense ill-dignified.  In the old system, Tinne is attributed to Holly, which is one and the same as the parasitic winter plant that climbs oak trees in Europe.  I have only seen holly growing on an oak once in my life, and someone had cultivated it in their yard and had to point it out.  Around my area of the Northern Illinois prairie, we have a common tree called Eastern Cedar.  The Eastern Cedar is not a true cedar, but like holly, it is evergreen and prickly.  

Just When You Thought It Was Safe…

Defense is a difficult balance, and my Ogham say our current approach to it is decidedly imbalanced.  it is easy to have two kinds of imbalance at once: both too much and too little defense.  

Defense is often imaginary.  The mask, like a toddler’s talismanic stuffed toy, is an imaginary defense.  It is proven not to work on the physical plane.  Whether or not those still wearing the mask realize it, they are engaging in superstition.  The MRNA vaccine is also superstition, and a vastly more harmful one than masks at that.  The mask wearer is in the same unenviable frame of mind as a compulsive hand washer.  The compulsive hand washer lives in fear of touch, wary of pathogens that will surely invade the sanctum of his body.  Meanwhile, his hands crack and bleed and he is ironically more prone to scary pathogens by virtue of a dampened immune system from over-cleanliness and the compromised skin of his fingers and palms.  

We live in an age where safety has been dramatically misunderstood.  I often think of the perfectly-titled 1995 art film Safe, where Julianne Moore plays a suburban housewife and mother named Carol White who becomes withdrawn into a hypochondriac’s world of allergies and sensitivities.  In the film, Carol’s idyllic existence of exercise classes, lunches with the girls, and gardening is disrupted when a home renovation triggers the symptoms of a mystery disease.  Carol suffers in isolation until she goes on an expensive retreat to Wrenwood, a community of other mystery sensitivity/allergy disease sufferers, and quickly becomes a devotee of the community’s charismatic leader.   Meanwhile, her body wastes away and her family have no choice but to abandon hope that she will return to them.

There’s a meme that says “I don’t want to give up on anyone, but if you think you are going to be killed by fresh air, sunlight, and hugs, we might have to move forward without you.”  I think those of us who did not lose our minds over the Plandemic got the memo about it being political/fake when hugging became a radical act.  Safety is never guaranteed on the Meat Plane.  That’s not how it works here.  There are special bubbles where the privileged can retreat, and they can pretend all they want that they are protected while they stew in their own misery; safety is still only an illusion.  The spoiler alert is that nobody gets out of this incarnation alive, and fear is no way to live.

I Know Things Now

The third card my Ogham give me in the much-anticipated Future position is Phagos or Teaching well-dignified.  Phagos is symbolized both in the old Ogham and my new one as the Beech tree, a tree that loves liminal spaces like bogs and riversides and that can grow to staggering heights.  The bark of the beech used to be made into paper, which is to my mind a further hint to its educational signature.  In my Ogham, Phagos is a card of mastery of a mental plane concept or concepts well enough to teach it.  For instance, I am a music theory expert.  The litmus test of my mastery is my ability to hear a tune or a harmony or both and to be instantly able to put it into sheet music notation.  Mastery is not confined to academic disciplines such as music theory: many people (not me) are masters at reading the emotional subtexts of other people.  One can also be a master in a negative, life-destroying way, for instance the narcissist who is a master at making others fearfully do her bidding.  

For Phagos to apply to a collective is a fortunate omen.  Well-dignified, it means that we are going to get over the aforementioned humps of misunderstanding and ignorance.  The trend of the veil of bullcrap being lifted will continue and the masses will belatedly understand that the government did not have public health and well-being in mind when they decided to overreact big time to a seasonal flu with sketchy origins.  For those outside certain salary class rogue states such as Britain and Canada, life is about to mostly return to the Old Normal.  Panic-stirring is already being rehashed as the Delta Variant, just as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are being vindicated by one half of the population and eagerly restricted by the powers who realize they’re about to lose profits because of their use.  My Ogham say that the difference is that people are finally onto the grift.  I know my group of 3300 members, Speakeasy Illinois, is full of Illinoisans with no intention of participating in future lockdowns.  Any future bioweapon released by the Chinese government with US government assistance will have to kill far more than 1% to have any chance at success.  If and when that happens, scaremongering propagandists will face the uphill battle of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Those still listening to the propaganda will have to face the inevitable music of the MRNA vaccine’s side effects, which look to be building a small apocalypse that hints at being the next Thalidomide.  

The Idea Virus

One of the main reasons I blog is because I have come to a limited understanding that ideas I put out there might act like viruses.  My husband has put a few memes into circulation and though he's had no financial compensation for them, he has watched his ideas parroted by mainstream media and therefore come full circle back to their originator in him.  I saw with veganism that a catchy phrase or a salient bit of logic easily defeated the opposing side whereas the wall of text and cited references to studies failed time and again to reach anyone outside the confines of Veganville.  I have put the idea out there that masks are symbolic (like a Swastika to a Nazi) with no purpose outside of the astral plane in a couple of essays.   I have mentioned that I believe masks are Satanic -- meaning they symbolize a specific form of demonic infestation of the Left and that their symbolism should be apparent to those who believe they worship God, especially those who belong to churches that enforce/enforced masking.  

I garden not just for enjoyment but to inspire other people to garden, including guerrilla gardening and indoor gardening.  These days more than ever, it is crucial to live by example and not just as a fan of the way you'd like to be.  Phagos speaks of people picking up some of the old ways of appropriate tech.  Our era is going to mirror the 1970s in fuel shortages and price spikes, so we might as well lean into other 70s tropes like growing enough tomatoes in one's yard to supply a small city, tinkerers tinkering with DIY off-grid power experiments and solar cookers, and neighbors who know each other by name and have a spare set of your keys just in case. 

My Ogham seem to think that sanity will prevail.  That’s the Ogham for you.  They are much like a gentle parents.  At any rate, my fingers are crossed that they are right.

The New Useless Eaters

To protect a sliver of the elderly via dubious methods of solitary confinement in nursing homes and hospitals (a.k.a. forcing them to die alone because the State has clandestinely labelled them as Useless Eaters), the government has collapsed the world economy, driving millions into poverty and causing third world starvation. Back in the first world, suicide and domestic abuse statistics are skyrocketing, crime in the cities is ballooning, businesses like mine are folding, and unemployment is off the charts. The only people who are still doing well are the Professional Managerial Class and their one percent rulers, smugly virtue signaling from on high. They are, for now, still making plenty of money, happily sitting at home as their children muddle through online lessons at school, some more proficiently than others. Jeff Bezos is nearly a trillionaire. In Wuhan, the economy has never been better and they’re partying mask-free like it’s 1999. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving.

Psychotic Break

Despite a fortune seemingly cemented in place that heavily indicates a few more years of a communist Chinese feeding frenzy disguised as monarchy, the Professional Managerial Class is in the midst of a psychotic break. They are the spoiled children that got everything they wanted for Christmas and then found that none of those toys filled the gaping pit of emptiness inside. They were mentally ill to begin with (I’m not supposed to use that terminology according to the Social Justice movement, because I could hurt the feelings of schizophrenics) and that mental illness is worsening by the hour. The preferred leftist outcome of the 2020 American presidential election was supposed to heal all wounds — Facebook and Twitter still ring with calls for unity while spewing vitriol at anyone who disagrees with shutdowns and masks or is of the wrong skin color — but it is clear to see the wounds are still there, itching and seeping under a thin bandage. The PMC acts no saner than it did in 2016 when the Orange Man played salvage shop and began to drain the swamp. Now, with Orange Man apparently vanquished, the Left is doing what it does best: eating its own. The mainstream media does what it can to stick fingers in the dam of evidence against its drooling, senile, child molesting President Elect, but there’s only so much you can do on a slow news day. The facts on the ground are that the President Elect is easy to loathe, and since the mainstream media has pushed nothing but loathing for the last five years, old patterns die hard. Trump was the goose that laid the Cheeto-colored eggs and he’s no longer laying. Of course all eyes now turn from him to the pathetic travesty about to take the Iron Throne.

Enter Shame

The PMC have a problem with shame, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. I know this because I was born and raised as a PMC. I know how they operate underneath the hood.

How Freaking Double Dog Dare You!

The Greta Thunberg phenomenon is meant to shame us all into accepting the young scold's warped vision of green utopia.  Thunberg, in her ocean-sailing, vegan convenience food eating, autistic naïveté said "How Dare You!" without the faintest understanding of her own hypocrisy.  The trouble with shame is that it cannot be effectively dealt by those who do not live as they preach.  Nearly starving yourself to death at age ten because you are a spoiled brat is not the same thing as the ten year old who picks up trash in the forest preserve because he wants to inspire others to conserve its beauty and majesty.  If the trash collector kid talks about conservation, I'm willing to listen.  If a rich kid who accepted a "free" Tesla who played hooky from school and made her mother quit a once-in-several-lifetimes career of professional opera singing because of whatever piss was infecting her cornflakes that week, I am not inclined to lend such a person my ears.

The Burden and Karma of Responsibility

On one of JMG’s blogs, I had a Covid fearmonger trying to go around with me because I danced around the idea of the s word that rhymes with blame. Her fixation was on the idea of responsibility, how I had better not consider her responsible if I infected grandma with COVID by not self-isolating and wearing a mask until my own natural death. She (or he) displayed a transparent yearning for me to feel shame for being wrongity-wrong, which I would of course feel when my loved ones caught COVID and died horrible failed double lung transplant related deaths. I found this interesting because of the shadow being projected.

The thing is, the PMC and all of the fearmongers who still encourage lockdowns and masks are directly responsible for the consequences of the lockdowns. The reason I have not played nicely with lockdowns and masks from the beginning is because I do not want the karma of those who have blindly followed orders all this time. My ill-wisher is already responsible for the death of 11 year old Adan Llanos, who shot himself during a virtual school session. She is responsible for the terror of my elderly neighbor, a kind old man who died surrounded by strangers in a hospital bed a few weeks ago instead of his wife and grown children. She is responsible for the droves of addicts who fell back into addiction, given nothing but idle time and no support groups. She is responsible for the small towns that lost their only profitable company because of lack of demand and all of the families thrown into poverty as a result.  She is responsible for a billion missed rites of passage: weddings, proms, funerals, mitzvahs, quinceaneras, graduations, first kisses.  She is responsible for her own cowardly escapism into the Petit Trianon of Netflix and takeout food while others literally starved.  I believe she will pay for it someday, though it won’t be up to deplorable like me to punish her.  Justice for her is up to the gods and I am not privy to viewing their schedules in advance.

You Watching Me Watching Me

The PMC woman was, like me, trained to be vain and to simultaneously deny that vanity as a sin. She is always picturing herself from an outsider’s view. We women are cultivated to view ourselves remotely from birth so that we can better compete with other women. The urge to compete is the urge to consume. Grasping why Madison Avenue would want us this way should be obvious. 

Postmodern Original Sin

Rich women are saddled with this self-viewing compulsion in the extreme. Being born rich means you will constantly percolate set ideas in your pretty head: that you don’t actually have the right to exist, that you are ugly, that you’re a parasite, a hustler, and a grifter because of the privileges you enjoy.  The Korean film about class warfare, Parasite, comes to mind: we are never explicitly told if the real parasites are the rich or the poor. 

The more privileges you enjoy, the more shame and guilt you must feel.  In order to consume more product to ostensibly better yourself, you are made to feel guilty and worthless, especially while young. Women have different reactions to being conditioned this way; most don’t think about it for one second and would blink at you stupidly if you pointed it out. For some, there is extreme dieting and dysmorphia, starving oneself to become perfect, beautiful, and therefore worthy of your status. For others, angrily inventing a list of oppressions to become a professional victim assuages the feeling of guilt. Some become party girls, attempting to have fun while becoming human tragedies of addiction and codependence. Rarely do they strike at the root, which is of course the way they were conditioned to (not) think.

My sister is a nurse in Texas. She had covid. These bull***t denier post don't help a single person. They do hurt many and possibly kill some. My sister is on the front line and paying the the price. I hope all you loud mouth cowards contract covid. Karma is a beautiful thing. If you do contract it and while you are coughing up your lungs while s***ing your petty brains out...please reread all your posts. A***oles.

This post is an absolute study in ignorance and making s*** up. Bravo!! 👏🏼👏🏼

All bull***t excuses. Every. Single. One.
Yes, they are sad things, but not one of them is a reason for not masking up.
If you don't want to wear a mask, stay out of stores. And if you can't wear one for the 20 minutes you need to be in a store, then seek mental help, and in the meantime, order curbside or delivery.

This is absurd, just STFU. Yes, I do shame people who don't wear masks, because f*** you selfish a***oles. This looks like something a Trump worshipper would post, in addition to a few other posts of yours in the last couple of months. Bye Felicia!!

The COVID mask does not serve its most obvious function, which is preventing suspended droplets of COVID-loaded bodily fluids from finding a contagious human target. COVID is endemic. I'm not going to explain what this means, because I am sure if you are reading this paragraph, you are already aware of how an endemic disease is the viral equivalent of wallpaper.

For those who wish to harass me like the examples above, I will warn you now that your entreaties won't be published here, so you will do best to take it elsewhere. Comments are fully moderated by me, filtered for profanity, and this site gathers the IP addresses of all who comment, whether I choose to publish them or not.

The mask and distancing that goes with it erects an astral plane barrier to prevent potential dissenters from communicating with other people. The mask isn't meant to prevent the spread of a virus so much as it is meant to prevent the spread of ideas. Masks are often compared to condoms: only icky, low class, date-rapist skeezeballs refuse to wear them.  As usual, wearing one signifies belonging to the middle and upper classes or at least aspiring to belong.  In the case of sex, as someone who grew up terrified of accidentally becoming pregnant, I know that abstinence is the only way of doing this between menarche and menopause. For mask-wearers, the ideal of abstinence has its direct parallel in mandatory stay at home orders.  If abstinence in the form of complete social isolation for everyone was the goal, they have done a remarkable job of achieving it in the last few months of cancelled gatherings.

The staunchest cheerleaders of mask-wearing and social distancing are natural introverts who fear other people, especially the working poor.  For them, social distancing was a welcome respite from being obliged to interact with low class strangers on a daily basis.  The mask keeps the dreaded Other far, far away from the fearful and their misanthropy.  The mask's double bonus is its function as a talismanic Binky.  The feeling of safety that the illusion of a masked face provides is more potent than its value as a face covering.  The mask is the molded plastic velociraptor that guards the terrified toddler from the Boogeyman he is certain lives in the bedroom closet.  The mask is the mark of lamb's blood on the doorframe to drive away the angel of death.  The mask is the hottest trend in superstition.

Speaking of death, you'll notice that one my detractors in the opening comments heartily wished it upon me and everyone who thinks like I do, which is a practice I do not reciprocate because nowadays I have an appreciation of the kind of karmic retribution it brings. The paranoia around COVID arises from the imbalanced fear of death that remains unexamined in our culture.  COVID primarily slays the elderly no matter what the mainstream corporate media tries to invent.  Instead of taking a cruel to be kind route and helping any elder drowning in their own fluids to an easy death of opium sleep bliss, our society chooses to isolate them in ICU wards while frantically inflating their lungs so they can succumb to the Reaper while exclusively surrounded by "essential" workers, which is to say they will die alone.  Meanwhile, nurses and doctors hold corpses aloft while dancing in choreographed Tik Tok routines through mostly empty hospital wards. One might almost dare to think they have plenty of time on their hands.

The end goal of mask enforcers is a permanent government funded welfare state of mandatory shelter in place.  In this Marxist welfare utopia, nobody has to work because Progress will deliver the technology in order to feed, shelter, and clothe everyone.  The salary class had it the easiest during the shelter in place orders in March and April, and their naive assumption is that such a state of affairs can go on forever just as long as it is applied with a one size fits all brushstroke.  This is evidenced in the "order curbside or delivery" comment.  This is Marie Antoinette asking why the peasants don't just eat cake.  It presumes the restaurant is kept open because of endless government cash, that the home will not be lost to foreclosure or eviction, and that the person living inside has the money to order expensive take out and grocery delivery.  Marie Antoinette does not understand that real people live outside Versailles and they must work in order to eat.  For the antisocial corporate drone marooned at home with her computers and smart devices, it seems like nobody should be permitted to gather in public ever again because she personally does fine in social isolation.  In her mind, nobody needs to go to church or see a movie in a theater because they can have online worship services and Amazon Prime Video.  The top-riding Marie Antoinettes of the Coronapocalypse want to create the world of Wall-E with slightly less junk, though it will be the same amount of junk soon with all of the take out containers and Amazon trinket packaging piling up.  

Virtue

It is interesting to watch people pretend to hate a situation they brought about out of political necessity.  The panic over the current administration lasting four more years is thick.  Though I have never revealed my 2016 vote, one commenter above paints me as a Trump supporter with gleeful spite.  The people who accuse me of being a Trump lover (I don't honestly give Trump much thought) doth protest too much.  I think they secretly love Trump.  Their hatred of them belies Freudian sexual turbulence.  They sincerely believe they hate him but I think they're more hot and bothered by Trump than simply bothered.  

The Left has a pathological need to feel victimized and oppressed.  Trump does the job nicely, doesn't he?  The revival of The Handmaid's Tale uncovered leftist longing for a Big Daddy Christian takeover that would make liberal women feel as oppressed as authentic victims of religious male oppression, such as Muslim women in Somalia.  Leftist women had the gall to uniform themselves in red Handmaid's Tale outfits to protest Trump's locker room banter about grabbing women by their crotches.  Meanwhile, the tragedies wrote themselves as trafficking gangs targeted white girls in Britain and Islamists hung gay men on public city walls while Joe Biden had yet to be implicated by Tara Reade.  Since they are not personally oppressed, the tormented black, white, and multiracial souls who wear masks must invent their tormentors, whether it's a disease or a president.

Progress, the true religion of the affluent, brought a longed for Apocalypse.  Like Progress itself, the Apocalypse in the form of COVID did not live up to expectations and had to undergo much fluffing and stuffing to appear like it was arriving on schedule.  Materialist Science's Coronapocalypse, although disappointing, was good enough for mask-wearers who needed to believe in the Narrative.  Those like me who don't go along with the Narrative are shunned as Deplorables.  Only a Deplorable would reject the Marxist welfare state utopia.  Only a Deplorable wouldn't be concerned about what the neighbors think.

Charging Away On Revolving Credit

The reason masks are pushed as the New Normal is a rational fear of accumulated blowback. Just as a twenty-something chases more degrees via grad school in order to delay the first of many inevitable invoices for student loan debt from arriving, the mask-wearer seeks to delay the tipping point when the masses discard the New Normal. Such a reckoning must be avoided at all costs, lest those who were disenfranchised start thinking about whom they should hold accountable for lost time, lost income, and forever lost connections with loved ones.  

Though they have their virtues, Millennials are a soft, easily led, placid group with deep reservoirs of entitled rage.  Without realizing it, they have pushed the cost of their hysterical rage primarily upon Generation Z, which is at this time too young to marinate in the hatred of their parents' generation.  Boomers are already hated by Millennials, but this will pale in comparison to the hatred Generation Z will feel towards Millennials when Generation Z comes into its own.  The mask, like pastel rainbow wall art and Netflix binges, is at risk of becoming a Millennial moniker: a symbol for the scaredy-cats who ruined lives because they couldn't admit that their political side was losing for solid reasons.  I'm not sure how this will look to the youth who bore the brunt of Coronapocalypse in twenty or thirty years, but I cannot imagine it will be flattering.