In time
Among the advantages of major cardiac surgery — in addition to the marvellous paranoid-but-amusing dreams you get, and time off work — is a more fatalistic and accommodating view of the squalor and wretchedness of one’s community (mostly outside the hospital). It is just as urgent as it seemed before, and likely going to Hell — but urgent for whom? And going to Hell on what schedule? One feels strangely aloof from the multiple crises, just as one is strangely attracted to the most transient surviving beauties.
I came out in an Ontario still “reeling” from the Batflu hysteria. The ability of politicians and their appointed public health experts to maintain the panic, and spread it through a majority of the population, is impressive, in a way. Their destruction of the Canadian economy will have real consequences, even for them. But what can an individual do about it?
For in a formerly free country, “the peeple” have no say that is not manipulated, or ignored. The individual expecting justice will not find it when the monopolists of justice have no interest in allowing it.
The Batflu is the most current of public obsessions. From what I can see, the Chinese dictatorship is responsible both for how it was distributed, and how we should react to it through lockdowns. Yet the exercise was so successful (China comes out of it hardly damaged), that it will surely be the model for their future efforts.
But it isn’t the project that will send us to Hell. The modern world predates the Red Chinese tyranny by several centuries, and did little beyond making very evil regimes possible. The opposition to them is subverted by the growing number of glib distractions also supplied by the modern world.
Against which, the power of the individual is reduced to the farcical and counter-productive. We have only that, and God, with us; that God in whom the modern disbelieves, and mocks in most characteristic gestures. From this side, the prospect of recovery is hopeless.
Whereas, from the other side, in which the emptiness of the godless is visible, the agents of modernity are nothing. They perish. We can reasonably expect God, with his servants, to prevail in time.