I’ve been watching in horror as the world loses its collective mind. I’m in horror because this pretty much means the end of things for many of us. We’re not going to survive the damage SARS-COV-2 is wreaking, and it’s a sobering thought. Earth’s finally found a cure for what’s ailing her, and we’re about to be “cured” out of existence.
But wait there’s hope. Only it won’t be like a proper prepper vision of the future, it’ll play out a bit differently. One way or another we’re screwed. Follow me on this scenario:
A few months ago the whole world went into lockdown. Prepper scenarios usually play out with a world war or some local (but ‘local’ meaning ‘widespread in our country’) outbreak / biowar / war. It generally involves one landmass or continent – and look! – SARS-COV-2 has managed to lock down a whole planet. Sometimes, ‘propper’ prepper scenarios involve an attack by alien forces – with SARS-COV-2, our best chance is for aliens to come rescue us…
THE WHOLE WORLD WENT INTO LOCKDOWN… Roll that thought around in your mind for a few minutes. The whole world. Is now on the brink of an “Us” extinction.
It’s just begun to affect me and my wife – we’re having our rental sold out from under us, because it’s just been discovered to have some serious cancer caused by water ingress, and the landlord is like anyone whose life is ruled by an economy, he can’t afford to do anything about that. If he did, heaven forbid, he’d lose money! OMD!
So he’s doing what every other debt-driven-economy-driven greedy bastard would do, and will try to sell the problem on to someone else.
Meanwhile, other landlords have all raised their rents for new renters because with the economic shut down, it was government edict that landlords couldn’t evict people for not paying rent if they had none to give. And finally – after a loooooong time more – it was decided that banks should also not pursue mortgages during this time. Pause was pressed.
But landlords are so invested in this debt economy that they’re pre-emptively raising rents so that they’ll be ahead in the next lockdown / press pause event. You can see the logic? I can’t. Making these pre-emptive plans shows that landlords are fairly certain (as are most people) that this current easing of restrictions is nowhere near the end of the harm that this virus will still cause. Making rents inaccessible to renters just means their properties’ll be lying empty.
Governments, in their eagerness to “get the economy going again” are admitting there will be an upturn in the number of infections. Tacitly they’re admitting that they’re willing to kill the people that all these new cases will inevitably generate. Just to “get the economy back on track.”
And there lies the the biggest problem, the thing that will cause more COVID19 deaths than all the deaths before, plus all the deaths from every other pandemic in the last century – adherence to a concept that never worked in the first place, has been hacked and chopped and changed in (unsuccessful) efforts to make it work, and which has actually landed us fair and square in the position we’re currently in.
Take this one thought home from this article if you want a take-home: Our governments are quite prepared to kill us in unimaginably large numbers as long as they can “keep the economy going.”
‘There will be outbreaks’: Morrison warns Australia as economy reopens
What a powerful mechanism for control this “economy” must be… And of course we know for a fact that this is true. If we are all born in debt (cf. we are all born in original sin, now doesn’t that sound familiar?) then we must all always be slaves to whomever we are in debt TO.
If there are suddenly more people in the world than “the economy” can support, then we know we can’t actually “grow” the economy because there are no resources to back up that growth. As the idea for the “economy” was altered and re-arranged, it finally became what it is today – a debt and market driven neoliberal capitalist economy. Only “debt driven” and “market driven” are important in that sentence fragment.
The only other thing to do is shrink the population until that economy balances again…
As we are seeing, people are quite happy to do extraordinary things for their communities, organising local delivery systems, willing to trade and barter in order to keep some balance in their community, and generally looking after one another.
The things that are actively sabotaging these efforts are invariably economy-related – banks refusing to pause mortgage and loan payments until they had to cave to government and popular pressure, grabbing as much interest as they can from operations that are still going, causing those going operations in turn to have to act in a predatory manner, and so the tail of greed and predation carries on right down to the point that it affected my wife and myself.
That is NOT a system I want to live in. And guess what? I won’t have to, apparently.
Because have you seen the crazy amount of people who are “sick and tired of living in this fear” and who “want to breathe without masks” and “get back to work so I can earn again” ???
Do those people think they’re talking to other people, their government, or are they thinking SARS-COV-2 gives a shit about their placards? COVID19 will kill them just the same – our best bet would have been to hunker down a few months more, maintain the strictest hygiene, and the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus would have pretty much been eliminated for lack of hosts.
Luckily for it, it’ll now get plenty of hosts…
Look at world figures:
China locked down – hard – and got their numbers under control. Then they relaxed things a bit (probably for their “economy”) and now they have increased cases again, increased pressure on their health systems, increased COVID19 related deaths.
In the USA they never got the memo that being home and isolated is better for you than being a corpse on the street, and, obligingly, their streets are filing with corpses.
In Australia, the people and local governments started locking down and forced the federal government to start to be seen to enact lockdown quarantine, otherwise we’d be where Russia, Italy, and the USA are.
Our number of cases decreased really sharply after that, as we tracked down all those cruise ship cases that our Federal government had let in because they refused to believe the economy should come a distant last after public health and safety.
Then people got edgy and cocky, and started being “sick and tired of living in this fear” and who “want to breathe without masks” and “get back to work so I can earn again”…
Even before lockdown restrictions were eased, the numbers were going up. A week after most States eased restrictions, most are seeing sharp rises in the number of new cases.
Once Stage Three easing takes place (if we get that far before we’re overwhelmed) that will skyrocket, and we’ll be either back in quarantine lockdown or scraping bodies away from around the doors of our places of business.
From a few paragraphs back: The only other thing to do is shrink the population until that economy balances again… Aren’t they lucky that “random people” are protesting and speaking up to make this very thing happen?
Preppers had one thing right though – they speak of people who are willing to take YOUR life away from you, take away all your means of living for their own profit and don’t care if that means that you’ll die. They call these people “zombies” in the prepper shorthand. And it’s generally accepted that movie style zombie outbreaks are caused by a sudden virus pandemic.
The zombies are here, and we are them.