On this day in 2019, the first cases of the novel coronavirus started to be reported in Wuhan Province, China. By this time the next year, it was a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands. Politicians and billionaire CEOs alike have spun stories of "herd immunity", "just another kind of flu", and "made up by liberals to gain sympathy votes", but don't let's lose sight of the REAL reason why the corporate feudal state insisted the COVID lockdown get lifted before it should have.
We were relearning how to be self-sufficient. There were people on Tiktok making sourdough bread with 200-year-old starters, and now the price of a loaf of bread is $3.50.
We were relearning conservancy. There were Twitter posts about how to burn DVDs and copy the ones you have. Now there are 13 separate streaming services that routinely go through content purges.
We were rediscovering how personal liberty could improve our lives. We were all working from home, at our own pace, with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast close at hand at all times, doubling or even tripling our productivity; and now we're all back at the office.
You would think that more productive workers are better for the bottom line, but it was never about money—it was ALWAYS about control. They need us to be consumers; they need us to waste and buy unnecessarily so they can make infinite profits, they need us to be subservient and hopeless at all times so we will spend more on snacks and frivolous impulse buys and won't revolt against their authority.
Even worse, we might have seen the truth about our society. If we'd been able to stay in lockdown until COVID19 was made manageable, we might have had the time to stop and think about things. To stop and think about WHY we had been toiling at busywork in a cubicle for 8 straight hours with only a 15-minute lunch break. To think about WHY our only choices at the grocery store are the expensive brand name, the more expensive brand name, and these 15 store brands that all taste the same. To ask what was the government actually doing with our tax money, to see that all the entertainment on corporate feudal TV is the same with different actors, to wonder why we weren't able to live like this for the past 100 years. That was unacceptable, so we were made to return to the grind. Anyone who died as a result was just a tax-deductible operating expense.
Land of the Free, my aching ass.