THE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE.

The recent sacrifices of personal freedom and choice made by citizens of some civilized nations cannot be erased. The damage to societies and economies has been done.

Mistrust of one another has been planted, like a pernicious weed. Pernicious weeds suck the life out of truly sustaining growth in any untended garden. The gardeners of the American can-do character, proud individualism and Constitutional freedoms, have backed away. They have been replaced by corporate farmers, reaping everything out of America while putting little back.

I believe balance of forces is a universal aspect of The Universe. Inertia and entropy are in constant play. Good and evil inhabit the far swings of life's pendulum. Existence is intrinsically dynamic. Non-being changes in a simple biological accident into a human life which grows, ages and dies ...and its elements return to non-being. Energy and matter absorbed. Energy and matter released.

The process of evolution which brought our America to a height of economic prosperity and productivity in recent times has ended abruptly. The pendulum now swings in the other direction. But this was not an organic process by any means.

People with political and corporate power have intentionally or unintentionally pushed that pendulum in another direction. Whether this was a confederacy of dunces or a cynical group effort will only be revealed by time. The immediate effects will be so drastic that the common person will not likely have the time or resources to investigate. And, if this turn was intentional, that result may well have been the desired one.

And what was gained? Well, Amazon, Fedex and UPS have gained massive rewards. Locking people into their houses and smashing the walk-in retail sector forced customers to rely on delivery services for basic necessities.

Law enforcement, which had been reeling under a new progressive expectation of compassionate policing, now had power beyond belief over the meekest and mildest citizens. Paradoxically, overcrowded, but profitable, prisons were allowed to flush out lesser offenders in the name of infection control. Gun manufacturers and sellers made fortunes on a mushrooming demand for firearms early in the lockdown.

And what was lost? More than 20% of the American workforce is unemployed.  The US Government has charged trillions of dollars onto The People's credit card to pay out token compensation to The People themselves. In other words, our government has refinanced America with a mortgage on The People's future. Like an onerous student loan which will never go away, this debt will haunt future generations of Americans.

Some labor experts fear that 40% of the jobs curtailed during this damaging time will not be recovered. This would leave chronic national unemployment at more than 12%. One eighth of the adult labor force would be unable to find work.

What about the "medical experts" who guided the US Government onto this disastrous reef? Oh, they'll be fine. They have operated under the decades-developed immunity enjoyed by all medical professionals in America. Their risk managers and lawyers wrapped that up long ago. Crashing a nation for them is equivalent to removing the leg of the wrong patient. It's an "Ooops!" and move on. They are trained in medical school to never apologize and to collude with establishment risk managers and lawyer to bury the truth and accountability.

In fact, the media has gotten in on the act of protecting the medical establishment from accountability. Suddenly doctors and nurses are "heroes" for simply going to work and doing the jobs they are paid handsomely to do. These folks are so secure in their immunity from accountability that they make stripper videos and post them on social media while they are reported to be risking their lives on duty. At the same time, physicians who speak out against the disastrous medical meddling in government are stigmatized and sometimes silenced in the public arena.

Why? Corporate media also got in on the act, reaping millions of views and clicks at a time when they themselves were becoming irrelevant. They discovered what Goebbels and the publishers of Pravda knew all to well: Propaganda can be big business with big rewards for those who sign up for it. Journalistic ethics, scientific skepticism and objectivity be damned! Much more attention-getting to nitpick Trump's inevitable misspeaking.

Militarism, the perfect propagandists' precursor, considered a scourge in the US in the 1970's, has made a huge comeback with the aid of the media establishment after it reaped gains from post-911 patriotism. The media supported the vengeful Afghan and Iraq wars in the early 2000's with the gratitude of a fumbling Bush administration.

The promotion of mass retreat from the current viral pandemic by corporate media stands in stark contrast to the war lust of the immediate post-911 years. But the process of exploiting mass fear is the same. In true Orwellian style, mass cowardice in the face of a relatively usual respiratory illness has been portrayed as heroic by those invested in promoting the governmental responses globally.

But the damage has been done. We all bear responsibility for submitting ourselves to the propaganda out of fear. However, the statistical analysis by great minds is beginning to expose the truth of this inflated monster. Yes. It is a virus that can kill the vulnerable. Very old people, previously sick people, people who are not healthy in dealing with their daily lives.  

The questions for the future are grave. Will this become a precedent for the chronic decimation of developed nations whenever the medical establishment cries "Wolf !"? Will politicians always be listened to, as though they are objective health experts? In the USA, will our Constitution be discarded in the future as it has so readily been recently? Will forms of martial law and fascist mass movements be a routine part of a global future?