Over the course of the pandemic, how has our desire to do what’s right for ourselves and for one another resulted in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, blame, hate, division, depression, anxiety, abuse, violence, and myriad forms of negativity?
The fact is we were sold this negativity and we bought it. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions — out of our desire to do good, we ended up with bad.
A couple months into the pandemic, I would say to people: I understand you’re frightened, but when will you stop being scared of all the people around you? Will you wait until you’re told you can stop being afraid?
Now that we have been told that the pandemic is over and many of us remain fearful, it is clear that it cannot be simply turned off like a light switch.
“We can let fear rule our lives or we can become childlike with curiosity, pushing our boundaries, leaping out of our comfort zones, and accepting what life puts before us.”
Alan Watts
As living beings, our most base level drive for all that we do is the desire for safety. When we perceive a threat to our safety that induces a state of fear, it becomes our number one priority and governs our actions. We are all simply naive, innocent beings who do what we think is best for our own survival, based on the knowledge, experiences, and various forms of programming we receive throughout our lives. In the case of this pandemic, we made our choices and did what we thought was best, but it continued to be imposed on us and held our attention. So, instead of being able to move on we searched for someone to blame, and put that blame onto others for not holding the same opinions and taking the same actions as we did. This applies to people on all sides of the pandemic debate. And we were indeed all forced to take a side — has it even been possible to take a truly neutral position?
Personally I was never afraid of covid, but I was afraid of the pandemic’s potential to be used as a tool for exploitation of the masses by powerful institutions. That is a result of my own experiences, knowledge, and programming. From this perspective, it has been unsettling to witness people happily showing their digital papers for access to services, without any apparent concern for the implications. Or the marked ignorance to the irony of a culture that brands itself as inclusive and tolerant, while systematically excluding its own members and promoting intolerance of those who exercise bodily autonomy. Although, from a public relations perspective it makes perfect sense — in marketing, when your actions will garner a negative reaction, and you want to obfuscate those actions and lessen the pushback, what you say is always the opposite of what you do. For instance, a company like British Petroleum (BP) uses a green sunflower logo and makes commercials about their ‘green’ initiatives in an attempt to change your perception of the company, to offset the fact that their entire business is destructive to the planet and anti-green by nature. A country will sing freedom songs and wave flags of tolerance to make people feel better and take attention away from the fact it is creating intolerance and taking away freedom.
Out of my desire to bring attention to the brewing intolerance and exclusionary attitude and practices, I spoke up, and it got me repeatedly insulted and rejected, which was endlessly frustrating. This frustration caused me to take a bitter attitude towards people for participating in what I saw as a crime against humanity and not resisting, not seeing things as I saw them and making the same choice, that in my eyes was the obvious choice. Basically, just like those who I had asked how long they would be afraid of the people around them, I became afraid of the people around me, just for a different reason. In the process of trying to help, I became the monster I sought to destroy — a fearful, blaming and shaming person. Although my intentions were good, I added fuel to the fire of division, projecting my own insecurities and fears onto them just as they had projected theirs onto me.
From my point of view, I had a moral obligation to take what I saw as good and right action to speak my truth, and do the best I could to help protect people from the threat I perceive. While I may or may not have helped a few people broaden their perspective, for the most part I found myself preaching to an echo chamber of people with the same viewpoint as myself. I felt discouraged and no longer made progress toward my goal of promoting unity, and showing people that our neighbours are not our enemies, and that we should not be afraid of each other.
They tell you to pick your battles, but they don’t tell you that more difficult than picking a battle is knowing when to stop fighting, and to let it go.
It has been a painful experience to witness people provoked by coercive mandates into injecting themselves with mysterious chemical cocktails, out of fear for their own safety, the safety of their loved ones, the threat of losing their livelihood, or simply to continue living their lives. It has been painful to see the division this has created between us, causing a rift in lifelong friendships, marriages, and families. It has been painful to see people be condemned for simply making a personal choice about what goes in their body, and standing up for their right to do so without being ostracized by society.
But, if we are wise, we endure our pain and suffering without adding to it. While I maintain that there is truth in my warnings, I added to my pain by opposing lockdowns, masks, mandates, and passports to the extent that it would become a source of self-inflicted suffering. This pandemic is a necessary experience for all of us, or else it would not be happening; nature works in mysterious ways, but it does what is best in the end. While that might not be clear in the moment, it will become clear in time.
The lesson I took from this experience is that it is not my responsibility to defend the truth, whatever that may be. Truth can defend itself. It can only be hidden for so long; in time it will be revealed, when it needs to be, to whom it needs to be.
“We all did what we thought was best in the moment. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” is what we can say about our past actions and those of others. We’ve all been unwittingly programmed without our conscious assent. Out of our confusion, ignorance, and naïveté, we bought into the negative programs. We let them run us. But now we can choose to stop. We can choose a different direction. We can choose to become more aware, more conscious, more responsible, and more discerning… We can see how others were programmed just as we were. They, too, were doing what they thought was best at the time. We don’t have to blame them or ourselves any more. We can give up the whole blame game as obsolete and ineffectual.”
David Hawkins
You won’t get far with people by showing them what they are not ready or willing to see. Even if you’re 100% correct, going on the offence only invites the other to go on the defence. The very act of pushing garners a pushback. This inevitably leads to conflict between you and them, and within yourself. You will find peace in the middle path — do not hide your truth, but do not expect others to see it, or attempt to force them to see it. Simply live your truth, embody it, and have the respect to let others do the same. Eventually the reality will come to light, and chances are that there will be truth on both sides. Even if one side turns out to be more correct, nothing but guilt, shame and animosity will result from labeling the other side as wrong. Just like you, they simply did what they thought was right.
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