Dear Friends,
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you do criticize them, you’ll be a mile away, and you’ll have their shoes.”
—Unknown
California is in the eye of the storm, and New York is too. NYPD officers report anonymously that if they question the bizarre Covid policies coming down from above, they will be fired, and that four thousand of them are currently waiting for their religious exemptions to come through, after re-submitting them on appeal. FOUR THOUSAND officers are waiting to hear if they will be fired, which is nearly fifty percent of the NYC police force! Wouldn’t it be great if some mainstream media reporters at, say, The NY Times would take some time out of their busy schedules to investigate this insanity?
But oops, I forgot - the USA is in a “State of Emergency,” during which anything goes. Or at least, Emergency Powers are authorized at various levels of government during this time, so that Many Things Go.
The State of Emergency was signed into place by Trump, and has been renewed by Biden twice now - most recently a couple of weeks ago, for another entire year. These emergency powers suspend our constitutional rights enough so that medical mandates (along with any number of other things - I’m sure we can just ask our corporate overlords for future possibilities!) can be implemented by many branches of government and private institutions.
Of course, these emergency orders should be rescinded for the obvious reason that there is no emergency, and because medical mandates, medical coercion, and medical scapegoating is wrong. Most relevantly, of course, is that tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of American men and women have lost their jobs due to these unconstitutional mandates, and they have no legal recourse to get them back until we exit this “Emergency”. Currently on “unpaid involuntary leave” are skilled professionals such as school teachers (1300 in NYC alone), firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, nurses, court employees, police officers, detectives, sanitation workers, ambulance drivers, etc.
——
Defeat the Mandates is coming to L.A. next weekend, April 10! I will be there in spirit, and yesterday a contingent of The People’s Convoy left their staging area in Hagerstown, MD, and headed back across the country to attend. The March Against Mandates in D.C. had about 40,000 attendees; in L.A. there may be twice as many. The speakers in D.C. were democrat and republican, black, white, muslim, jewish, christian. There were doctors, patients, lawyers, firefighter, teachers, students, families, grandparents, uncles, aunts. It was a highly diverse crowd, which is one of the bright spots in the craziness: We Are Not Alone.
https://defeatthemandatesus.com/
The demand is simple: rescind the emergency orders, rescind the unconstitutional mandates. “Vaccinated, unvaccinated, Democrat, Republican, independent, Americans of all races, backgrounds, religions, united we stand, in peace we march.”
——-
——
A friend writes:
“I’m taking a journalism class, and today the professor talked about how newspapers used to be privately owned or maybe family owned. And then corporations started buying media outlets, and she said that was the beginning of the end of true journalism. I brought up how I saw the Academy Awards was sponsored by Pfizer, and I wondered: what chance do you think any of those people in the Academy would dare question the narrative of big Pharma when big Pharma is paying for their existence (and for the existence of just about every major station, publication, radio and television included - The pharmaceutical industry is their biggest advertiser if not owner)?
“She shockingly said yes, absolutely: podcasts and sub stack are the only viable outlets for true journalism today. This was a shocking revelation for a professor teaching students to become journalists. My point being that True journalism, as we know it, is dead. And that’s not realized by most people. So they are believing what corporate owned mouthpieces decide should be disseminated to a gullible public.
“For the first year or so of this pandemic I resisted that. I talked and laughed about the wackos and the ‘conspiracy theorists.’ Who didn’t trust the science. I cautiously awaited the day when i could get the vaccine that would stop all this, once I was assured it was safe. But that day never came. And the longer I wait, I can see that the vaccine is neither safe, judging from the side affects I am observing in friends and family, nor does it stop the spread, witnessed by everybody I know who is triple vaxxed still getting Covid. And now, everywhere I look, everything I thought previously is not true. I can see how if I’m feeling overwhelmed by this censorship overload, so many others are just deciding it’s easier to bury their heads in the sand and say, ‘My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts!’”
——
——
A friend wrote to me the other day with kind words, saying that my writing “…is a relief, like a respite. When your updates come and you share your perspective, it’s like slipping into a space of agreeability & support. It’s like I get to put my feet up while someone else takes over with pointing out all the nonsense & simultaneously affirming that it IS nonsense.”
This is exactly why I read so much these days, because when I read somebody else’s extremely thoughtful analysis that obviously took them many many hours to write, I know that they, too, care about what is going on, and they also care about digging to discover what lies under what SEEMS to be going on.
We’re all the blind men (and women), continually feeling up the proverbial elephant, and it’s so important to talk to each other along the way!
Sometime soon I will send out a few links to articles I have recently found interesting, heartening, and Useful.
Xoxoxo
Sarabeth