Being Good

It's a dizzying sensation, the thought that hits you randomly: that standing there on the platform, if you just reached out brusquely, with moderate force, you could topple the person next to you onto the tracks below. Or when walking too near the edge, you could lift one foot and lean irrevocably into the abyss. 

I clutch my daughter's hand more tightly. 

The border between good and evil is thin. And while few give in to horrible acts, the knowledge that the impulse can be so close is disconcerting. Just as disconcerting to me is the idea that doing ill unto others can as easily take on a form much less flagrant than pushing someone onto the tracks. I was puzzled to have this topic impose itself upon me: I thought that after World War II, the concept of the "good German" meant that normal citizens easily perceived the line--thin as it is--and only psychopaths crossed it. But the impetus for evil is present, and perhaps resistance against it is the more mysterious force.

The inspiration for this essay came from a steely-faced nurse. I was holding my sheath of papers, confused and distressed. Misinterpreting what I was asking, she cut me off and said, "I can't help you. Rules are rules." I won't go into the details of the situation (in deference to the idea of medical privacy that is a quaint idea still upheld by a few of us), but what I understood from her words and demeanor was that regardless of the situation, she would follow the rules, moral or not. Because rules are rules. It hit me that we could not possibly be in the situation we are in--medical experimentation on the masses through coercion and fear, looming totalitarianism--if enough people weren't content enough to just follow the rules, against the good of the individual. 

In previous essays I have given several outs--people don't perceive the cognitive dissonance; people are quick to label ideas without understanding their true meaning; people are just not working hard enough at listening. But is it worse than that? Is there an urge to go along with wrong that is stronger than its opposite? Are anger, unkindness, and apathy so much easier than their antitheses? When I look into my own heart, I perceive plenty of anger. I struggle against it. But most of that anger is directed against people who would hurt those I love. The anger left over after I have done the active work of forgiving has settled into a shallow puddle of sadness and hurt I can easily step over. Regarding unkindness, I wonder sometimes. I say unkind things more than I'd like to admit; I do not always make the extra effort to be ethical--I buy things that do not hit all the marks of fair trade and ecology, for convenience or economics. I do not volunteer as much as some and I do not give as much as I should to the poor. But with all that, anger and unkindness are emotions we all suffer periodically to various extents, and they are usually passing. And most of us control those emotions enough not to be led to evil acts. It is the innocuous-seeming apathy that leads to moral corruption and to the acceptance of evil.

My younger daughter, until she reached the age of eight or nine, asked constantly, "But is he good?" We would be relating the story of an acquaintance and the way he or she did something we didn't agree with. "But is she good?" It was exhausting, having to explain to her over and over that doing something not in accord with the exacting morals of our family did not mean a person was not good; innumerable times we had to tell her that good people sometimes made mistakes or did bad things. I gave her examples of my own moral failings. Eventually she attained the requisite level of sophistication to understand this essential paradox of human nature. But though we laud the subtlety that means that we appreciate good intentions and indulge in tolerance, isn't there something fundamental and beautiful about the way in which children want to see goodness in its absolute?

As I write this, the sentence has recently been decided for the man convicted of mowing down eight people along New York's West Side Highway in 2017. In deference to the absolute of goodness, I was of course appalled that my home state was even considering the death penalty. But more pertinent to this writing is my personal connection to that event. On Halloween, 2017, my younger one's kindergarten teacher, by incredible luck, let the kids out a few minutes late. When my little owl was finally released to me, her homemade beak and feathers still intact after a long day of schooling, I took her by the wing and we tramped down the steps of her school toward the river, happily chatting. As we were about to cross the bike path, a man running toward us yelled, "Go back! There's someone with a gun!" Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a dark figure splayed on the ground. I swiveled and picked up thirty pounds of owl and sprinted back up the steps to the school. (My sister got the athletic genes, but adrenaline made my strength Olympic-class in that moment.) As it turned out, the gunshots had been police response to a man mowing down seven people with a van--an extreme case of evil by someone who remained unrepentant. We ended up in lockdown for the next three hours, as dozens of worried friends texted me, and my NYPD detective friend kept me informed as best he could. But as I was trying to reassure my people and get information from my sources, I was sitting on the floor in front of a game of Connect Four and a wide-eyed ball of feathers. And we were having the most philosophical conversation we'd had until then. 

"Are there real bad guys?"

"Yes, there are real bad guys."

Silence.

"Is he a bad guy?" 

"Yes, I'm afraid he is."

Pause. 

"Will he go to jail?"

"Yes, he will go to jail. He won't hurt anyone else."

"But will he stay in jail?"

"Yes, he will stay in jail, don't worry."

Silence.

"But what if he never gets to come out?"

I can't remember what I answered. I had once had the same belief--that anyone could be made good again, if only they were in the right situation, if only they had the proper help. Moreover, I believed that it was only childhood trauma that caused people to do evil things, that the perpetrator was a victim himself. This is of course terrible and true of many people who commit crimes, and they deserve our compassion. But this cannot explain the nefarious acts by many in power who did not grow up underprivileged and abused. It also cannot explain why I have some friends who have suffered many losses and come out with grace and generosity of spirit, and I know others who have used their suffering as reason to direct anger at others. My little owl could not comprehend the fact that someone could actually be a bad guy. She had no acquaintance with the concept. (Having the kind of protective mother who only doled out literature she saw fit for her daughters' age, the five-year-old had not yet read anything more emotionally charged than Toys Go Out.) And how is it possible to understand that someone might choose to do harm to someone else? Most children unacquainted with evil intentions cannot imagine them.

Unsurprisingly, her favorite subject was the study of Native Americans and a culture of peaceful living close to the earth. In contrast, her favorite books were eventually Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, stories about the battle between good and evil. (We just read A Wrinkle in Time; Madeleine L'Engle was wide awake.) What is surprising to me is that I no longer consider black and white children's literature an entertaining departure from our reality. It offers metaphors for the real battles we must wage against our own impetus for evil, or at least for our acceptance of evil. 

When I started mulling over this topic, I thought of a good friend of mine, a native midwesterner--kind and mild-mannered. It was with a sense of contrition that she related an altercation she'd had with a school administrator. My friend, whose own kids had gotten the Covid shots and were not those discriminated against, was railing against the administrator over the exclusionary policy of the Department of Education dictates that forced masking on unvaccinated kids, (more often than not black and brown kids). The administrator was unapologetically spewing, "rules are rules", and my friend raised her voice at her. In listening to my friend relate this to me, I was struck by the moral pain she herself felt at having lost her temper! I laughed at the irony that the person in the moral right was the one apologizing for her righteous outburst. I scolded my friend for being too kind. But this contrast stuck with me. The administrator, unwilling to contemplate the wrong her actions were feeding, remained oblivious--and banal in her acceptance of wrong-doing.

But of course people will say that she thought that she was pursuing the path of righteousness by protecting others against contagion (against all science to the contrary). Her unwillingness to listen to my friend at all, to be presented with facts showing the barbarity of making the lone unvaxxed child the only one in the class forced to cover his face because Covid had visited the entire class at some point in the week... that apathy is what I would call an acceptance of evil. And we have been confronted with many examples of this in the past two or more years. A dear college friend listens to me go on a rant about the ugliness of our alma mater mandating experimental injections on its young student body but no longer on its faculty, (this alma mater having received more money from the HHS in one year than it received in tuition over three years), and she nods with a concerned face. She squints when I tell her how painful it is to see children masked, against all science and all basic human decency, and tells me she's concerned for my own unhappiness that I feel such emotion over it. She makes a show of empathy when I tell her that those of us in the medical freedom movement are still hurt and upset that the lack of apology for all the discrimination against the unvaccinated means that such discrimination could easily happen again. And then she invites me to a party and requests Covid testing for attendance. I scold myself for my own unkindness that I rail against such obtuseness. She is doing what she thinks is right, protecting the vulnerable in her circle. (Although she exposes herself to my family, attends concerts, uses the gym...) Perhaps I could forgive someone of lesser intellect, lesser capacity for research. But I have the belief that when the universe generously gives you an excess of a certain quality (in her case, intellect), it is your duty to use it. If she had responded to my concerns by offering me ideas and studies to refute the ones I proffered to support my arguments, I would have been thrilled to engage in the challenge of extra research and debate. But, as was the case with at least three other friends who actively rejected my ideas about the nonsensical cruelty of the mandates, no constructive answer was offered, while the arguments I forwarded were ignored. This purposeful ignoring of information that is fundamental to the reality we live in smacks of laziness. And because this laziness means that you adhere to a cruel narrative rather than a difficult truth, I see it as morally problematic.

But perhaps I am too harsh. I have much kinder friends than I am who are constantly appealing for forgiveness and love. And in Madeleine L'Engle's books, my daughter and I valiantly entered a mitochondrion and joined the protagonist in defeating the Echthroi, not by force but by understanding their essence and sending love to them. We defeated the bad guys by sending them love. But we understood that the Echthroi were evil. And we engaged in mortal combat against them. (Avid readers are badass.) I suppose that is the first step: having the courage to recognize evil, which is not easy to do in a society that tries to relativize everything. 

Earlier I mentioned that I do my best to avoid anger. But recently I felt anger against someone close to me, and I carried it for a while. When I told myself to let it go and forgive, I was flooded with sadness instead. And while that sadness is less destructive to me and others, it is harder to hold than anger.  It weighs more, and it hurts. The ill that anger effects upon me is not as obvious in the moment, so it is much easier to carry. When it comes to the issues plaguing us today, I wonder if it is the fear of sadness that prevents people from looking at things face on. It is much easier to feel anger at anti-vaxxers than to contemplate the fact that our government lied to us about SARS-COV-2 (link) and about the shots (link), meaning that we have been victimized by an entity we thought protected us. That realization asks for the strength to forgive (mostly ourselves for our naïveté) and the strength to empower ourselves by disempowering those who betrayed us. For teens who are prey to hormonal confusion and to a society that seeks to take away all privacy and sense of individuality, it is easier to create a new identity that asks others for compliance to it (by the changing of pronouns and names) than to deal with the nasty mess of growing up--accepting responsibility for one's actions and one's future, figuring out one's values and learning to live by them, thereby condemning oneself to the periodic sadness that comes with struggle and change. When we are confronted by images that are an affront to our sense of decency (oh, those dating app subway posters, those Calvin Klein ads, those Balenciaga images), we are afraid of showing our revolt because "tolerance" requires we understand that the norms have changed, though we might have been powerless in this change. Again, we must deal with the sadness of the concept that we are but tiny parts of a huge machine; and we must deal with the sadness of the idea that the hyper-sexualization of our society (and possibly pedophilia, link) are unavoidable facts of our times.

But to return to the realm of a child's understanding, the best children's literature does not let us shy away from sadness. One of my favorite authors, Kate DiCamillo, wrote a book, The Miraculous Adventures of Edward Tulane, that was torture to read to my older daughter. Every chapter has the little mute but sentient bunny catapulted into a different living situation, and every single chapter ends with sadness, until the final chapter in which the bunny finds himself in the arms of his original owner's daughter, he himself transformed from apathetic to empathetic by his exposure to so much loving and living. We would read a chapter a night, and my daughter, aged seven or so, would burst into sobs at the end of every single one, and it would take forever to extricate myself from her tearful embrace. But there was no question of ending the book without reaching its conclusion. My husband thought us bonkers for subjecting ourselves to this ordeal every night, but the sadness was a necessary part of experiencing the beauty of this story. 

I am from a culture whose ancestors survived genocide. In my experience, it is common for Armenians of the two generations above mine to avoid sadness and other emotions that make one vulnerable. Suck it up and carry on. Your ancestors sacrificed themselves and saw horrors they could barely speak of. You must move forward and make us proud. Anger is allowed (against Turks, specifically,) but other negative emotions are often unacknowledged, held in. In our society, I recognize a similar tendency toward annulling sadness (mistakes were made by all, it doesn't matter that you lost jobs, education, friends, and lives, let's just move on!) but righteous anger abounds and is encouraged. Youngsters are whipped into outrage over racism and transphobia and climate change; meanwhile, these anger-inducing narratives are promulgated in such a way as to separate us from each other, along the lines of race and gender and political beliefs, and all the while those wielding power are continuing, undeterred, with their agenda--targeting minorities, increasing poverty, destroying farming (link, link, link), promoting geo-engineering (link), multiplying environmental disasters, advancing the social credit system (link), instituting Central Bank Digital Currencies (link)... If, perhaps, we allowed ourselves the sadness of realizing how thoroughly we have been victimized, we might redirect our necessary anger at the sources that deserve it, and use the love underlying our sadness to lend each other strength. 

Is it because children--usually, hopefully--are not weighted down by sadness that they are more able than adults to define good and evil? A favorite writer of mine, Toby Rogers, recently wrote about the trolley problem. He rightly says that even engaging in that questioning is profoundly immoral, authoritarian, and narcissistic. A child would never countenance the idea that one must choose between sacrificing one life and saving five. A child's imagination goes straight to that one person on the tracks and screams, rightly, that all should be saved. Why would you have to choose? Find a way. Use your imagination--both intellectual and ethical. The type of moral relativism that adults like to engage in is not congruent with human goodness. The risk of injury to one person for the "common good" is never acceptable. The idea of sacrificing the individual for the collective has only ever been promoted by totalitarian regimes. (Which shows what I think of our so-called democracy, with its vaccine mandates, its war-mongering, its test-based education that denies children their true expression and individual aspirations.)

A former friend inhabited this way of thinking and of course our ways have parted since 2021, but looking back, I should have analyzed better the strange direction of her thinking. We were discussing a colleague's theater production over glasses of wine. We both had critiques, but this former friend's biggest criticism was that the piece, which was inspired by the Fukushima disaster--about which our colleague had done months of on-the-ground research--was cultural appropriation. I remember blinking uncomprehendingly at what she was saying and moving on. After all, I'd spent my childhood dancing to and singing the music of Miriam Makeba; I passed on to my daughters my mother's and my fascination with Native American culture; I sang and directed the music of cultures whose languages I did not speak. By this logic, all I've ever done has been to culturally appropriate! Whatever intellectual infection had taken over this woman's thinking, I feel it led in a straight line to her later accosting me in the grocery store and demanding whether I'd gotten a flu shot (how was that her business?!); and then of course to her own tragic obsession with getting her young children injected as soon as the experimental shot came out. (You can surmise that I did not shut up on the classroom chats--gently asking parents to re-evaluate such choices.) This seemingly innocuous idea of cultural appropriation smacks of a form of intolerance--toward anyone adventurous and curious enough to explore things far afield--and a willful creation of barriers between the different cultures and ethnicities that make up our human wealth. Discouraging us from delving into the mythology, heritage, and history to which we are not related by birth is a way of preventing us from relating on a level of mutual goodness. And in retrospect, the fact that this started before the pandemic eased us into the further fragmentation of our society through lockdowns and ever more strident calls for alienating those who do not go long with the prevalent agenda.

But what made this woman indulge in this kind of thinking? Is it only the sadness linked to our feeling of disempowerment? Is it a lack of imagination? To this I must answer no, because some of the worst affiliates of the new normal are avant-garde artists of different media. Must I come back to the idea of laziness? My generation is, in my opinion, one of the laziest generations the world has seen. We have gotten used to the idea that disposable materials are acceptable, simply because we have gotten used to the convenience; indeed, convenience is a cultural obsession. We have absorbed the idea that raising children without screens as babysitters is impossible. I happen to think it a very dangerous form of laziness to set a screen in front of a child because one is too tired to engage in a conversation or deal with the struggle of teaching him or her the joy of reading or invention. In my experience and observation, the extra effort put into keeping children engaged, away from screens, pays off exponentially in their capacity for self-sufficiency later on, as well as in their mental health and breadth of critical thinking. My generation and the next also started the whole over-the-top culture of prepared and delivered food and goods. A whole movement of "slow food" was created just to counter this tendency to expect everything fast and easy. I wonder if it is also an inherent, normalized laziness that prevents friends whom I know to be kind and well-intentioned to avoid thinking about issues of medical apartheid, expanding surveillance, and the slow, deliberate poisoning of our children. My hapless college friend--who will likely never read this, for the reasons outlined here--is good-hearted and generous to her core. She would never willingly accept nor endorse evil. But she willingly engages in the dictates of a bio-medical state that asks for injection with experimental shots (bio-weapons), that demands the testing and surveillance of its populace, that encourages the revocation of parental rights (link, link), that celebrates the chemical and surgical transformation of gender dysphoric teens before their brains have finished developing. 

Last summer a dear friend and I were dissecting why I was unable to resume normality with some mutual friends. These friends had forced masking on everyone only when in my presence, and had yelled at me at their front door because they feared I might cross their threshold, maskless, in my state of un-injection. There had never been an acknowledgment of this treatment of me and my family, and there was a seeming expectation that all should continue as before, now that the narrative had shifted to acknowledge that the vaxxed were as infectious as the unvaxxed (more than, actually). I told my dear friend, who is Jewish, that in this case, they had acted as good Germans, whereas she, by standing up for me and generally taking an active stance against the ugliness she saw around her, was on the right side of history. I still remember her widened eyes as she did a double take at the vehemence of such words. But in the next second she gravely nodded in agreement. I don't think she had dedicated as much anxiety and energy to the happenings of our world since 2020 as I did, but she confronted the dissonance; she never succumbed to senseless fear; she is no stranger to sadness, which she taught herself to accept; and she is anything but intellectually or physically lazy. 

Notice that I am not bringing in fear as one of the reasons for this tolerance of evil. Fear was the most destructive virus, and motivated the iatrogenic disaster that we have seen with the promotion of the Covid injections. But it is not what motivates my college friend (who never stopped visiting us throughout the so-called pandemic), nor many others who show support for the ugly narratives of our day, or at least a disinterest in opposing them. Fear is the easy culprit. Those who succumbed to it fully--those still wearing masks in 2023--are too pitiable for me to question. It is those who are fully sane and yet still refuse to question whom I query about here. For those who would say that I am the one adhering to a false narrative, they have the moral obligation to prove me wrong by means of studies and evidence that refute those I present here. The only rebuttals I have gotten from friends disputing my claims have been in the form of fact-checking sites (I was mortally embarrassed for her when an Ivy-league educated colleague threw fact-checking sites at me), or broad-stroked dismissals--"It's probably not productive to dig into the technical weeds" said one geneticist friend as a way to discard my points. Reading Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough for years now, all I've been doing is trying to understand the technical weeds! These are just more examples of the laziness I decry. I do not ask that everyone be as outspoken as some of us; the respect for free expression means respecting the freedom to remain silent if one desires. But--and this is my own failing--I don't get it. This floundering verbosity you are subjecting yourself to here is my trying to make sense of the conformism I perceive around me, even in those I love.

Is it indeed anomalous to care so damn much? My poor teenaged daughter, in late 2020 was getting nervous hearing the way her mother's views contravened those she heard at school and all around her. I know she wished her mother were less outspoken, more in line politically with the gentle demeanor she generally exuded. What is it about me that I could not shut up? Well, my daughter herself was the biggest problem, along with her sister. The danger I perceived confronting my children made me into a raging lioness. Many of the most outspoken dissidents today are mothers. Lift a hand to a cub and expect to be mauled. But then again, many mothers I know and respect engage in what I perceive as moral/intellectual/emotional laziness by not questioning what the mainstream is so eager to shove down our throats. I know that a common question in the dissident movement is what causes us to question while so many remain (willingly, I would argue) blind to the contradictions and the ugliness? I might have said that in my case there was a cultural component, since I was raised in a French school and railing against the machine (well, against everything, really) is a French habitude. But my friends in the dissident movement are from varied backgrounds, ethnicities and religions, and there is no common ground there. One commonality, though, is an interest in health, in the capacity of the body to heal itself, and an avoidance of toxins. None of my dissident friends drink the fluoride-Koolaid, for example, knowing that fluoride is a toxin that degrades the pineal gland, which is believed to be the physical seat of intuition. To this point, notice how many country people (with their own wells, living close to nature and its rhythms, accepting of the physical effort that it takes to survive in a more isolated place) account for those who refuse to be dragged into the mainstream currents. A dear friend in California wished we had spoken in person much earlier, because I turned her onto the Ivermectin (link) debacle, and she wished she had understood this before getting jabbed. But she thanked me for waking her up to the ugliness of the narrative; she said that she traveled through the French countryside in 2021, and if she hadn't had her views affected by our conversations, she would have viewed all of those country dwellers as a bunch of conservative abrutis. In her new state of understanding, she felt compassion and an alliance with these campagnards. (I love this story, because this woman is one of my mentors, my high school history teacher whom I've loved and emulated for thirty years, and whose own ideas and passion for justice--and gardening!--influenced me greatly.) 

Perhaps it is unkind to rail at the apathy of people who are themselves the victims of poisoning by their governments--the physical poisoning of our water, our air, our food, and the intellectual poisoning through censorship and propaganda. And the working and middle classes have added burdens imposed by our governments: the indignities of excessive bureaucracy, terrible healthcare, dysfunctional and unsafe public transportation, inflation, sky-rocketing rents... But my healer friend insists that everything can be healed. If poisoned, we can do the work to undo the damage. And when abused, it is our duty to find the strength to say no. Indeed, many of those protesting the new normal around the world are not the laptop class but the working class--those who have the least time to spend in the technical weeds. The will to resist evil must be there. When the will is lacking, we are thrown back into the problem of laziness. 

Someone close to me complains that I care too much; after all, we are powerless in the face of the machine. We should just mind our own business. If I agreed with this, I would not waste the effort of writing. Nor of striving to parse through so much reading to attain understanding. I could just tuck in with some entertaining movies at the end of the day and forego trying to understand elements of immunology, banking, and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, one of my wisest friends insists that our job is simple: it is to hold the light. Which means that we do not stay in the dark. We seek out the truth and where we can, we fight for the difference that begs to be made. For the things over which we do not have direct power, we state our position and express our desire for a more beautiful reality. My wise friend herself is highly educated on all things to do with the dystopia tugging at our reality. She informs herself, puts her money and effort to make change where she can, denies her consent to the ugliness, and offers more love to the world. Holding the light means admitting that there is darkness that must be dispelled. And my friends in the dissident movement understand that every good action has a double power: the good that the action is effectuating in the world, and the good of the intention that spurred the action. "It's the thought that counts," we were always told. Indeed, the intention accompanying an action is often as powerful as the action itself. (Just think of the immense power of that clumsy but earnest thank-you drawing taped to your fridge!) Understanding this gives us the agency needed to work for a better future, even when those in despair might tell you the cause is already lost. The idea that our efforts are futile in the face of the monolith is related to the laziness I decry above. Caring enough to understand and be ready to take action when and if it is called for, is as heroic as anyone need be. In the face of the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies, the effort to use cash, so minimal, is a powerful tool of resistance. In the face of iatrogenic disaster, apart from saying no to the experimental injections and pharmaceutical interventions in general, showing support for those who say no is constructive. 

But consciously saying no is essential. We the plebeians have a duty to shed the laziness and sadness and anger that cloud our consciousness and prevent us from seeing the truth face on. In order to hold the light and be part of a more beautiful future, we must be willing to acknowledge the evil that confronts us and oppose it--at the very least with our thoughts. I can't agree with the one close to me who complains that there is little we can do to change the ugliest realities. It's true that as individuals we only have control over ourselves and our interpersonal relations. But by casting even a bit of light on the darkest corners, we can stop the actions that cannot be carried out in full exposure. We depend on courageous journalists and whistleblowers to uncover the truth and then we take the responsibility of repeating that truth--to a neighbor, to a friend, to the person serving you coffee. "Have you heard about how the Biden administration has been censoring us for years? How about that close friendship between King Charles' family and Jimmy Saville! Fascinating, no, that Noam Chomsky, such a soothsayer when it comes to American imperialism, was meeting up with Jeffrey Epstein after he'd been convicted. Interesting, hunh, that the Covid injections were created under the auspices not only of the NIH but of the Department of Defense! How about that pandemic treaty that will make the WHO more powerful than our own governments? Unbelievable, right, that the association of gynecologists was paid to get Covid shots into the arms of pregnant women! Did you know that the transgender transition market is predicted to be around two hundred billion dollars a year--more than the film industry?" If we the plebeians--the proud, independent individuals who make up this society--refuse to condone or accept as inevitable the immoral actions of the powerful, we divest them of some of their power. 

We the people, we the good people, the ones who do not consort with the Savilles and Jeffrey Epsteins of the world; the ones who do not contract with military institutions to create bio-weapons; the ones who do not sell false ideas of safety--against terrorism, viruses, climate change--in exchange for servitude; we the people have the requisite power to shape society according to our terms, and it only asks that we walk around with our eyes open and be willing to make small, consistent efforts--chewing out the immoral administrator, using cash, putting our money in small banks, refusing biotechnology in medicine and food, tuning out the talking heads whose hands are in corporate pockets. With small actions multiplied by millions, we can bring into being a more beautiful future. But we must want it. We must see clearly what threatens us and be willing to fight it through multitudinous actions, however modest in scope. 

I cannot understand what goes on in the mind of a Bill Gates or a Fauci (link) or an Epstein. I can't understand what goes on in the mind of a Chomsky who consorts with a pedophile and promotes medical fascism. I can't understand the mind of a Rochelle Walensky, a Tedros, a Bancel, or an Albert Bourla, who willfully put millions in harm's way. I'm not sure I could put pen to paper to begin to understand their way of thinking, because the nature of such evil is beyond my comprehension. We normies find ourselves like children when confronted with it. But I do want to understand what goes on in the minds of my peers who accept this level of evil as: inevitable, justifiable, too big to fight, not worth the energy of combatting. 

I was recently surprised to re-read a chart that ranks emotions in the order of their positive effects on us, and to discover that apathy ranked lower even than fear and grief. Since apathy is probably one of the foremost elements of conformism, this makes sense. Conformism can lead to horrible abuses, as we have now seen demonstrated in the west more than once in under a century. And if one believes--as I think one should!--that actively wishing for a more beautiful world is the first step out of apathy and toward bringing that beauty into being, one rises above the sadness and anger that interfere with our goodness. I have struggled to understand the dangerous nonchalance of many people I care about because I believe there is more to being a truly good person than living one's life without overtly seeking to harm others. Being good in a world teetering on disaster demands some effort and occasional hard choices. In the context of a society peering into the abyss, we must all pull back, clutch each other's hands tightly and get to work.