By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor
In all likelihood, we have all been the victim of slights, of transgressions, even of high crimes like robbery or physical abuse at some point in our lives.
How do we deal with that? Do we allow it to eat at our soul, ruining our lives forever? Do we plot revenge? Or do we learn from it, put it behind us, and move on?
In our personal lives, this is a question handled differently – by philosophy, by religion, by psychology; our approach is shaped by our cultures, by our families, neighborhoods, and by our studies.
No matter what path we choose, we must begin by facing the nature of the crime, acknowledging to ourselves, and perhaps to the public as well, what the transgressions against us were, so that the path we choose may be understood by others.
How we respond to such abuse, after all, is precedent for the future; if we allow it, if we stand still for it, then our attackers will likely continue to do it. Everything is precedent.
In a republic – a nation governed by elected officials operating with the consent of the governed – the same rule applies, perhaps even more so.
When the public is cheated; when the public is robbed; when the public is deceived by their government; or even worse, when many are tortured or imprisoned, their lives ruined or cut short, then too, we must acknowledge what was done, and determine the proper response, sensibly, rationally, justly.
All the more so, in fact, because every such decision, every such reaction, will guide future policy. Everything is precedent.
In early 2020 – a leap year, a Summer Olympics year, an election year (in the United States) – a virus was discovered that was said to be different; worse, especially lethal.
We were told that it required extraordinary measures.
The annual seasonal flu already kills between 50,000 and 100,000 or so people in the USA every year – not exactly chump change – but we were told this would be far worse.
So what did they (the establishment – the federal government and many state governments, and even many city governments) decide to do?
They shut down passenger air travel for months, essentially killing the business model of air travel, on which both much of modern commerce and a huge amount of global tourism is dependent.
They shut down most retail, for weeks or months, except for a peculiarly arbitrary classification of “essential workers” in “essential businesses.” Restaurants were forced to seat only a quarter or a third of their real capacity, stores had to paint idiotic arrows on the floor to make one-way aisles. Thousands and thousands of small businesses, from restaurants to clothing stores, never reopened… but a few giant “big box” chains reaped the benefits of their competitors being forcibly shuttered. Retail, after all, is largely about marketshare.
They shut down manufacturing plants and all kinds of offices, for weeks or months, often requiring redesigns of assembly lines, elimination or shrinking of lunchrooms, and the addition of pointless acrylic barriers between desks, work stations, and lunch tables.
They closed off hospitals, pausing normal checkups for months, even a year or more, scaring the medical community out of doing their jobs, and scaring patients out of the wellness checks they knew in their hearts to be necessary. We will never know how many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of conditions that would have been treatable or even curable if caught on time, were not diagnosed for a year or more, after it was too late.
They locked down cancer wards, hospices, nursing homes. How many millions of us were forbidden from visiting our parents, spouses, grandparents, children or friends, in their final days or weeks? They banned us from the final conversation, the final hug, the final prayers together at the end. They banned us from communication with our elders while they were still lucid, so many of whose conditions had deteriorated by the time the doors were reopened, the opportunities lost to us, our chance at those communications gone. So many of our loved ones died alone.
They shut down schools. In state after state, they paid teachers to sit at home and give Zoom classes, if they taught at all. They continued to collect our property tax dollars while the school sat fallow and the children fell behind – a quarter, a semester, even a year or more behind, in some states. And for what? Statistics showed, virtually from the start, that children of school age, outside of the very rare minority that’s normally at risk of any seasonal flu, were at virtually no risk of covid anyway.
They hopelessly compromised our election process, scaring people out of traditional polling places, illegally promulgating touch-free and verification-free mail-in balloting that enabled massive ballot fabrication at an previously unimaginable level.
They closed our churches. In state after state, they tore up the 1st Amendment and forbade church attendance, then when they finally did reopen, they scared the churches into closing down every other pew, requiring hand sanitizer at the entrances, and driving more and more people out of regular church attendance and into fallen-away status.
And the masks. Oh, the masks.
Despite a century of scholarship confirming that masks provide virtually no statistical benefit in such a circumstance, millions were conned into wearing them religiously. Many still wear them today, in fact.
And the medical scholarship they hid from us. Knowledge from the start that the virus itself was primarily dangerous to the same subgroup endangered by the seasonal flu, such as the very heavy, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. And the early reports that the vaccines were infinitely more dangerous than protective. Early reports that Vitamin D, ivermectin and hydrochloriquine might be helpful were buried. Early proof that the virus had originated at a Chinese lab – and the knowledge that this lab’s dangerous work was commissioned and funded by our own NIH – was denied and derided until it could be hidden no more.
We can stop the tabulation there, though there’s more.
Infinitely more.
How many careers – athletic, educational, professional – were paused at the worst possible moment, interrupting progress that could never be recovered, costing people their careers, costing them, perhaps, the chance for the optimal life they would have enjoyed were it not for the overreaction to covid?
How many couples never had the chance to meet or date, let alone marry and raise a family, because of the utterly unnecessary, unjustified social “pause” of those two to three years known as “the pandemic?”
How many family businesses were destroyed, after generations of work and pride, for nothing? How many fortunes laid waste, how many potential new entrepreneurs driven out by the bad luck of attempting a launch during that outrageous period of political excess, of societal kool-aid consumption, of bureaucratic and executive tyranny?
These are the crimes that a corrupt and unconstitutional government – and its allies in the press, the academe, and the pop culture – have committed against the American people.
How should we deal with these crimes against humanity?
Should we impeach, prosecute, convict and sentence them? Shouldn’t we at least take away their keys to power, so that at minimum, future authoritarians will be taught that such abuse will be punished, not rewarded?
Before we decide whether to forgive or punish, we must fully consider, and fully declare for the record, the long list of injustices these megalomaniacs – both petty and otherwise – have committed during this long and destructive fraud.
And when justice is served, may the Lord have mercy on their souls.
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook, Twitter, Gettr or TruthSocial.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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