Fickle Beasts

 

I’m stingy with compliments. It’s not anything new or something that came on with age. I’ve always been this way because I respect the integrity of words and that they mean things. Modern culture tends to water down and dilute everything, including the meaning of words, wherein an over the hill has been bag of wrinkles is called a heroine for shouting her abortion, or as modern parlance would phrase it, murdering her unborn child, or committing infanticide.

That said, any nurse, doctor, candy striper, or other medical staff who continued to go to work day in and day out as the pandemic broke out is a bonafide hero in my book. Why? Because when this all started last year, nobody knew anything about this virus, whether mortality rate, transmission rate, or what it could do to the average human.

Countless unknown factors served to make people trepidatious. Yet, medical professionals still clocked in every day did their jobs, and came home, all the while uncertain as to what they may have contracted when the toothless homeless fellow hocked a loogie in their eye.

As Americans are fond of doing, at a certain point, we jumped the shark. As a society, we went overboard with giant banners waving in front of hospitals declaring that heroes worked there, kids wearing my mom’s a hero shirts, husbands wearing my wife’s a hero hats, but it’s the American way. We are a bombastic people, and we like signage. That’s why Marshall’s Home Goods is still in business. Take a dollar’s worth of wood and paint, scribble Bless This Home calligraphically, and you’ve got yourself a $40 piece of art that some cat mom somewhere will be proud to own.

A year and change have passed, we know more about this malady, and chances are most nurses and doctors have had it and recovered from it. Still, because they refuse to fall in line and obey for whatever reason, they are now pariahs, worthy of being left destitute and homeless.

It just goes to show how fickle a beast the human being is because I would wager that some of those calling for the termination of these people were likely cared for by them over the past couple of years.

Although grotesque on its face, there are deeper truths we must uncover as this saga plays out. First is the speed at which society can make a heel turn as far as its heroes are concerned. An entire sector went from hero to zero in no time flat, even though the reasoning is shaky at best.

The second thing we must be aware of is that this is the perfect vehicle by which the non-compliant, the stiff-necked, and the independent-minded are weeded out of positions of power, authority, or import. The new order is looking for team players, not lone rangers, so shut up, do as you’re told, toe the line, and be quick about it, or you will be next.

It’s sad how quickly we can vilify our fellow man and how readily we can be manipulated to be at each other’s throats for something that makes absolutely no sense at all. If you got jabbed and it works, then it makes no never mind what I do. If you got jabbed and it doesn’t work, it makes no never mind what I do. It’s like rolling down your window and yelling at the driver in the next car over to put on his seatbelt because he’s going to kill you. It makes no sense, yet here we are.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.