Occam's Razor

We’re coming up on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. It was an unwanted seminal moment for us Americans, including me.

I was working by the National Mall at the time and recall the smoke rising from the Pentagon (where I had worked until 1998) and the otherwise surreal picture perfect day. It caused me to reassess a few things, including the risks of working in downtown D.C. As a result, about two years later I had switched jobs to one at the U.S. Geological Survey a few miles from my house in suburban Northern Virginia. It felt too dangerous to work downtown in a building butt up against the railroad tracks.

One result, in retrospect, was it made us more distrustful and paranoid as a people. Suddenly we had a reason to suspect all Muslims hated America, even those born and raised here. By definition, paranoia is generally not a reasonable fear. It’s still here today, but it’s far more irrational twenty years later.

When you live in fear, you tend to strangle reason. Civil rights and democracy can become nice-to-have things. Many of us crave autocracy instead, confident that a strong leader who mirrors our prejudices is the only solution to our need to feel things are somehow in control.

Still, not in my wildest dreams did it devolve into what we actually have today. Essentially, we have huge numbers of adult babies: grown up Calvins, determined to bring the whole system down because reality makes them anxious. Previously they were conservatives and took comfort in rule of law. Now they want to blow it all up and unleash the war and chaos that bothered them in the first place.

There’s no convincing these adult babies, at least with reason. They die disproportionately of covid-19 because they mostly aren’t vaccinated. Even as they die hooked up to ventilators they don’t believe they actually have covid-19. They ingest horse paste thinking an anti-parasitic is going to kill a virus when, at best, it’s only going to give them a bad case of the runs. They line up to receive monoclonal antibodies, a clinically proven treatment for those with cases of covid-19, while rejecting three highly effective vaccines clinically proven to dramatically reduce the likelihood of acquiring the disease, or if you get it, greatly reduce its likely severity. Their own opinion leaders, most of who were quietly vaccinated, are urging them on to recklessly endanger their own health. They have no idea what freedom actually means and no belief that shared sacrifices like masking are sometimes necessary. Freedom seems to mean the unrestrained ability to bring sickness and death both to intimates and society at large if you want to.

Reality is so inconvenient that apparently it must be killed. Public health officials warned that if we didn’t follow their advice we’d end up exactly where we are at. These adult babies have needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom make up their intimate circle. If life feels too discordant or truth feels too close, outlaw it. So don’t allow any critical teaching about racism in our public schools. Lying is now the point and apparently if you lie enough, it becomes truth.

And so we get a pro-life party willing to let their kids come down and die of covid-19 in public schools because masking Junior is somehow anti-freedom. Apparently they can deal fine with their own cognitive dissonance, since they’ll deny covid-19 is real through their dying breath. So everyone else has to as well.

Just grow up already! Except they can’t. Their psychoses are so engrained and advanced that there is no way out except through self-destruction that threatens the safety, health and civil order needed for society to function.

Since they can’t, I am finding it’s completely rational for me to wish they were all dead. They seem to be busy doing just that to themselves. I just hope there are enough of us rational people left to bring back order to the chaos they are unleashing.