I was in the park with my daughter today. We built a fence made of small sticks, twigs, and dry branches of a huge two-hundred year old tree that stands next to the stream. We played tag, sat on the grass, went around the tree in a game where we had to step only on its roots...
And a man with a huge bulldog was passing by, a tan man with long, curly hair. As he approached, I felt strange about the fact that we couldn’t say “hi” to his dog... Social distancing and all that, you see, we have “new rules” )) that make people jump away from one another in an illusion that it will make the world safer or save millions of lives. Forget the fact that immunity builds up when we are exposed while sitting at home and wearing masks that obstruct breathing can make even a healthy person sick...
But then the man asked: “Do you want a butterfly?”
And stretched his hand toward us.
“It’s a dead one, but still...”
He opened his palm and there was a black and yellow butterfly with slightly crumbled wings. My daughter was uncertain, and I took the insect from him while she was pondering... probably not knowing what to do in the world where getting close to people is against the Rules... and what if president Trump, or the police, or the doctors come and punish us because we disobeyed and dared to say Hi, and worse - take something from a hand of a complete stranger?!
“It’s not gonna hurt you”, he said with a slight smile.
“Hello, dog,” I said to his dog who was looking at us.
He continued his walk, and we continued our play after burying the dead butterfly.
It’s not gonna hurt you...
That’s right, dear stranger. The butterfly is not going to hurt us, and contact with you is not going to hurt us either. Thanks for refusing to be another puppet in a muzzle even outdoors, where the closest human is usually like 50 feet away anyways.
In the world where people are required to wear masks (in some countries even outdoors now! Outdoors, in the fresh air, Carl! Alone!!) which can screw up their healthy lungs if done for a long enough time... In the world where people can be punished or fined for getting together (because people getting together is dangerous - what if they form groups, friendships, tight relationships, alliances, what if they stop fearing and start thinking for themselves too much?) this small contact is a miracle.
It got to the point where I cherish people who are not afraid to get closer than 5 feet to me and even make physical contact - like touching each other’s hands...
I am astounded at how easy it is to make fools out of the whole world. To rule us, humans, there is no need for an army, no need for blunt, direct use of force. You just gotta find something scary (Ebola, bird flu, swine flu, coronavirus, communists, terrorists, aliens, zombies, a new mysterious whatever), make it look really SCARY on all news channels, make some deaths happen for real (make the virus that kills mostly the weakened and the elderly), then inflate death statistics (many doctors admitted they’d been told/ordered to inflate so-called covid deaths), then - ta-da-da-daam! - offer some measures to “fight” the big bad alien, virus, terrorist, group of people, disease, philosophy, etc.
These measures, of course, serve the whatever agenda of those who implement them, but scared panicking people who consume everything that is “official” will never really think about that. They’ve been shown the big bad enemy and the great right solution, and they follow the rules, and they don’t question them, and they feel like heroes... while those who do question and try to dig a little deeper get to be called crazy “conspiracy theorists”.
PS. I just published this post on Uptrennd too... nobody “likes” it there :D But I don’t lose hope, some people must must must be able to overcome this
Glad to see people aren't all breaking natural protocol, humans are social creatures and touch is part of how we engage with our world, taking one sense away is literally making us senseless!
I've been offline a lot, at least off the fun part of being online, so I missed the chance to upvote this when it was fresh.
I love your writing, please keep doing it.