How Normal is "New-Normal"?

This lockdown is a real bummer for a lot of people. Another friend of mine OD-ed last week, I spent about an hour on the phone with his Mom today. She is going through a lot of her own stuff too, but she's kept sane working with the homeless (who are also inexplicably unharmed by corona in her location near Chicago). They are putting them up in hotels so maybe there is a silver-lining, but sadly she is facing eviction and not getting a free room. It's a strange system that takes care of the absolutely worthless, but often lets the semi-functional through the cracks.

Her son was quite a character, the type who had the brains to do anything but always hung-out with idiots. Maybe he liked to be the smartest guy in the room? I don't know, we only knew each-other briefly. He had gotten clean this Spring and was out of rehab and employed, but then the world went crazy and he went back.

Too bad, but the business closings had to be done... right?

Well there were other things we could have done, like protecting the elderly in the nursing-homes. Even Cuomo now concedes that forcing COVID patients into the homes was a bone-headed move. It was done at the last minute, with no warning, and without even allowing the homes to ask the hospital if the resident had tested positive! This went on for months. The rescinding is better late than never, but for thousands who died in infected homes the reversal is far too late.

This decision should call into question the good faith of Cuomo's plan to re-open, eventually, the regions of NY. If he was really acting in the interests of public health why did he lockdown the healthy population and destroy the most vulnerable? If we're trying to slow the spread, why are certain businesses targeted for destruction while others are treated like they have some kind of magical anti-viral force-field around them? It doesn't make any sense. It's almost like the criteria for staying open is to be a powerful and connected national player, those companies who can return the favors of their patron. I have a hunch that NY won't be big enough for our Little Dictator much longer.

Absurdities are flying fast and thick in the world of the "new-normal," one can barely keep-up with them. One of the most disturbing is the news that Bill Gates is once again partnering with the school system,  as if his universally-loathed Common Core "standards" haven't caused enough PTSD in the poor children who've been traumatized by it. If experience is any guide we can expect a new level of childhood stress in the "new-normal" of medical-grade schooling. Who knows, maybe Gate's bizarre and convoluted methods of teaching basic math (that left parents of 1st and 2nd graders confused) will seem quite rational and common sense in the "new-normal" of childhood social-distancing and forehead scans? Even though children are unharmed by corona (and haven't been confirmed to transmit it to adults) we must ensure that they are damaged by it one way or another. How else will they by psychologically scarred enough to accept their role as permanent part-time Walmart  employees receiving a paltry UBI in the "new-normal"? Without a healthy daily dose of pandemic-terror to keep them off-kilter they might start to question why they are being forced to give up their futures so that octogenarians with 3 or 4 medical preconditions can live another year.

Only a step back from Gold in the stupidity Olympics is the tragic irony that public health itself is guaranteed to take a nose-dive from all of this. Millions of ventilators sit in closets unused, dustily prepared for the "second-wave" now promised by Neil Ferguson's broken computer model. The dire "first-wave" of 2 million dead only existed in the computer's darkly-lunatic digital-mind, as it was warped and goaded by the Frankenstenian tinkering of the Imperial College Doomsday Team until gibbering mountains of ventilated corpses spewed forth onto the results page, much to the delight of the Gates-funded mad scientists. Nevertheless, "safety-first" must be our motto as millions of non-simulated medical maladies go untreated for months and hospitals systems crash and burn. In the "new-normal" we will have no need for such frivolities as family-practice care and a doctor's familiar face: I'm sure Jeff Bezos will provide all our medical needs in the new 24-7 warehouse-cage that the lucky few will inhabit two-weeks out of every month.

The lynch-pin of all this, apparently "normal," madness is the lockdown itself. So why would one expect even a semblance of reason to gloss over the gas-lighting of King Cuomo?  While we watch like good kids in the classroom as he places a shiny star over each box of his "reopening metrics," the last slot is still withheld. In this attempt to blackmail his fiefdoms (or regions in the old-tongue) into supine compliance with all the mad whims of his pals, the Tech Giants, Big Pharma, and Multinational Conglomerates, the last piece of his gambit is finally revealed. Sure we may have TONS of extra hospital beds, we've been good obedient children so our hospitalizations are down, and the requisite amount of trace-snitches have infiltrated among us. But that's not good enough if the snitches have nothing to do! 

You have to keep people on their toes, or what's the point? There's no better way than a good hard TEST! Or how about 35,000 of them? TESTTESTTEST. It doesn't matter who or what, just test! Once upon a time it was really important to only test the symptomatic people (when they wanted the virus to look worse). Now we have learned the wisdom of random testing (not to be confused with randomized testing, that would tell us too much about the actual situation). Hence the forehead scanners going around in the vans to the sign-flying hobos every-day and getting their temp reading. Any who are a little up that day can be swabbed, if needed. From what they have told me they aren't being "forcibly" tested, for now. I expect they won't be allowed to beg a buck on the intersection if it's positive though. We'll have to see, the sign-flyers are our canary and I suggest everyone pick their brains now while we still have a chance.

The test is in a sense a symbol, you are giving your body over to the State, your very DNA. It's tempting to go on a testing binge to get over that hurdle, but once you've given in that's the signal that the lockdown power-play can be used at will. It appears that testing is the gate back into normalcy, but you may find the "new-normal" anything but. Once the contact-tracers get going is when the fun really starts. Don't take any test because you are forced to or co-erced to. It's an abdication of your medical privacy rights, opening you up to the contact-tracers. But by all means, anyone in a risk-group, if you feel like you do need a test get. Let me know what it felt like in the comments. If Cuomo gets enough suckers, maybe he will let us go free? Whatever "free" is, now, in the "new-normal."