The Downside of the New Normal

The New Normal of the post-pandemic world has both a downside and an upside. Let’s tackle the downside first. Now that America has ended the Covid emergency laws, everyone is keen to get back ‘to normal.’ What they crave are the old routines, the familiar lifestyles, and the comfortable liberties. The problem for America and other nations who behaved in concert with the unholy trinity of vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and masks is that going back to normal is impossible. 

The world has changed, and overall, it is not for the better. We have changed. Our government has changed. Our values have changed. Covid-19 has given us an unjust legacy of new ways of thinking, new values, and new expectations. It is overall, an unjust system. It is an unrighteous system. It is a system that exacerbates inequality, rewards conformity, and ensures division. The values it promotes are a cancer that will spread through the fabric of our nations and our hearts. Our children and grandchildren will stand in judgment over us if we survive at all. 

As for the disease, it continues unabated and unrestrained, hardly extinguished by the vaccines that were meant to kill it. People continue to die, lives continue to be destroyed, and the government says little, or next to nothing anymore except talk about boosters, social distancing, and mask-wearing. But it is weak and half-hearted, like a man trying to give you something he doesn’t want you to have anymore. ‘Shut up, and move on,’ they say. A few might beat their breasts over Long Covid, but we are expected to forget the last three years because we have our freedoms back, what’s left of them. 

Covid-19 continues to evolve as a series of strains and wreaks death, havoc, and mayhem around the world, even among the people we were told would never get sick, hospitalised, or die, the vaccinated. The reality is that if governments had any intention of keeping people safe, martial law would have continued, but those evils were about social control, loyalty tests and litmus tests for the future, and nothing to do with public health policy. It was abuse of power and corruption on a scale hitherto unknown in the West, at least for a while. 

Let us be clear what will not happen. There will be no trials for the leaders of the lockdown policies, or their corporate backers. There are current enquiries and investigations, and they will, overall, exonerate lockdown ideology, vaccine policy, and government responses, though some might lament the negative aspects of Covid Hysteria in hindsight. If the narrative collapses around vaccine efficacy, everyone will plead ignorance, and say, ‘Well, we didn’t know.’

The corrupt will be protected, those who benefited financially from Covid-19 will get wealthier, and the victims will be ignored. This is how the world works. If you want to change it, then have a revolution, but as Lenin found out, you will have to kill a lot of people, and maybe it is a slight overreaction to a public health disaster. 

What are some of the negative characteristics of the New Normal? 

1. There will be enduring vaccine mandates across a variety of industries and professions until they are defeated through the legal system. These industries focus on the health sector, but also include professions and organisations that work with ‘vulnerable people.’ The arbitrary nature of such laws, their ineffectiveness, and susceptibility to lawsuits suggests that it is in the health sector that the last insanity of Covid Hysteria will be played out. Even though the vaccines do not prevent infection, transmission, hospitalisation, or death, unvaccinated individuals will be unable to undertake gainful employment in these workplaces. These enduring mandates violate a host of human rights obligations and anti-discrimination laws. If patients are not required to have their vaccinations up-to-date, then employment mandates for vaccines in those workplaces are a nonsense. 
2. There is widespread acceptance of Covid-related unemployment and poverty. Many millions of people lost employment due to their views on the vaccines. These victims of Covid-19 had an uncertain economic future. The institutions that were supposed to protect them cast them aside. The silence of the teacher’s unions, the nursing unions, and the health-care sector unions and medical associations in general were deafening. The best form of welfare is a job, and yet Covid Hysteria forced millions into welfare against their will. The suffering of this class of people is just another group that our welfare society will do nothing to address. An individual who has their latest booster can lounge on unemployment benefits for the rest of their life, while their unvaccinated brother or sister is denied the right to a job in an industry for which they are suited, trained, and prepared. This is a wickedness but what do you expect from a welfare system that is about politics and not preparedness? 
3. There will be a stubborn refusal to budge from corrupt vaccine narratives. There have been some high-profile confessions and acts of repentance from people once devout followers of Covid-19 ideology, but overall, the original fabric of Covid Hysteria has remained intact. Time will tell. There is sufficient evidence for the complete unraveling and replacement of Covid ideology with a new perspective, but there are far too many important people, whose lives and reputations are linked to a continual devotion to the current narrative. Those who love Trump know this; while Fauci was a significant player, he was a government employee, and the ultimate responsibility for all policies during a Presidential term lies with the sitting President. He or she can claim credit for success and blame for failure. That is the cost of leadership in the American system. It is called American democracy.
4. There are much closer ties between church and state that will have unforeseen consequences. In Australia and America, the churches laughed all the way to the bank in Covid Hysteria. Many received millions in subsidies, payouts, and other financial benefits, perhaps carrots to smooth over the closure of the churches and their silence. Usually, churches are always saying something in the public sphere, but during Covid Hysteria, they were very quiet. Maybe they were too busy counting their money or worried the government was coming for their assets if they did not comply, or God forbid, expect them to pay taxes like everyone else. 
5. There is broad acceptance of martial law as a way of overcoming national crises. For most wealthy members of the ruling class, Covid-19 was a good thing. They saw the suspension of human rights and democratic freedoms (which they don’t really believe in) as necessary for the national good. Of course, many lived in insulated bubbles, immune to the social and economic chaos of the pandemic. Covid-19 was a loyalty test for citizens and a litmus test for the future, mainly for the middle class who are usually forgotten. Few people protested the end of democracy, and this is how democracy dies. 
6. There is a lack of repentance over the demonisation of citizens. The denunciation of the unvaccinated; indeed, the creation of this category of people was, in my mind, the worst aspect of Covid Hysteria, and it remains the most wicked. I was astonished and I still marvel at how foolish the West was. It exposed us as unbelievable hypocrites, telling the world to welcome all minorities while at the same time we happily, joyfully and enthusiastically condemn a new minority. The damage this has done to the moral standing of the West is incalculable. 
7. The enduring silence of the academy, old radicalism, the Old Left and Old Right. The billions dangled in front of many people during Covid Hysteria was enough to induce silence. Many on the Left and Right who boasted a lifetime of commitment to the truth, to justice, to the revolution, said nothing except praise for the state’s abrogation of human rights and the suspension of democracy. The groups and individuals who stayed silent as well as the churches that closed, took the money, and shut up, proved their intellectual impotence, irrelevance, and lack of integrity. If such a person was made destitute during Covid Hysteria, their stance being purely personal, saw the error of their ways, and sought to bring light into darkness including admitting their own personal complicity, it might be different. But these groups and organisations took a lot of money from the government, lived comfortably during Covid Hysteria, often made a fortune – many churches did – so whatever they say now are with hollow words, dead phrases, and illusory notions. They are morally and spiritually bankrupt. 

The decay of the academy has been ongoing for generations, and it is not surprising. Tenured academics are often careful about which battles they fight, and non-tenured staff must conform, or else. Some of the old hippies kept up the fight, but most did not. The slogan of ‘Make love and not war,’ was replaced by ‘I’m vaccinated. You’re welcome.’ Many of the old Hippies today rush for their boosters and have more injections now than junkies. As for the Western Marxists, those who are not calling for the death of the unvaccinated, most of them are too busy with their wine cellars, tenured positions, and paying their kids’ college fees to condescend to walk among us mortals. Covid Hysteria barely ruffled their feathers.

Combined, these characteristics are not positive, nor do they suggest genuine hope for the future. The New Normal implies the subordination of the population ready for the next crisis. The emergency laws, martial law, whatever you would like to call it, were the instruments of tyrants and tyranny. They are the emblems of neo-fascism, which is really what we are facing today, the economic takeover of the state and the end of the old system of representative democracy.

Some call it ‘corporatism,’ others ‘fascism,’ or maybe it is a revival of undiluted, unrestrained capitalism. We all know what it looks like, but we don’t agree on how to describe it; perhaps we just need a little more time. Politicians do represent someone, but they tend to be the powerful and the wealthy, and ordinary people are left to fend for themselves. 

What I saw in Covid-19 was that many people love fascism, will embrace it, and will be excited by it especially if there is someone to blame. We should never blame anyone. Modern problems are usually too complex to even think about blaming someone. The temptation to blame a group of people for a complex social problem indicates deep, profound societal and individual failure. 

It is not superficial failure. This is in the foundation, this is in the sinews of social life, this is in the fabric of society, and it is in the hearts, the souls, and the minds of individuals who gave up truth and morality for lies and personal failure. Yet after centuries of boasting and talking, the best the West can do is find another group to condemn, to persecute, and to blame. 

The great and perverse irony is that the same people who said, ‘Follow the science’ came up with the term ‘The unvaccinated.’ The so-called lovers of science drowned in prejudice and irrationalism, persecuting those who were not vaccinated. This was not science, this was a deep ignorance, a deep misunderstanding of the human condition, and a deep failure of Western morality. 

I might say God help us, but why would he bother? After thousands of years of God talking to us in different and various ways, we still do not listen, and we never learn.