When I first heard about the COVID-19 epidemic in China late last year, I realized how much easier it would be for China to deal with the virus than it would be for the US and other free countries.
Lockdowns, quarantines, and forced vaccinations are easy for communist regimes, where people are compliant, individual rights are nonexistent, and government control over all aspects of life are the norm. Public health mandates in China are little different from normal, daily mandates. People are used to being told what to do, and how to live.
Public health mandates in the US are the closest we get to being communist. Once a public health emergency is declared, civil rights are knocked-down, while everything else is locked-down. We all become statistical data, no longer individuals with a life of our own. And as the response to COVID-19 is showing, we can be told by our government to stay home, stop working, stop seeing friends and family, and stop breathing without a mask. Our kids can’t go to school. We can’t even go to the park, if it is still open, and enjoy nature.
Private businesses have been closed and destroyed, replacing business income with government loans and handouts. Big government, and Big Tech, have become our Big Brothers.
Our lives have been forced online to be lived over the Internet, where Big Brother can watch, listen, and record everything that is said. Our homes are on public display, and our privacy no longer exists.
For those who are used to being private, self-directed citizens of a free country, the US is no longer recognizable. COVID-19 has given license to communism in the US. We are now all wards of the State, and must do what we are told by our pseudo-elected officials and their public health “experts”.
In communist China, you are arrested and punished for not obeying the “experts”. In the US, you now face fines and imprisonment for disobeying mask mandates, or gathering with “too many” people.
In China, those who do not obey are subjected to “re-education”. Now, in the US, we are all being re-educated into feeling guilt and shame over our past. Statues of our iconic Founding Fathers are being destroyed. Capitalism is under attack.
Having free and fair elections is also something communists don’t get. And from the looks of things, we seem to have lost that, too, here in the US.
In a free country, we accept responsibility for our own actions. We live by the Golden Rule, but accept that others may not. But in a communist regime, we have responsibility for one another. We live by the government rule.
In a free country, we respond to an epidemic by taking personal precautionary measures as we see fit, and listen to the advice of the “experts” if we agree with that advice. It’s our choice. In a communist country, we are told how to respond to an epidemic by the government, and take any measures politicians and “experts” decide are for our “safety”.
A free country requires freedom of speech and assembly to continue to exist as free. In a communist country, information is censored, and those who don’t comply are “cancelled”, just as is happening today in the US.
Fear tactics, censorship, lockdowns, isolation, and despair are used to control the masses. We are under the gun to comply, fearful of the virus, and fearful of the government. And the government stays in our face constantly, as we are forced to wear masks, even outdoors.
Usually, when there is a health crisis, the sick are quarantined, not the healthy. Individual liberty is lost when someone has an infectious disease and needs to be isolated for the safety of others. Now, however, we are all quarantined, even the healthy. We are not allowed to take any risks with our own lives.
Everything we do is assumed to potentially impact others, limiting our freedom. The need to protect others from disease has become more important than our right to live our lives as we wish. We can’t even say something that someone else finds offensive. We have become our brothers’ keepers, more concerned with others than ourselves, with everything under the umbrella of social justice and equality and government control.
In a communist regime we are responsible for one another; in a democracy we are responsive to one another.
Until COVID-19, our culture had accepted that people can spread disease. We lived with deadly flu viruses year after year without these hysterical calls for ending contagion. We accepted that life has risks, and disease is one of them. We avoided crowds during flu season, but didn’t social distance or wear masks, especially not healthy people. We even shook hands. We somehow managed to live for centuries despite the hazards of living.
But we have changed as a nation. We now embrace policies and values that are more fitting for China than the US. We have sold our freedom, and our souls, out of fear. We are being re-educated, and our culture rebranded. The virus has infected our minds and souls more than our bodies. Our nation is sick with despair and self-pity and wants Big Brother to save us, just as it does in China.
We need to stop locking down our minds, our economy, and our lives. We need to breathe the sweet air of freedom again, and place our faith in some power higher than Big Brother and Big Tech. The virus may take away some unfortunate lives, but it must not continue to take away our freedoms and destroy our nation, or history will show 2019 as the year the US died of COVID.