Two years ago today, on March 11, 2020, the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. Like millions of others, that historic moment and that specific event started me on a personal journey of research and discovery that continues to shape my opinions and my view of the world today.
Throughout that year (2020), a couple of friends of mine and I were intently sharing data and information back and forth, trying collectively to gain a thoughtful understanding and an accurate consensus of the events taking place around us globally, both from a medical, political, and a cultural perspective. Together we pieced and processed our way slowly through a bewildering maze of medical inconsistencies, political inaccuracies, a barrage of differing opinions, and untold mountains of misinformation, disinformation, even mal-information in our efforts to uncover the truth and to make sense of things.
Then last year (2021), about this same time of year we met at our favorite lunch spot where we sat on the patio to share our thoughts and conclusions and to discuss any apparent courses of action that might mean for each of us and for our families. I remember how shocked I was that both of them had elected to, and had in fact, already submitted themselves to the vaccination shot(s).
From a rather far-off distance, I heard myself ask them in utter disbelief, “Why did you do it? Please help me to understand your reasoning.”
They explained their thoughts, their reasoning, and their processes individually and I listened, but I’m not sure I could honestly say that I understood. After weighing out the pros and cons, it seemed to me that in the end, both of my friends had simply chosen the side of convenience. To them the choice seemed to boil down to the fact that it was simply easier and more convenient to just take the jab and go on with life without too much further social disruption. While I respect their decisions to make the choices they made, I have opted for a different course for myself.
Yesterday, we met up again to lunch at the same place at the same time where we had engaged in that conversation a year earlier. I was curious to hear my friends’ thoughts about the happenings of the year (and there were many, happenings that is), to hear about any fresh revelations they may have had during the year, and about what growth of ideas they had experienced since we had last had an opportunity to talk together about things that really matter.
I enjoyed the company of my friends immensely in the couple of hours that we shared about our lives over lunch. Both of these women are smart, articulate, good conversationalists, and generally fun to be around. We talked. We laughed. We caught up. I value their friendship, their ideas, the essence of who they each are.
But as I strapped myself into my vehicle after lunch and felt the weak sunlight spill across my face, I felt an aching sense of loneliness. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment, recognizing that I had been changed pretty significantly in the past year. And I’m okay with that.
Nevertheless, change is sometimes hard. It’s sometimes sad. It sometimes displaces you, changes your course, rearranges priorities and even sometimes affects your relationships. As a “Live and Let Live” type of person, I generally try to take all of these kinds of things in stride. But this time it took deliberate effort on my part to accept the sadness and let it wash over me, knowing better than to distract myself from it which would only serve to lodge it like a splinter into my heart. The pain of the inflammation would then take longer than necessary to heal.
When I got home, there were several of boxes of books sitting by the door that I had already cleared out to make room in the existing bookshelves for newer books. They were packed in boxes ready to be dropped off at Grace Works for someone else to enjoy. I picked up a small volume off the top of a stack, a novella written by Alan Bennett entitled The Uncommon Reader.
The Uncommon Reader is a wildly delicious story, set in modern-day Britain which focuses on the “uncommon reader” – Queen Elizabeth II – who narrates the story as she becomes passionate about reading after an encounter with a mobile library outside the royal kitchen. As she becomes increasingly more interested in reading than with the duties of the monarchy, her fascination with books has major consequences for her, her council of advisors, her family, and her position as monarch. She begins questioning the systems and people around her, developing more of a mind of her own. In addition, she starts wondering about the ways she has lived her life according to her royal duty.
As the Queen begins examining the world around her more critically, she decides to start writing her ideas down. She becomes more determined to produce something in writing that is both analytical and reflective about her life. The conclusion of the book comes when the Queen announces this intention to a large gathering of her advisors at her 80th birthday party. Many of the guests try to protest her ideas, including the prime minister, reminding her that she would have to abdicate the throne if she were to publish her writing. The Queen responds, in the concluding sentence of the novel that this is precisely her intention.
“No, one knows that it isn’t the same, but my great grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also, Leaves from a Highland Journal, and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offense as to be almost unreadable. It’a not a model one would want to follow,” the Queen said. And then of course,’ and the Queen looked hard at her first minister, ‘there was my uncle the Duke of Windsor, he wrote a book, A King’s Story, the history of his marriage and subsequent adventures. If nothing else, that surely counts as a precedent?’
Furnished with the advice of the attorney general on this point, the prime minister smiled and almost apologetically made his objection, ‘Yes, ma’am, I agree, but the difference, surely, is that His Royal Highness wrote the book as Duke of Windsor. He could only write it because he had abdicated.’
‘Oh, did I not say that?’ said the Queen. ‘But. . .why do you think you’re all here?’
There. I apologize for having spoiled the delicious ending of this delightful tale for you. Even knowing the ending, it would be completely worth your time to read this novella for yourself; there is so much rich goodness in it. And besides that, following the Queen’s fictional journey of personal development is certain to make you laugh.
Suddenly, I understood some things that I had not given much thought to before about the nature of change, the high cost and the risk of change, how change influences the people around you, and even the loneliness of change when it happens to you but not to others.
The engineered chaos we are witnessing in the United States and around the world is, in large part, the result of forced transformation. Since 1974, the systematic dismantling of national, state and personal sovereignty, the reformation of global trade and the ad hominem attacks on those critical of the globalists’ “plan” have all served to create the current state of confusion.
Richard Gardner, an original Trilateral Commission member and academic wrote a seminal paper in 1974 that was published in Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Obsessed with the Trilateral goal of creating a “New International Economic Order”, Gardner titled his article, The Hard Road to World Order.
Gardner’s oft-repeated statement that follows gives us an insight into his (and the Trilateral Commission’s) radical idea to turn the world upside-down:
In short, the “house of world order” will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ but an end-run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
Richard Gardner
This “booming, buzzing confusion” as it matures has certainly been wearing us out the past couple of years. When education has been horrifically dumbed down for multiple generations so that critical thinking is virtually impossible, when the traditional rule of law no longer provides consistent justice, when the economic system no longer produces wealth for the middle class, stripping them of hope for their future, when election integrity fails, and when the Biblical character of a people, the original guideposts necessary to properly run our Constitutional Republic is shredded, society will inevitably experience chaos, violence, and worse.
So, I get it. Change is hard. Change is confusing. Change is lonely. Because of that, many people will simply choose to sleepwalk through the times not culturally curious, not wanting to understand what is happening or why or even what one’s responsibility might be in the midst of the confusion. In some regards it is easier to simply look the other way, to go with the flow, to go along to get along, and to pretend everything is normal when it clearly is not. But while it may be easier, it certainly is not intellectually honest.
None of us have chosen this path; it has been foisted upon us. But here we are. When it’s all said and done, in the end we each have to choose for ourselves how we will respond to this time in humanity’s history. Yes, it’s hard to challenge the status quo. It’s hard to undermine the official narratives, to expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum.
You know what else is hard? Making peace with the choices people we love make that are different than ours and loving them anyway.