Just Say “No” To Tyranny

Schadenfreude is not something I want to be part of my personality. And yet, watching people torment themselves the same way they torture me, what am I supposed to feel? I can’t even be pleased that they aren’t being hypocrites because that means they sincerely don’t know how to be human. Perhaps this guy sorting out his feelings will help me sort out mine.

THE ISOLATION OF GRIEF IN THE PANDEMIC

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By Jay Peters, 25 April 2021

Many people adopted a pet during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife and I just lost one.

Gouda, our eight-and-a-half-year-old exotic shorthair cat, died on April 16th. We rushed him to the hospital the previous morning after he spent another night vomiting. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong, but, over the course of 24 hours, signs pointed to fatal kidney disease. We made the difficult choice to euthanize him.

I can sympathize this far. I grew up with dogs. It’s never fun when the time comes.

The events would have been horrible under any circumstances. But I found that the forced isolation of the pandemic made grieving a lost family member even more challenging than I could have possibly imagined.

My wife and I spent the majority of the 24 hours inside a Zipcar parked outside the animal hospital. Due to safety regulations, we couldn’t wait in the lobby, so we . and all of the other families worried about their pets . waited alone in our cars. Despite being feet away from each other, we were all worlds apart, stranded in pods of sadness made of metal and glass. Once, we watched as a woman handed off her cat to the veterinary staff, got back in her car, and broke down sobbing.

Losing sympathy. First for the veterinarian for banning people from the lobby, then for Jay staying in the car like he didn’t want to just because the government declared it so.

As we attempted to sleep in the Zipcar overnight, the phone was perched on the dashboard. I stared at it in between fits of sleep, dreading when it would ring. We could never talk to the vets in person, meaning we couldn’t see body language, facial expressions, eye contact . nonverbal cues that would have helped us make the most difficult decision of our lives.

If euthanizing his ailing pet was the most difficult decision of his life then I am FAST losing sympathy. I already suspected he had a sheltered life from 1. no camping gear and 2. being strongly emotional. But losing a pet is a time that permits men to cry so I wasn’t sure.

When we went in to see Gouda for our final goodbye, we sat in a dimly lit room on a soft couch. Our masks constantly filled up with snot. From the other side of the room, the staff told us we couldn’t be with Gouda when he died. There would be no easy way to be six feet apart.

“If you can’t grieve in accordance with mandatory health guidelines then you aren’t allowed to grieve.” –a woman married to the State.

Right after, my wife and I realized we didn’t want to be home, but we had nowhere else to go. We’re not vaccinated from COVID-19 yet, so we can’t see our family or friends in person to find solace. We couldn’t escape our empty studio apartment.

Suck it, you fool. Suck on that loneliness hard and give it some tongue action, too, because your kind did that loneliness to me first. I lost my friends because of your Plandemic. Now they’re all excited about getting the jab, every single one, and I’m going to be the lone holdout. I would get new friends but look, no social activities are permitted by the State. Not even grieving! I disobey and go outside to meet people; they see me coming on the hiking trails and cover their faces, keep distant and their heads down. Maybe they’re trying to be polite. They’re certainly trying to avoid me. I wander into the local park past dire warnings that playtime can kill; nobody. Food joints, the beach and game hangouts, no love. Credit to a few bicyclists, however; I should’ve known that people who insist on dressing like that in public could care less about being mask-shamed.

I’ve met some great people online but visiting them requires plane tickets. And soon, vaxx-ports.

So then, liberals can suck on their self-inflicted, self-mandated loneliness until they choke on it and die unloved and shunned as a disease until their corpse rots, at which time they’ll ironically be declared plague-free. I wish these people WERE hypocrites because then, on some level, they would still know how to behave like human beings.

Out of habit, we opened the front door gingerly. Every day for more than eight and a half years, Gouda had always greeted us, sometimes throwing his whole body against the door in his excitement to see us. But he wasn’t there.

Instead, we saw his food bowl, his scratching post, his toys. Our apartment had been the one place we had felt truly safe during the pandemic, but it was now filled with reminders of our missing family member.

So we began to clean.

Usually, getting rid of things comes easily to my wife and me. We have internalized much of what Marie Kondo writes about in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. But this was different. It was harder than any cleaning we had done before because the things we got rid of were the reminders of our missing family member. We couldn’t fully move on if we kept them, but that didn’t make it easy to let them go. And because of the pandemic, we couldn’t ask others to come over and help. We had to face this part of the grief as just the two of us.

It’s not that his friends shunned Jay. It’s that he refused to give them the chance to NOT shun him because he hadn’t gotten his second Pfizer-jab yet. What am I supposed to feel about such a person? Hate? Pity? Maybe I shouldn’t feel anything and just treat him like that plague-bearing raccoon that doesn’t raid my garbage anymore. Christ wouldn’t want that… but he himself does want to be assumed a plague-bearing varmint? “I’m such a good boy, I told my friends and family to stay away from me until I’ve had my shots! Even when it makes me miserable!”

I will never know how grieving this death would have been different if we weren’t still in the pandemic. I do think it made the worst moments even worse. It trapped us in our car. It kept us from him in the hospital. It separated us from our families. It locked us in our home with the memories of our lost family member.

You could always… oh, I don’t know… JUST SAY ‘NO’ TO TYRANNY!!!

Kondo recommends thanking objects that you remove from your house to acknowledge the role they played in your life. I did that for every one of Gouda’s things. .Thank you, scratching post,. I said. .Thank you, plastic Easter egg. Thank you, food placemat.. I even thanked his litter box.

Get another cat. That’s all you have to do. A little grieving, get ‘er done, then get another pet. Do NOT anthropomorphize the litter box.

Thanking Gouda’s things may sound trivial. But it was one of the few rituals left to me during the pandemic, when so much has been taken away, and it helped me recognize everything that Gouda gave to me. He taught me responsibility, caring for and feeding him every day. He taught me how to play, crouching just out of sight around the bed so that he could spring toward me. He taught me about love, snuggled above my head on my pillow in the middle of the night.

Thank you, Gouda.

So, Jay… in the unlikely event you’ve discovered this and read this far without hating my guts… has the government banning you from acting human taught you anything about evil? Do you have any resentment at all that the State has practically banned you from living indoors, banned you from being visited by family when you’re hurting, banned you from showing your face long enough to kiss a loved one goodbye? Are you bothered at all that humanity now comes only in a syringe blessed by the New World Order?

Please say yes, so that both of us can see the other as a fellow human being.