See previous posts, wrote 2 in the last week on this mess. Listen to this song too. BTW all red text in my posts is external links to related data.

Death is inevitable, you can not avoid it when it is your time to go. There are millions of causes of death, and even the flu supposedly kills 3% of those that catch it. Every so often, whether it be “survival of the fittest” or “God’s plan”, regardless of what you call it, something happens worldwide that kills many people. There have been natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, F5 tornadoes), planes flying into buildings, wars, The Holocaust, The Soviet Famine (Holocaust senior), bombs, car accidents, train accidents, and many many diseases. If it’s your time, it’s your time. If it’s not, then being sick for a week or two isn’t the end of the world.

And suffering is all self-contrived to begin with. I can’t count the number of old people I have worked with that hold on for no apparent reason even when their body has shut down and it hurts more to be alive than to let go. I always end up having “the conversation” where I essentially ask them why are they holding on. Regardless of their excuse, if they can even speak, inevitably that conversation seems to be the permission to let go and they always let go and let themselves exit the misery. It was their choice all along.

Additionally, what goes around comes around with suffering. I find it interesting that one of my 94 year olds told me over the phone: “They won’t let you come give me my massage, they won’t even let my kids in…. I worked on a kids polio unit all those many years ago. My unit was in the basement of the hospital in rural Iowa. Kids were dieing of polio and their parents had to stand outside of tiny basement windows to try and see their kids. The kids would cry for their parents. Now I know how they felt.” Polio killed many people, but not everyone. I have a dozen people that I know over the age of 80 that survived polio. Two lost use of their legs, others look fine but have residual leg problems, others had no lasting effects. All of them have lived generally good happy lives.

So far, numbers that I have seen and heard do not make this virus any worse than previous pandemics. Yet the world has gone insane.

Keeping people home and unemployed does not prevent the spread of the disease altogether, as should be obvious by now, yet somehow more and more government agencies seem to think it’s helping and are following suit. More of our society lives in whole families than live alone. So just because Bob couldn’t go to work and Bob’s kids had to stay home from school, doesn’t mean his wife got out of work, and many families live with extended relatives: aunt’s, uncles, grandparents, etc. So 80% of your family is sequestered but 20% comes into contact with the rest of society doing their job. They catch it and bring it home to the people that were forced to stay home, little good that sequestering process did. Someone proposed that we require staff to stay at their jobs. For how long, and where, would you make people sleep at their desks, and has anyone thought of the strain that would put on families and small children missing their parents?

This idea that we’ll just shut everything down to slow the spread is rediculous and unsustainable. It may be effective at slowing the disease, but it draws out suffering for everyone.

Everyone that loses income or employment, stuffers hardship attempting to pay bills. It puts our healthy children behind in their education and contributes to illiteracy. It’s puts mental strain on everyone because of cabin-fever and the loss of the benefits of proper socialization (which I learned is a major key element to fighting clinical depression). It will literally drive people crazy with anxiety, worry, and stress. That chemical storm in the human body will make everyone more susceptible to every disease, even ones their immune system has already fought off at some point. This is all already documented, well accepted, verifiable information.

It is unsustainable. We already have multiple diseases yearly. If everything shuts down every time a virus spreads, we’d be shut down more than functional. Last year alone I watched two stains of the flu, 1 stain of pneumonia, and CDIFF spread through my work environments, to be followed by this covid19. If we had shut down for all of them: banks would not get paid for mortgages and loans, businesses would close, homes would be lost, unemployment and homelessness would skyrocket. This is not a sustainable solution.

Just because there is more technology that enables more people to work from home, does not mean we can sustain society on that alone. Trash/recycling would still need collected and processed, grocery stores would still need to function, drug stores would still be vital, hospitals/nursing centers would still need to function, chiropractors/acupuncturists/massage therapists are as vital as ever as they help lower stress levels. I can think of dozens of things that computers simply cannot replace.

I know that everyone thinks that AI is the great saviour that will solve all of this. We can have robots make the products. Robots package the products. Robots deliver the products. Robots could even eventually replace trash trucks. But would you want to eat a meal cooked by robots? And, how much of society can be replaced by robots before you run out of work for qualified citizens? There’s only so many positions that can be employed from a home computer. We always have had a portion of society that was unskiled menial labor; even if one hypothesizes that we could eliminate the jobs with Robots, you can’t eliminate the portion of humans that filled those roles. There is no way to ensure all of humanity is educated enough to carry out highly skilled positions. Would you start assassinating healthy upstanding citizens merely because their job was replace by a robot and they were not skilled enough to work from a computer?

I for one have seen the movies like Gataca, AI, etc. They were bad ideas in the movies and I don’t want to live in that world. That is what is trying to happen here. I don’t want to live in a world like this.

I want to live in the world of sanity, where people value each other and understand illness as part of life. Where we love each other and care for each other even when a new disease is spreading. Where we work on ourselves to overcome fears, worries, and anxiety so that we can stay as healthy as our bodies and God intended. I want to live in the world that takes normal, sustainable measures to slow the spread of diseases. I want to live in a world where the divinity of our amazing immune system is honored. I want to live in a world where people in power have half a brain and can step back and say: “ok, this crossed the line, we need to pull back a bit.” Where those in control use logic and reason and make positive forward-moving decisions based in practical reality. I want to live in a world where media channels fall and the contrived Hysteria comes to an end. I want to live in a world that mitigates the news to truly necessary informational updates and returns to only being informed occasionally as scheduled, not 24/7. The inundation is what breeds Hysteria. I want to live in a world where entertainment tells the good story, tells the good what if, tells of good things to look forward to. I want to live in a world where superheroes are the politicians and law enforcement officers that bring calm, sane, reassurance. I want to live in a world where people focus on living a happy life knowing they could die anytime from anything. I want those things for myself mostly, but for everyone. I am being selfish in these thoughts, but in a way that includes humanity as a whole. I want everyone to do that. Being selfish does not have to equal harming others or bringing humanity down. We are all in this together, bring the love and the light and lift each other up. Supporting each other helps us all get through life better. Supporting each other helps your own life feel better.

Here’s a question, with all the shut downs, what’s happened to soup kitchens? What’s going on with homeless shelters? Churches have shut down, how are food banks functioning? In fear of “I might get sick” we’re hurting ourselves all over the place in literally thousands of other ways. How is that okay?

May we all come to our senses. May we all make peace with the possibility of death and the minimal suffering of a nasty cold. May we see that what doesn’t kill us really does make us stronger. May we all see our general health. May we know our immune systems are God given kick ass virus destroying superheroes. May we love ourselves and be selfishly helpful of society as a whole. May we all have joyous happy lives full of healthy days of positive socialization and friendships. May we all earn a living doing things we love regardless of their ability to work from home on a computer. May we all be able to exist freely and happily day to day for our entire lives.

Many blessings to everyone, you’ll make it through this one way or another. It’ll all be okay. It is okay. We can return to normal if everyone makes it known that is preferred.

World peace begins with inner peace. ~ Dalai Lama

Siva Hir Su