MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS
When I came home last night, there wasn’t really any television shows I could watch before I went to bed. I needed to wind down with some mindless entertainment before I crawl into bed.
I know I always talk about this but it has been something that I got in the habit of doing since the pandemic has limited my ability to go top restaurant or bar to have discussions with friends and colleagues.
I have discovered that there is a streaming service called Peacock. It has a channel devoted to old Saturday Night love reruns. It just randomly selects old sketches and skit from previous episodes even some of the classic ones wind up in the mix.
As I was sitting on the couch having a snack there was an old Steve Martin sketch called Theodoric of York Medieval Barber.
I remember that sketch when I was a kid as I am sure many fans of SNL or Steve Martin remember it as well.
The skit is set up by Don Pardo stating that:
“In the Middle aged medicine was still in its infancy, the art of healing was not conducted by doctors but by barbers. The medieval barbers were the forerunners of todays men of medicine, and many of the techniques they developed are still practiced today.”
That was the joke.
Theodoric , the Medieval barber’s first patient was man that requested a haircut and bloodletting.
Then a woman comes in carrying her sick daughter looking for help,
She says to the barber: “I followed all of your instructions and she is still sick and dying. She told the barber undefinedI mixed powder of stag horn, gum of Arabic with boiled sheep urine and applied it to her face.undefined
The barber then asks, undefinedDid you bury her in the marsh up to her neck and leave over night as I instructed?undefined
The woman then says undefinedYes, and she still feels as listless as ever.undefined
The barber then says undefinedWell it looks like she could use another bloodletting.undefined
The woman is still worried, and the Barber admonishes her by saying undefinedWe barbers are not Gods and medicine is not an exact science but we are learning all the time why 50 years ago we would have thought your daughterundefineds illness was brought on by demonic possession or witchcraft but nowadays we know that her aliment has been caused by an imbalance of bodily humors perhaps brought on by a small toad or a dwarf living in her stomach.undefined
There are other treatments that the barber used to help is patientsundefined he would use leeches and boar’s vomit.
Believe it or not the whole sketch was based on truth, SNL writers consulted with a Harvard professor to get the details right.
Yes, we can laugh at the foolishness of medieval barbers and doctors of the 1300undefineds but will future generations look back at the way we treated COVID-19 and have a good laugh as well?
Right now, we are not laughing of course but perhaps the truth can help amuse ourselves to death.
In California, kids have still not gone back to school, masks are still required even when you’re outside, and indoor activities are strictly limited. Californians are still only supposed to leave home for “necessary” government-approved reasons.
Meanwhile in Florida, the Governor never issued a statewide mask mandate. Bars and restaurants have been back at full capacity since September. Florida schools have been open all school year. Families gathered for the holidays. And the state hosted the Super Bowl.
In 2020, Florida’s beaches stayed open for Spring Break, while California closed most beaches. Disney World in Florida has been open since July, while Disney Land in California remains closed.
But Florida has the disadvantage of an older population— 20.9% of Floridians are above the age of 65, versus 14.8% of Californians, according to US Census data.
And since people over 65 account for the preponderance of COVID deaths, Florida has a much higher percentage of at-risk population.
We’ve also been hearing from our media overlords for months about how wonderful and effective the harsh lockdowns in California are, and how dangerous things are in Florida.
So it would be easy to think that COVID case rates and death rates in Florida would be dramatically higher than in California.
But that’s not the reality.
CDC statistics show that the COVID-19 case rates and death rates since the beginning of the pandemic are nearly identical in both states.
(Unsurprisingly, Florida’s death rate is a whopping 40% lower than in the State of New York, along with dozens of other states.)
Yet despite California and Florida having nearly identical public health outcomes, their diverging strategies have had an enormous economic impact:
In January 2020, California’s unemployment rate was 3.9%. Today, it is 9.3%.
In January 2020, Florida’s unemployment rate was 3.3%. Today it is 5.1%.
The national average unemployment rate is 6.7%, so Florida’s labor market is much healthier.
Leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 30% in California, and only 15% in Florida.
Twice as many people have started businesses in Florida, compared to California in the last year. Comparing the third quarter of 2019 vs. 2020, California’s economic decline was 33% worse than Florida’s, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The data is quite clear: California disregarded civil liberties, violated the Constitution, locked people in their homes, destroyed businesses, and ravaged the economy.
But it turns out their harsh methods didn’t make a bit of difference.
And it cost an unknown number of lives to suicide, substance abuse, increased poverty, and a more sedentary lifestyle.
Florida’s freedom, on the other hand, resulted in nearly the same number of COVID deaths as California, yet dramatically improved the economic outcome.
You’d think that the lockdown states would change their ways and realize they’ve bled their patients too much.
The whole process can be seen as medieval.
Yesterday, we failed to observe the day in which our government imposed a large-scale lockdown – probably the first mass lockdown ever imposed in a modern constitutional era.
A year into a global pandemic, politicians and public health officials have tried just about everything they could think of to stop the spread of COVID-19.
They forced people to wear masks in public; locked up healthy people in their homes devoid of sunlight or exercise; isolated everyone from friends and loved ones; and destroyed countless jobs and businesses.
The most destructive public policy of the century is now a year old. We were told a year ago that the lockdowns were only going to last for 14 days. We were told that it was the sensible thing to do to flatten the spread of COVID-19.
It has now been the longest 2 weeks in history. If you want to cite “the big lie” in the 21st century – the two-week pitch into Blursday would be it. In a lockdown, the days, weeks and months all blurred together.
It has been a year – let that sink in for a moment.
What is most ironic is that at the turn of the 20th century, a federal court in Jew Ho vs. Williamson struck down a notoriously insidious lockdown.
Local public health officials had quarantined an entire district of San Francisco, ostensibly to contain bubonic plague, but it operated exclusively against the Chinese community. The court said that health authorities acted with an “evil eye and an unequal hand.”
This again proves a point about history rhyming and that concerns back then remain equally discriminatory and people become the victims of subjugation with the instrument of coercion.
Nothing changes except the severity and near totalitarian efforts that have been in imposed by your government against you.
But think about it – it has been 1 year. 12 calendar months. 365 increasingly grueling days and no one seems to understand that governments wish to continue it—they say it is for your safety.
It’s a long time since “2 weeks to flatten the curve”, became an obvious lie. Sometime in July of 2020 it turned into a sick joke. If you complained there were many concerned Karenundefineds who would tell you that you should stop whining about being undefinedinconvenienced.undefined
We were told by Dr. Fauci and others that it was a sacrifice for the undefinedgreater good.undefined
It was not a hard decision with arguments on both sides. It was not a risk-benefit scenario. The “risks” were in fact certainties, and the “benefits” entirely fictional.
After we have been told that over 500,000 people have died of COVID-19 maybe we should also realize that this plan to lockdown everyone was a big mistake.
Even if you subscribe to the belief that “Sars-Cov-2” is a unique discrete or that it is incredibly dangerous the lockdown has not worked to, in any way, limit this supposed threat.
Even with the lockdowns it spread, even with mask wearing it spreads even with social distancing it spread and I can hear the arguments now that we would have seen more deaths if we didnundefinedt push these Draconian measures.
There is absolutely no way to prove that, meanwhile, we still have over 500,000 dead and some people terrified to even venture out -even though the restrictions are being lifted in some areas.
Putting the entire population under house arrest obviously did not benefit public health. In fact, it’s rather predictably incredibly counter-productive.
The damage done by shutting down businesses, limiting access to healthcare, postponing treatments and diagnoses, postponed surgeries, increasing depression, soaring unemployment and mass poverty has been discussed to death. The scale of the impact cannot be overstated.
It was announced today that more people are dying from heart and respiratory conditions which don’t usually lead to death, and avoiding medical care because they fear they will get COVID-19 from hospitals. Little do they know that if they die of these aliments they will be listed as dying from COVID-19 anyway.
These people are dying from heart failure or COPD — these people are much sicker and close to death than in pre-pandemic days.
Previous studies have noted that fewer patients suffering heart attacks and strokes are entering emergency rooms during the pandemic. Moreover, hospital mortality rates have been higher as well. Scientists believe this is likely the result of delaying urgent care and recommended therapies.
People are so traumatized they are unable to think clearly. They clamor for an unproven, untested, hastily cobbled together DNA altering gene therapy mislabeled as a undefinedvaccineundefined.
They stand in long lines for hours to have this experimental cocktail injected into their bodies with the very real possibility of death as has already happened to hundreds of COVID vaccine victims. At least 271 deaths, 9,845 adverse events after COVID vaccination so far. Who in their right mind would agree to risk their life by taking this concoction to hopefully protect themselves from a virus that according to the CDC is survivable by 99.74% of those exposed?
It doesnundefinedt make any sense does it?
In addition, there are thousands of highly credentialed medical experts who totally disagree with the official narrative that COVID is a undefinednovelundefined deadly health threat.
And while the public health undefinedexpertsundefined loudly proclaim that an experimental undefinedvaccineundefined is our only hope, tens of thousands of doctors around the globe are having great success treating virus patients with simple, inexpensive, proven therapies. Americaundefineds Frontline Doctors - empowering patients and physicians with independent, evidence-based medicine.
With courage and scientific data at hand, we should stop hiding away from the virus on the order of our governments. We should trust nature that things will balance back to normal, instead of tampering chaotically and arrogantly with the natural dynamics regulating the human/virus interactions.
The relentless, never-ending confinement measures have led to the appearance of a host of absurd, even pathetic measures and situations, with some citizens wearing masks alone in their own cars or jogging masked and alone in the countryside…I have heard many people around me wonder if they were not in a nightmare or a bad movie.
I am sure that when we look back at all this we will realize just how these measures were malignant, dishonest, and cruel psychopathic overreach of power.
All the suffering of lockdown was entirely predictable and deliberately imposed. For reasons that have nothing to do with helping people and everything to do controlling them.
What is even more sickening is that they continue to scare people and use brute force in some cases to continue this charade.
Miami Beach Police used SWAT teams to try to enforce its emergency curfew against Spring Break partiers in order to enforce a lockdown rule.
undefined
Videos on social media and local media showed thousands of partiers defying both the COVID-19 pandemic and the Florida beach town’s curfew after it started at 8 p.m. Saturday.
Even as police SWAT teams rolled in to block the streets and used piercing sound cannons to try to clear the completely packed streets, the parties continue to rage for hours.
Police ultimately fired pepper balls at the crowd.
The whole affair looked like it was taken from some dystopian apocalyptic movie.
Now SWAT teams are used to stop the spread. can you believe it?
Now we must be afraid of police state tactics if we do not comply.
This is outrageous—this is supposed to be America but now out of fear they have created a massive gulag.
Think about the constant reminders we see all around us to be afraid, very afraid. Last March we were told by the U. S. Surgeon General, the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization (WHO) that healthy people should not wear face masks. US health officials say Americans shouldnundefinedt wear face masks to prevent coronavirus.
Then suddenly they all changed their minds with no hard science backing them up and decreed that indeed everyone should wear a face mask to be SAFE.
The ubiquitous face mask is a constant reminder to be afraid. The message has been pushed relentlessly that there is a deadly virus that could take your life if you donundefinedt follow the rules. Itundefineds a great tool to ramp up the fear and indoctrinate millions into blind submission, obedience and above all else to follow the dictates of the undefinedexpertsundefined. Itundefineds also a great tool to undefinedexposeundefined the unbelievers guilty of undefinedwrong think.undefined
So whatundefineds the antidote to all this fear? Itundefineds the truth for those able to receive it. And thatundefineds why those of us still capable of critical thinking need to share the truth with others through whatever means we have.
Of course, we know most people are so frightened theyundefinedre incapable of escaping their fear cocoon and will refuse to listen to anything that doesnundefinedt align with the main stream narrative.
It’s been more than apparent for most of the last fifty-two weeks that the agenda of lockdown was not public health but laying the groundwork for the “new normal” and “the great reset”.
A series of programs designed to completely undercut civil liberties all across the world, reversing decades if not centuries of social progress. A re-feudalization of society, with the 99% cheerfully putting on their peasant masks “to protect the vulnerable”, whilst the elite proselytize about the worth of rules they happily admit do not apply to them.
And we’ve all had lives ruined and a year of precious time wasted. For nothing. You’ve been locked up for two weeks that lasted 365 days. For nothing.
Or rather, for everything. Because that is what they are trying to take from us.
Everything.
