American Lunacy, Part 2: The Theft of Normal

March 2020. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Patriotic duty. Temporary sacrifice.

Two weeks become two months become two years. Your business becomes a memory. Something else gets built while we're locked down.

The mask becomes the test. Not medical—compliance. Wear it between bites like you're playing peek-a-boo with a virus. Walking to the table. Outdoors. Alone. In your car. In your fucking car. Like the virus is hiding in your glove compartment.

Watch who complies. Who questions. Who gets marked dangerous. Your two-year-old wears one eight hours daily. Can't see smiles. Can't read lips. Can't learn faces. Raising a generation that thinks mouths are rumors.

"Following the science," they say. The science changes daily like a restaurant special. The compliance doesn't.

Meanwhile, definitions shift in shadows. CDC website, November 2020: "Herd immunity" suddenly needs vaccines. WHO changes "pandemic" definition. Merriam-Webster—yeah, the dictionary—edits "vaccine" in real time. January 2021. No announcement. Just... different.

When did words become negotiable? When did Webster become Wikipedia?

Your mother dies alone. FaceTime goodbye. Ten people maximum.

Unless you're protesting. Then thousands gather. The virus apparently checks your cause at the door. George Floyd's funeral fills a stadium while you bury your mother with nine masked strangers. The priest rushes—cemetery has time limits now. COVID protocols. Ten minutes at graveside. Like a drive-through for grief.

The tears fogging your glasses—do they matter less than CNN's tears?

While everyone's home scrolling death counts like sports scores, they're drafting policies. While we're teaching kids through screens, they're rewriting curricula. While we wonder if this ends, they know exactly how it transitions.

"Never let a crisis go to waste." They didn't.

Zuckerberg drops $400 million on the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Private money. Public elections. Not campaigns—the actual voting process. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia. The states that mattered.

What a coincidence. Like finding your wife's lover's underwear in your bed. Coincidence.

The vaccine arrives. Salvation becomes obligation becomes unemployment. Email arrives. Thirty years with the company. Perfect reviews. But myocarditis questions make you dangerous. "For the safety of the team." The team you built. Choose: shot or street.

OSHA tries mandating for companies over 100 employees. Supreme Court says no. Your company keeps the mandate anyway. Like keeping Christmas decorations up until July—wrong but nobody stops you. Healthcare workers? Still mandated. 10.3 million jobs. No jab, no job.

Your friend's son. Twenty-three. Athlete. Dead. "Rare side effect." His mother doesn't go to church anymore. God didn't answer. Pfizer did.

COVID was just the warm-up. The tutorial level before the real game.

Language shifts while everyone's wiping down groceries like they're defusing bombs. "Equality" becomes "equity" overnight. Like someone did find-and-replace on reality. Your company handbook rewrites itself. Thirty-seven new pages. Terms that didn't exist last week are now fireable offenses. HR says they've been working on it for months. Timestamp says 2:00 AM, June 2020. While cities burned, someone was typing.

Someone was always typing. In the dark. With purpose.

Every federal agency buys Kendi's book. Your taxes funding bestsellers. Robin DiAngelo gets $30K to tell your company you're racist. Per session. Nice work if you can get it. Like being paid to tell people they're ugly, but with credentials.

School returns. Different school. Math divides oppression by privilege—the answer is always you're wrong. Library has new books. Graphic. Sexual. For eight-year-olds. You read passages at the board meeting, voice shaking—not anger but disbelief that you have to explain why eight-year-olds shouldn't see illustrated sex acts. Like explaining why dogs shouldn't drive cars.

They call you dangerous. Same label as the unmasked. Same label as anyone who notices.

Your son comes home from freshman year explaining how your existence perpetuates harm. The house you built sits on stolen land. Your questions equal aggression. Your confusion equals fragility. You want to tell him about double shifts to pay for that house. Teaching him baseball in the yard he now calls colonized. But arguing confirms his thesis. It's a trap where loving your son means letting him hate you.

The son you raised to think critically now thinks in slogans. Brain traded for bumper stickers. He learned this in orientation. Tuition: $47,000 a year to teach him you're the enemy.

Your daughter texts from the bathroom. Someone with a beard is in the next stall. She's fourteen. Won't drink water at school anymore. Dehydrates rather than shares space with strangers. But you're the one who's dangerous for noticing.

Your neighbor—twenty years teaching—loses his job. Said biological sex exists. Two words together. Now sells insurance. "At least I don't lie to children anymore," he says over the fence you built when pronouns were just grammar and grammar was just words.

National School Boards Association to Biden: Parents are "domestic terrorists." Five days later, Garland mobilizes FBI. Five days. That's government efficiency when they want it. When they want you.

Portland burns. "Mostly peaceful." Like saying the Titanic was mostly floating. Your brother's store becomes insurance paperwork becomes bankruptcy becomes a U-Haul to Idaho. Three generations of customers. Gone. But CNN says "Fiery but mostly peaceful" over footage of actual flames. Like calling chemotherapy "aggressive wellness."

$2 billion in riot damage. Most expensive in U.S. history. But sure, mostly peaceful.

COVID taught them what we'd tolerate. How fast we'd comply. How to make fear feel like virtue. How to make submission feel like solidarity. Then they applied the lesson to everything.

Two weeks to flatten the curve. Four years to flatten the culture. Same playbook. Same compliance. Same people saying "it's for your safety" while they dismantle your life.

They didn't steal freedom at once. They took it in doses. Each one small enough to swallow. Like arsenic in tea. Until everyone's choking on the accumulation.

If this is building back better, what exactly did they measure the foundation with?

A Ouija board?

🔪 Up Next: Part 3 - Revelation.
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