The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'doctors injecting vaccines with war in the sky.'
One of the great lessons of covid was that there's a powerful biomedical faction within the national security state. This faction took control of the covid response and treated it like a counterterrorism operation with disastrous results. Behind the deep politics at play here was an understanding that the virus came from a lab that received funding from the US and hosted a Chinese bioweapons research program. Public messaging about this in no way reflected reality. It's now known that officials conspired with establishment media to mislead us about covid's origins.
Covid was almost certainly the product of risky weapons research, which means that people were responsible for releasing it, intentionally or otherwise. These people are responsible for all of the harm done by the virus itself. Since the pandemic began, this group has been shielded from accountability by the control regime. Similarly, those responsible for the profoundly damaging pandemic response haven't yet even come close to being held accountable for their harmful decisions. To the contrary, many of these people were praised for their heroic action in the face of an unprecedented crisis.
The covid madness never really wound down. In media it was replaced by obsession with foreign wars presented to the public in such a way as to secure popular support for a seemingly endless parade of sprawling military aid packages. The national security state used covid to seize more power and now it's using that power to advance an agenda that threatens to spiral completely out of control at any moment. Notably, the US budget deficit effectively doubled in 2023.
Lately I've been trying to think about this whole situation in practical terms. There's nothing I can do about the national security state beyond maybe helping to expose it to public scrutiny. I'm just as powerless as everyone else. And even if a million people took to the streets to protest our proxy wars with signs and bullhorns, it probably wouldn't make a difference.
We can of course exercise our freedom of speech, voicing our opinions, finding friends and making enemies. We can try to help conflict victims with money or other resources. But realistically, there's not much we can do about the war machine. In this way, it's similar to many other massive problems plaguing society.
While solving these problems may not be possible at this time, how we relate with these problems is largely up to us. They can trigger our traumas, leaving us outraged or depressed or hopeless. But they can also challenge and inspire us, individually and collectively, to return to our center and act constructively from there. Within this option lives a great deal of power.
The horrors of war. The insect apocalypse. The poisoning of the food supply. Our disintegrating social fabric. Issues like these are everywhere. They produce overwhelming emotions as well as opportunities for more informed sensemaking.
There's an enormous need right now for sensemaking on a social level. People are floundering, looking for answers in an untrustworthy information environment. Many are barely beginning to come to terms with the seriousness of the problems we face. Even so, we all have a measure of influence over how society eventually makes sense of these problems.
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