THREE ELEVEN, 2025
On the fifth anniversary of the last emergency, more than a month into the next emergency
Five years ago today the World Health Organization declared a “public health emergency of international concern” for Covid-19. The lives of most people on this planet were permanently transformed as a result, in small or large ways, directly or indirectly, consciously recognized or not.
And what have we learned? Next to nothing.
Those who were against disruptions and restrictions imposed in the name of Covid, are now all for disruptions and restrictions in the name of an unnecessary, unprovoked, and unjustifiable “trade war”. One emergency favoured vaccines; the latest one is all about tariffs.
We have had only about an 18-month lull between one emergency and the next, between just starting to recover from 3/11 and its vast economic damage, and then we were forced into 2/1: the trade war phase beginning with Trump's executive order dated February 1, 2025. Both manufactured and leveraged crises feature one key element in common: a declared “public health emergency”. Even this one fact alone eluded most of those who, just moments before, were claiming to be critical, independent-minded people who would not be swayed by a regime’s “fear porn”—and yet, here they are, cheering and as part of the MAGA (adjacent) cult, braying about the threat that is Canada.
We locked our arms together to fight mandates and the bad politics that made for bad medicine…and then they turned on us and started to threaten our country, and said they now wanted it as a 51st state.
Just when I thought I had one group that I could never forgive, I now have another.
We now have permanent emergency rule, for one reason or another, and a bunch of non-dissidents who are only against something when it’s done by the other guy.
This wilderness is extremely sparsely populated. It must be very frustrating to be trying to explain its topography to so few.
As for myself, I have no voice, partly because I have been somewhat muffled, but mostly because I spend all my time climbing, trying to get up high enough to get a better sense of the lay of the land. Thank you for blazing a high-level trail affording a view which had not occurred to me. Perhaps some day I will manage to get a voice, though it does not look good.
Sparsely populated though the wilderness is, you can never tell who will hear.