Author’s Note
Dear Parent,
Thank you for reading my book. I wrote this children’s story for my six year old daughter – as both a warning and a plea. I hope it may serve as a desperate search for light and sanity in dystopian times, fading more and more into darkness each day.
The social canvas described by Plato’s Cave analogy is here and now: where ignorance is a laudable trait and those few who seek the sun are derided, hated, and ridiculed.
Background:
The story you just read was roughly inspired by a scuba-diving trip I took with my father, uncle, and cousin; we traveled to St. Croix in March of 2022. While vacationing there, we learned that the ENTIRE island was grappling with a savage storm … that of insanity.
Each and every shop was under a governmental order (and “edict” as mentioned in this story) requiring cloth masks be worn at all times within any business or establishment.
Let me remind you that our travel was in 2022, long after the collective body of scientific and medical evidence had clearly resolved that cloth masks served absolutely no value and did nothing to slow or prevent the transmission of Covid-19.
Despite established medical evidence on this topic (and also despite the mountain of evidence demonstrating that government mask-mandates have had statistically ZERO impact on the Covid-19 transmission and contraction rate within a populace), the governor of the island still imposed harsh penalties on any business owner who did not comply with his draconian and un-scientific mask mandates.
His mandates were surface-level only; they boldly and righteously proclaimed to the masses he was “doing something to help.” It didn’t matter that ‘something’ did absolutely nothing.
They were a grand gesture of pollical power and virtue-signaling; but just like the islanders in this story, putting mittens on your hands won’t beat back a storm. So too, wearing a CLOTH mask on your face will do nothing to prevent a microscopic airborne pathogen from infecting your body.
Compounding the insanity, the vast majority of the islanders KNEW this and understood cloth masks did absolutely nothing to help. They were routinely referred to as “required facial decorations.”
The shop owners would sigh with exasperation when one of us vacationers entered their establishment mask-less and then meekly explain that, yes, they indeed knew the masks were pointless – but nevertheless they were still required. Since they were the law!
I honestly do not know which is worse: to believe in a bad government program and support its existence out of sheer ignorance, or to KNOW it is nonsense but still go along with it.
In many ways, the islanders of this children’s story are more innocent and their actions far more understandable—because they were hoodwinked and truly believed the lies they were told by ‘The Minister’ charlatan.
However, the islanders and shop-owners I experienced in St. Croix were willing participants in a bad/ineffective/onerous government edict and did little to push back against naked tyranny. They knew the cloth masks to be ineffective and pointless, but complied with the mandate simply to avoid persecution and stress.
While I certainly understand this sentiment (“going with the flow” is easy!), I believe it is a terrible precedent!
Governments throughout world history have committed tremendous atrocities simply because no one stood up to bad, wrong-minded, or evil state policies.
Or, as the old adage goes: evil prevails when good men do nothing.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with certainly far, fa more at stake than the issues of this context, preached the importance of civil disobedience in the face of unjust, immoral, or just “bad” laws.
Just because something is made illegal by a government doesn’t make it morally wrong; and just because something is made legal doesn’t make it right.
Morality, truth, and legality do not always go hand-in-hand.
What Is Truth?
In our postmodern society, we are often instructed to believe that morality and truth are subjective … ideals too complex for a common person to consider and thus must be hashed out by courts and politicians. I urge you to reconsider these beliefs if you find yourself fooled by this false ideology. Or, at a minimum, begin to question the laws around you – especially when they are couched in political or partisan language and/or not backed by any real evidence, scientific data, or rational thought.
Said another way, are we as a society to function like a school of fish or a flock of lemmings: to so blindly and uniformly mov in the established/prescribed direction of the herd that we completely lose sight of why and where we are heading?
What happens when we collectively head towards a cliff? Is our social desire for “fitting in” and rule-following so strong that we have forgotten how to stand up to foolishness or evil? If so, we are only a few short steps away from being slaves to the whims of “our Betters”: the political Elites who set policies and demand that we dare not question them.
Here in America, we were once proud to call ourselves a nation of individuals and free-thinkers. Are we still?
For as soon as we stop thinking and allow the political class to do our thinking for us, we lose our footing! As soon as our laws dictate our beliefs versus allowing facts and reason to influence our laws, we are lost.
Tinting at Windmills
The brutal and inconvenient truth is that some disasters in life, for example a hurricane, a tidal wave, or a savage virus, often cannot be easily side-stepped – even with all of humanity’s power, skill, cunning, and technology.
Surface-level efforts and platitudes cannot affect them, even when such efforts are endeavored with a religious zealotry. It is hubris to assume man can beat back nature with his fists or that screaming into the wind will change its path.
Helplessness is a terrible feeling, which is why so many people and tribes throughout history have sought to bend the will of nature by appealing to magic, astrology, old gods, golden calves, or new religions.
The newest religion – the newest cult! – of this Covid era is strangely-enough labeled: “Science.”
With Orwellian precision, the word “Science” was co-opted and completely redefined in 2020+ to no longer mean a pursuit of truth and a study of evidence to support or reject a stated assumption; rather, the slogan “trust the Science” is the new motto of religious fanatics and state propagandists who sacrifice Truth (and ironically the Scientific Method itself) on the altar of Covid Mandate Compliance.
These Zealots are not interested in fact-finding, data, or evidence; medical and scientific studies are largely inconvenient to their agenda. They have shown themselves to care far more for affecting political and state policies and new mandates – all in the name of “Science” – while ignoring everything science truly stands for. Because, to them, doing something (anything!)—regardless of efficacy or downstream negative effects—is surely better than accepting the fact that a force of nature may be beyond their control.
And, sadly, born out of this fear and helpless feeling, many of them would burn the world down around them in the name of enacting ineffectual policies while simultaneously demanding everyone blindly ‘trust the Science.’
When science became a political buzzword for enacting obedience instead of a beautiful and transformative fact-finding philosophy seeking empirical truth, we doomed ourselves. Science is not to be blindly “followed;” rather, scientific pursuit does the leading!
The new “Science™” would seek to cure the disease by killing the patient.
For, dear reader, once we have abandoned every ounce of freedom, restricted our movement, alienated our friends and family, blindly obeyed every state policy without second thoughts, and redefined what it means to LIVE, we have sacrificed infinitely and gained nothing for it.
It is in the backdrop of this looming tragedy that I wrote this book as a warning and as a guide.
God bless and protect you in these strange times.
Sean Dempsey
