A brilliant friend of mine, Nikki Moonitz, wrote the following:
“I thought one of the most profound scenes in the movie Titanic was when the mother was reading her children to sleep as the ship was going down (after they had been locked in the lower quarters with no escape).
Even when she knew there was no hope, she instilled CALM in her children, not panic (now I personally probably would have been trying to get them out, but that's not the point).
Good people calm children. BAD PEOPLE instill terror in them.”
I think the same goes for our leaders, great and small.
In that context, I would substitute the word “reassure” instead of “calm”. Citizens need reassurance their leaders have their hands on the controls, know how to use them and know what the result of that use will do, and that result is in keeping with their constitutional duties to the people.
There is much we control over our own lives, where the advancement of modern life bestows upon the individual the ability to effect large amounts of control over their environment and management of their interactions, our constitution is a blueprint for controlling things that are largely beyond the control of an individual.
If your read is faithful to the original intent, the Constitution is all about the government being the servant of the people in the prevention of tyranny of groups over the individual. It reassures the citizen that no group of other citizens will ever be able (or allowed) to use the collective of government to take from them any right given the individual by Nature and Nature’s God – and if and when that happens, there are mechanisms built in that are to be used to correct that situation.
For me, I don’t believe I have ever been aware of a nation so in need of reassurance of those facts in parallel with such a period of chaos created by the most intellectually inconsistent environment of any nation in history. America is suffering from a national case of cognitive dissonance, a form of nervous breakdown brought about by logical inconsistency, contrived contradictions, arbitrary and capricious positions expressed, actions taken and the glaring hypocrisy of it all.
Of course, there is also the duty and responsibility of our leaders to understand when an issue is significant enough that reassurance is necessary.
The election of Joe Biden in conjunction with the Covid-19 panic has brought America to a tipping point. It is separating Americans into two camps, the rational and the irrational, from which a return is becoming more impossible by the day.
The pandemic restrictions are a case in point.
There is nothing logical, no reconciliation to be made, when someone can gather, unmasked, with 100,000 of their closest friends at a college football game where they yell and scream for several hours only to be forced to mask (unless they are eating or drinking) after they are stuffed into a jet-powered winged aluminum tube for the ride back home – and masked under the penalty of law.
There is nothing logical about big city restaurants allowing vaccinated people with a piece of paper (even though it is proven the vaccinated can spread the virus) to enter (with masks of course) and not allow people with natural immunity to do the same.
And inconsistency of all inconsistencies, it is not reconcilable that the very officials who make the rules seem not to be terribly troubled about following their own dictates.
There is no rationalization for those things that can reassure anyone that any of the leaders in charge of this has any idea what they are doing.
Of course, those prone to hysteria and panic over every event that can be spun as a disaster (the more existential, the better) are strangely reassured by their own panic – I would assume because these Super Karens believe their panic and hysteria is legitimate, justified, and noble.
Crazy times.
And I do not mean that metaphorically, I mean people are literally crazy. They have lost their faculties.
Perhaps you have heard of St. Vitus’ Dance, tarantism or the dancing mania.
Occurring mostly between the 14th and 17th centuries, random, unexplained outbreaks of spontaneous dancing (and sometimes singing as well) would occur.
One famous outbreak occurred in July of 1518 in Strasbourg, France. It seems that Frau Troffea, all alone in the middle of a silent street, began to dance for no apparent reason. Not long after, bewildered neighbors came to watch the Frau movin’ to the silent groovin’. Even stranger, Troffea’s silent dancing was joined by first one neighbor, and then another. Their dancing was bizarre, their faces were expressionless, and by the end of the week, more than 30 people had joined the Frau’s weird Dance Party. They boogied night and day, but what began with a single person was just the beginning – within a month, more than 400 citizens of Strasbourg were swept away by the dancing mania.
Strasbourg turned into a silent Soul Train with and no explanation for what was happening. Nobody knew why they were following Gwen Stefani’s edict to “Keep on dancing”.
After the bouts of Medieval Dance Fever continued, doctors were consulted. The medical community ruled out supernatural causes, something generally ascribed to weird conduct at the time. Instead, they said the mania was natural and caused by “hot blood”, although there is probably no truth to the rumors this is where Foreigner got started when one dancer named Lou Gramm sang “I’m hot blooded, check it and see!”.
The leaders of Strasbourg decided if they couldn’t stop the dance party, the best thing they could do is to make it the “new normal”, carving out a little reassurance that it wasn’t weird at all to suddenly start dancing in the middle of the street.
But it was weird.
With no cure for the dancing on the horizon, the brain trust of Strasbourg decided to build stages and invite musicians to play for the dancers. City officials figured the cure might just be to groove to the beat and encourage the dancers to dance until they got it out of their systems. Perhaps they were right because we still do not know why, but after a month of Medieval Dance Fever, it stopped as mysteriously as it began.
Maybe, rational people decided it was weird and when the attention it drew waned to approach zero, people cured themselves when they decided that, yes, it actually was pretty weird. Maybe people figured it out for themselves even though the Strasbourg leaders insisted it was still a thing.
Also weird is the continuing panic over Covid-19 and its most recent incarnation of the super deadly (not) Omicron variant.
The science indicates the panic is unjustified. There is nothing reassuring or calming about officials mandating that minstrels continue to play music long after the townsfolk have lost the groove and stopped dancing.
You get the feeling the Biden administration and contemporary Democrat politicians are getting their grove on to the Medieval Dance Fever now. There is evidence of some sort of irrational mass hysteria about the coronavirus raging across the nation. There are symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders being exhibited as the Democrats continue to propose increasingly overwrought autocratic solutions to problems that there is little evidence the “problems” even exist.
So, all the Democrats can think of doing is continuing to play that funky music, white boy, play that funky music until they die – even though there are more people every day not dancing to their tune.
That is most certainly NOT reassuring.