Traffic accidents illustrate the phenomenon. It was widely assumed that traffic deaths would decline during the pandemic because fewer miles were being driven.
But the opposite happened. Miles driven did predictably decline in 2020 compared to 2019 – by about 13% — but traffic deaths spiked upward 7%. The story in 2021 is even worse. Traffic deaths in 2021 are running about 18% higher than 2020 even though miles driven are up only 13% over that one-year period.
These grim figures correlate with declining use of seatbelts, more drunk driving and more speeding. COVID effectively suspended the rules of the road.
That’s not all. Drivers are not just aggressively trying to get somewhere in a hurry; they’re looking for a fight. They hop in their car and drive around looking for prey.
COVID suspended the whole rulebook of civilized behavior. It’s like a children’s game where the rules are suspended for a few moments, except the few moments have dragged on for about 20 months now.
We see the same effect everywhere. People were told they don’t have to work, so they stopped working. Or they were told that they could pretend to work from home, so they pretended to work from home.
People were told that the police are bad and should be starved of the funds necessary for them to do their jobs. So policemen and women are quitting. Unsurprisingly, that adversely affects law enforcement.
People were told that it’s OK – even noble! – to loot department stores, or at least that they could shoplift with impunity. So they did.
People were told that lives don’t matter unless they’re black ones, so the murder rate is up 30%. That’s the biggest one-year jump in history.
People were told that government handouts are not limited by the amount of taxes the government collects from the people. Instead, the government has as much money as it wishes to print, so it can give unlimited quantities to the people. Money grows on trees, except you don’t even need a tree.
People with all this free money – and free time since they aren’t working – can then go buy things, if only there were people still working to make those things.
Children were told that they didn’t have to go to school. So they didn’t. And they didn’t seriously replace their truancy with online learning. We lost at least a year of education – of children who were already being educated badly.
With the guard rails removed, civilization crashed like a garbage truck driven by perfidious pants-pooping drunk vagrants colliding with a dumpster fire.
The left likes all this de-civilizing because they dislike civilization. Civilization involves qualities like merit, morality, honesty, logic, justice other than the social kind, intellectualism and consequences. The left finds such things an obstacle to the utopia they plan to establish and rule.
As for me, I’m done pandemic-izing. Let’s have rules again. I want my world back.
the Aspen beat 
Marvelous column Glenn. Thank you.
Of course much of the left’s deliberate de-civilizing was teed up long before Covid came along, but how brilliantly they seized upon the “pandemic” once the virus was let out of its cage, in order to exercise totalitarian controls with the consent of the fear-struck masses.
Yep, I too want my world back, but it may take more than Republican majorities that are a year away. If, in the meantime, the courts won’t act to defend and restore civilization, what’s left to us?
They also leveraged & ginned up the Covid hysteria to 11 in order to change election rules & remove their nemesis the Orange Man. Worked out perfectly for them.
Why couldn’t the republicans in congress right now do something? We have one named Cheney that is fighting on their side. I think there are more. We have no leader. We have too many media stars that are competing for our attention, and we’re not organizing.
I can’t believe that what they’re doing by running the country in secret, using a cardboard cutout, is not a serious crime.
The Left excels at ignoring and failing to plan for unintended consequences.
It’s a lot like Newton’s Law … for every action there is an opposite reaction.
Yet the roadside warning sign is always dead ahead … Consequences Just Ahead
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I don’t think they are ignoring or failing at anything. For example, the border crisis is not a result of a failed policy; it IS the policy, which for some reason we are tolerating as the secret plane loads and bus loads of illegals disembark in our neighborhoods. So far, the left has suffered no unintended consequences, except for parents waking up to how screwed up our schools are.
Many people have said that. What looks like the bug in the system is not a bug at all. It is the system.
TRUE. It is too late to wake up the sheep and past the time to wake up the other lions.
Dear Jakki
It is never too late. I and others keep trying, it is slowly working. The lions are roaring and the hyenas are being scared off. It may look bad but then it always gets coldest near dawn before daylight comes.
The light is coming. I put various things on my site to help.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
Everything they’re doing is deliberate and they don’t care how many Americans are killed. Eight hundred people have been murdered in Chicago this year. Do they care? Prosecutors, mayors and governors all over the country are allowing crime to go unchecked.
And what about the threat of food shortages? It all sounds like the beginning of a communist country.
We need to do something!
FWIW, I am now using the word perverts in place of descriptors such as Leftists, Communists, Socialists, Progressives, etc. Perverts just seems to go directly to the core of the phenomenology, bypassing the rhetorical smokescreens blown up by this ideology and that. Karl Marx would denounce todays’ soi-disant Communists, Progressives, etc. He would look a death-ray into the eye of a Bill Gates or a Barack Obama. No, these guys are just perverts. One can tell by the company they keep.
Perverts have two ancient and constant goals: (1) reduce human population to a size that does not threaten their perversity, and, (2) remove popular governance’s ability to obstruct their private practice. Perverts want chaos, not system. In chaos there is profit. In system there is peace. Perverts want profit, not peace.
The utopia these perverts desire is that chaos by which their perversity most flourishes. This they are emplacing globally from Washington D.C., Langley, Beijing, Doha, Tehran, and faculty lounges around the earth. The common thread is the chaos of perversity. So yeah, system, duty, honor, toil, humor, and truth. Yeah Humanity. Yeah Divinity. Yeah Beauty.
Scottish philosopher Alexander Tyler listed the 8 stages of the rise and fall of ( mostly western) civilizations.
1 From bondage to spiritual growth
2 From spiritual growth to great courage
3 From courage liberty
4 From liberty to abundance
5 From abundance to complacency
6 From complacency to apathy
7 From apathy to dependence
8 From dependence back to bandage
Ted Flynn s book , ” The Great Transformation”
relates these stages to what we experience today.
The Bible portrays this cycle several times over. Was it Twain who remarked that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme?
The good news is that in every dark age there is always a remnant that remembers and reignites the embers of a cooling and nearly extinguished civilization.
That might be called a silver lining. But the fact remains that it’s bad news & misery for most, by far.
Dear Chad
Thank you. History certainly repeats itself. has to nobody listens, at least not many.
I observe an 80 year pattern at the moment. 80 years back that is to WW2. We are in WW3 now, only a war of words, not guns, tanks and planes.
The USA entered the war on 7th December 80 years ago. I wonder what form this will take now and what Japan might do.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
Hello from the UK
Thank you. did you mean bandage?! Perhaps it reflects on the way the NHS tries to put sticking plaster on wounds that need radical treatment. I would include the pointless vaccines or pharmaceutical drugs which cause harm and sometimes death.
This is as opposed to proper nutritional advice and boosting vitamins and minerals to overcome the toxic effects of the many poisons in our environment.
I write about some of this on my website.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
Glenn, please take a look at this piece: https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
Wow. A must read — even though it takes a mind like that of the Jeremy Irons character in the movie “Margin Call” to understand it fully.
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Hello from the UK.
Many thanks for this post. You could have included vaccine incidents in the accident figures. As people get clots from vaccines who knows quite whether these are causing some of the issues. My brother-in-law and I think so.
Regarding getting rules back, the problem is more one of too many rules and many of which are stupid. The stupid follow the stupid rules (those on the left of politics seem particularly stupid), and society suffers as a consequence.
In my books we need more common sense (where has it gone and who stole it?) and upholding the sensible rules we have where these remain. And love our neighbour as ourselves as many people have forgotten, especially during so-called lockdowns.
I have written about various matters on my website if you or anyone is interested. Here is a link to vaccines. I do use humour as necessary on my site to lighten the mood and to help make the points. I cover the other aspects of Covid 19 and who is behind it all.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
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