Covid Don’t Surf

In the year before the Covidian age came upon us there was a little white girl with braided hair full of piss and vinegar.

She was on a holy mission and speaking tour telling anyone who would listen in her angry little voice that the planet is dying.

She dropped out of school and told other kids to do the same because I why go to school when the world is on fire?

She even took her problems to the United Nations and told them they had stolen her future.

Her apocalyptic rhetoric was played and retweeted day and night for months. Full grown adults began to worship this child as some savior.

I once saw street art depicting her as the Virgin Mary. Society bought in and those that did not were evil monsters who wanted to end the world.

But the little girl had already told us the future was stolen, the world would burn. So dropout of school and travel the world in a tiny boat and tiny train. Tell anyone who will listen that it’s already over.

I am 44 years old, the better part of 43 years taking place in the Pre-Covidian.

One of my earliest clear educational memories is from the third grade. An old woman by the name of Appleyard telling my group of young children in her care that there might not be air to breathe when they were 18.

Keep in mind, this was also before Russia fell. So we also got those nice little lectures of how easy it would be for all of us to die in a flaming nuclear Bethesda franchise.

Decades later I still breathe air. I doubt Mrs Appleyard still does.

As the years have gone by and the world has shockingly continued to turn the rhetoric has only increased.

As we got close to the big two thousand, the millennium, a moment in time that was supposed to magically change everything. The apocalyptic obsession got worse.

Television networks that claimed to “edutain” the masses got obsessed with Nostradamus and biblical codes locked inside historical paint.

Doomsday preppers were normalized while alien reptile hunters were given a wider voice.

Rumors turned to full on CNN broadcasts that the computers that ran the world might stop at midnight 2000 due to a bug in the code. They called it the sexy name of Y2K.

Y2K might end the world. With planes falling from the sky and power plants going Chernobyl all at once. The millennium came and went, nothing much happened.

Nothing much happened that is until September of 2001. When Mohammed Atta and a group of men with nothing more than box cutters in their pockets, hijacked 4 planes and broke the psyche of America in a way they have yet to recover.

The New York financial district was turned into an ash cloud, the Pentagon given an extreme makeover

Were it not for some plucky heroes with a marketable catchphrase, the White house would also have fallen victim to that master of simple tool design, the box cutter.

Of course this day of apocalyptic visuals played over and over and over again my friend, convinced many we were once again on the eve of destruction. “Let’s roll”.

After all, this was a war with the middle east and what happens in the middle east? That’s right kids, the battle of Armageddon.

The big biblical war to end all big biblical wars to end everything the return of JC himself son of God and Greta,, I mean Mary.

Suddenly all those millennium prophecies seemed to become true. There was Anthrax in the mail for reasons, and you could never know when the next big attack would come.

Spoiler alert it never did, terrorists have been relegated to hitting people with rental vans. Tragic yes, but hardly apocalyptic.

Still, be afraid, be so very afraid because December 2012 was coming to kill us all.

A month you ask? We feared a month? Well a day actually December 21st 2012 it was all going to come crashing to a violent awful end.

How did we know? Some dead Mayans said so and they should know being a dead civilization and all. So that’s how we knew.

Once again people obsessed for years over this nonsense.

The moon will crack in half, your toaster will rape your wife while the family dog makes you watch like a cuck. Flesh eating virus will consume your child's face as Yellowstone explodes with enough force to push the earth out of its orbit and into the path of rogue Planet X. We were all going to die AGAIN.

It never happened.

The Obama age came and the rhetoric ramped up. Secret Musslim plots to open FEMA camps and take away guns. Mandatory abortions and poison vaccines will make your living children transgender communists.

The melting of the icecaps and the melting down of a place called Fukushima after Japan caught a gnarly post quake wave.

Fukushima don’t surf but it will ejaculate through its open wound radioactive water into the pacific that the doomsayers claim will cook us all alive or burn us to a cinder.

Yet nothing.

It has been years with nothing. In America there are daily shootings or as we like to call them now Mass Casualty Incidents.

Someone with a gun or sixty guns walks into a school and murders kids till he is killed or beats the high score. It becomes the new American pastime over baseball and burning coal.

Of course there are those that don’t believe anything mainstream and think that tiny preschool children who are shot to bits like sweet crying Space Invaders were not really killed. They were Crisis Actors don’t ya know?

Any victim of a crime their way of life allows to happen is a Crisis Actor. Part of a conspiracy for secret Muslims to jam their children into dog cages (future irony intended).

They make claims of computer chips in the skin to mark them as property of the Beast. Blaming secret underground pedophile cults of Jews and pagans for the earth being flat and their jobs moving to mexico.

So instead of trying to ban guns to make schools safe they run drills, small children are led into hiding places and lights are turned off to train them for the day they are shot to death by a white man with a screw loose.

This has happened for nearly two decades. Ever since two boys named Eric and Dylan went full Columbine.

So why have I gone on the telling of past history when I always say that I write for Future History if there is any? Why did I just go on this long winded rant of over 30 years of events?

I did it to make a point and the point is this. In the 4 months since western civilization entered the Covidian there have been those that resist.

They resist the lockdowns, the distancing. They resist the use of masks and travel bans. They will, I am sure, resist the vaccine when it comes.

People go to the beach in the middle of mass death, they demand malls and theme parks reopen in a pandemic that is infecting thousands a day.

They have Covid parties and place bets on the first to get symptoms of infection.

Downtown streets are converted into patio space so people can drink in the sun. Sane people perform the Picard face palm meme and ask why?

We want to yell and say that it is ignorance and in many cases especially in the old folk, that may be the case. We call it stupid and selfish and profane even.

To not obey the new social taboos of the Covidian age is punishable by public shame and when possible economic cancellation. We call them Covidiots, assuming they are simply stupid.

But I don’t believe this is why people are breaking bad all over the infected landscape of modern western society.

I think they do it because they have already been told for decades that there is no future, no retirement from their hourly wage slavery.

They have no hope of a better world or a better life and they might be dead or dying tomorrow.

Be it from this plague or the next plague or world war 3 or an Incel with an AR-15 mad about a video game sub plot.

Or worse, they might not die, they might just live in this capitalist hellscape of phone scams and credit card debt, never owning anything forever. Waiting for the melting ice to swallow them whole.

Why would a generation with perceptibly little to nothing to live for not go to the beach? To spend one last day in the sun, getting drunk and going down? Skin cancer?

Fukushima ocean water? Climate change? Demented man in the Whitehouse?

No one cares, it doesn’t matter you told them it’s already over. And Covid doesn’t surf.