Author: jilldomschot

This is going to be a short tidbit while my really annoying adorable dogs are sleeping at my feet. I came across a word I’d never heard of before in a Father Brown mystery: asseverate. It caught me up short because it looked like a word I should know. It is obviously of Latin derivation; sever or severe appeared to be the root, but in the context a man “asseverated” that he didn’t know something. I couldn’t make sense of those potential Latin roots with the context being used in the story.

When I looked it up, I realized the meaning should have been obvious: to assert with force (hence, “severe” as the root). The word, however, is so rarely used that Merriam-Webster gave as an example the very Chesterton passage I had just read. The word dates to the 17th C, so it isn’t new, just not often chosen.

The Merriam-Webster entry has a story in its entry, about Elmore Leonard reading the word in a Mary McCarthy book. He, too, had to look it up. The interpretation of the Leonard story was to demonstrate that only those who want to show off their vocabulary would use such a word. At least I’m in good company with my ignorance. It seems Ms. McCarthy was perhaps not in bad company when she used the word asseverated instead of the more ordinary said (Chesterton is clearly good company, too); she is simply in a group so small it hardly exists. Whether she was trying to show off is not for me to say. I’ve never actually read McCarthy’s books.

I don’t think it’s bragging to claim I have a vocabulary better than 97% of the population. I could go with 99% because it’s probably true, but that might actually be bragging. In any case, I just added to it, though I doubt I will use it any time soon. I use vocabulary in a fluid sense when I write and speak — whatever comes to mind. That word would be a definite challenge to use in any way that wasn’t artificial and/or didn’t seem to others that I was trying to show off. I care little about the latter, having often said offhand things I found ordinary, to be met with that cult of stupidity smugness of “[eyeroll] I don’t listen to people who use words with more than two syllables.” One time, I casually remarked that syllables has three…do they no longer listen to themselves? I was met with more smug eyerolling.

It’s always good to learn something new, though. What’s life without a few good extra words to pack around?

No, this isn’t about humans. It’s about my new puppy friends and my obsession with relearning Spanish. Against my better judgement, we added two puppies to our pet family. Over the years, we have had many cats and one sweet dog. My husband has been bringing the kittens home for years; firefighters have a reputation for rescuing animals, and sometimes people will leave a box of unwanted baby cats or dogs outside the fire academy or department. That is how we started getting pets, despite my housecleaning meticulousness.

I’m really more of a dog lover than a cat lover, so we eventually rescued a puppy from an Albuquerque shelter and brought her home. She’s now an elderly dog, about eleven or twelve, I think. I can’t remember what year we brought her home, but she is the best dog in the world. She looked into my soul with her puppy eyes, and that was how I knew she belonged with us.

But puppies are a lot of work. I’ve been loath to bring home any new puppy friends. Our poor older dog has had to be satisfied with cats for her animal companions. She was always a lot nicer to them than they were to her. Our most elderly cat died a couple of years ago, and our other cat is living with one of my daughters because she was peculiarly unhealthy living in Roswell. The alley cats had given her fleas, and she was allergic to them. For some reason, fleas don’t proliferate in the desert, and so we had to send her back to our desert-dwelling daughter before the poor patchy creature withered away.

To make a long story short, just having one dog and a large yard with plenty of trees for shade allowed me to give in to my kids’ pleas for puppies. A friend had rescued a pregnant dog, whom the owner didn’t want, and she needed to give up some of the puppies. We brought two home. Since then, my life has been consumed with them, as they are very young. Thankfully, unlike human babies, they can be put out in the yard when they become too trying. They move like a whirlwind through the house, you see. Anyway, it’s been fun, but if you notice, I haven’t posted on here for about as long as we’ve had these pups in our lives. I suppose I should give an explanation for the title of my post: the dogs are true friends, as dogs will always be. They will fill your heart because they will love you like only dogs can. They are true blessings from God!

As I said, I’ve also become somewhat obsessive about relearning all the Spanish I’ve lost over the years. When I graduated from college, I could read and write fluently in Spanish and speak it if forced (I’m not good at speaking in my native tongue; trust me, it’s worse in Spanish). I had to be able to read and write fluently because my degree entailed reading very long novels and writing fifteen-page papers. I still remember when I became a fluent reader; it really was to the point of one day translating slowly as I went, and the next, just reading and understanding.

I’m doing Duolingo because it was recommended to me. Duolingo does deal with grammar, but it’s also good for conversational Spanish, which is what I need. So far, it’s helpful. I also found a copy of El amor en los tiempos del cólera at a thrift store and will test my reading fluency, to see if it’s still there…somewhere. I also started a Finnish course on Duolingo, but it’s not very expansive, and I have no earthly idea why I chose to take it in the first place, except that the Minä in Minäverse is Finnish for “I” — it was meant to denote a narcissistic world. Not the Finnish part — I chose Finnish because it has a pleasant sound and the umlaut looks nice.

My days, then, are full of puppies whom I run after while shouting Spanish phrases at my phone. I don’t yet shout in Finnish, though a friend on Discord posted a video of strong Finnish swear words. Very serious shouting words, those. But that’s a digression. Re Spanish, I decided I needed more than Duolingo, which brought me to the website Real Fast Spanish, where I read a post that piqued my interest, on false English-Spanish cognates. He calls these “false friends,” which is apropos. True cognates make your life easier and they are, consequently, your friends. False ones can lead to embarrassment or confusion.

Obviously, there are many false cognates, and his article doesn’t deal with them all. I found his article fascinating because the words he groups together all have to do with emotions. He gives some theories as to why there are so many false cognates in the world of emotions. I believe it has to do with the intangibility of emotions, as well as the way different cultures approach them. If you are interested in learning Spanish, you should read his handy table. There is one word where the false cognate goes one direction, Spanish to English, and that is gracioso. Gracioso does not mean gracious, as one would expect. It means funny. But the word for gracious is cortés, which has a true English cognate, courteous. Gracious is simply an extension of related to manners of the court.

In between work and caring for puppies, I’ve managed to find a subject that makes me emocionada about life again. Words. Words in Spanish, Finnish, and English. Yes, emocionada is on the list of false cognates. Go see for yourself.

To bring this back around and force two subjects to fit together that don’t at all, the reason I prefer dogs over cats is that they are true friends, while cats are false friends. Is that a cruel thing to say? Cruel, perhaps, but true. Cats will eat your face off after you die; dogs will curl up by your side and get depressed because they want you to run with them again. Dogs really love their humans, and cats are capable of the same love, I suppose, but they will only show it when it suits them. Cats are the false cognates of the animal world. Okay, I admit that was a real stretch. My apologies. I haven’t been sleeping much. Puppies, you know.

Some books resonate in the soul more than others. While I was out and about on spring break, I found some old copies of the childhood favorites, My Side of the Mountain and On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. To this day, I want to live in these books.

There are certain tropes in children’s stories that are endlessly appealing, among which is running away from the world. I’ve never outgrown this desire to get out of Dodge; I’m not much of a rock music listener, but Matchbook Twenty’s I wish the real world would just stop hassling me is endearing and relatable. It makes one consider what the real world is, and if how we live is actually it.

As a child, I gravitated to either running-away or kids-stranded-on-their-own books. The worst of these was Lord of the Flies, as it took a very jaundiced look at human nature. There is a real life story of boys who got stranded together, and I urge you to read about it because it turned out quite a bit differently than William Golding’s novel. But perhaps the truth is I have a utopic vision in my head, and I want to maintain it through my fiction, not destroy it. Or perhaps I’m simply tired of the badness being considered reality, while goodness is an unrealistic ideal that only foolish Christian women buy into with their prairie romances.

To be fair to Christian women everywhere, I’m pretty sure they’re longing for the same thing I am: a trip right out of the annoyances of the modern world. That’s exactly what My Side of the Mountain does. It takes me to my peak fantasy world.

The story is about a twelve-year-old boy, Sam, who runs away from home to his grandpa’s abandoned farm in the Catskills. He doesn’t have the skills to survive on his own, but thankfully, he learns along the way through trial and error, as well as frequent trips to the library in the small village a couple miles from his wilderness home.

The entire plot is Sam learning to survive. This is why I love it. It’s rich in details; it verges on being a how-to manual! Through it all is the harsh combination of beauty and terror living that close to nature brings. Best of all, he lives in a hollowed-out tree. I want his house, his loneliness, his life of books and experimental engineering. When I was growing up, I did a fair amount of survival training and learned to build makeshift shelters and fires, etc. I was equipped with the skills that Sam wasn’t, yet sadly, they haven’t been put much to the test.

For literary quality, On the Far Side of the Mountain is probably a better book. And it is good; make no mistake. On the other hand, Sam is no longer as isolated, as he partners up with a friend to find his sister, who has moved to the wilderness with him (and decides to have an adventure by herself). And he has largely learned to live in nature by this second book, though there is still some engineering that occurs. Some of the magic is lost when the plot isn’t solely Sam against nature (and a few nosy journalists). I recommend all three — yes, there’s a third book that was not available at the thrift store where I found the first two. I’d read all three of them again right now because I want to exist in Sam’s world forever.

Yes, I know I have a family. I love my family. But my two youngest children will grow up and move out soon, and they can visit their parents in my fantasy curmudgeonly mountain treehouse; I’ve thought this through, you see. My husband and I can share a tree. It can start in the hollow trunk and branch out to a treehouse. My husband would love this life. I think. I have yet to have the discussion with him.

I’m not going to apologize over my focus on politics and Covid lately. It is still the most relevant issue, as it’s being used for overt government control. It is also being used to push a dangerous vaccine that you will have to continue getting year after year, just as you’ve been getting the flu vaccine seasonally. Perhaps I don’t mean you you, but there are plenty of people who get it every year, and this is what will end up happening with the Covid vaccine because Covid is the new flu.

Look at the numbers. Here is a good compilation of them, but they are easy enough to verify on your own. I did. I always do because numbers matter to me. There has been little to no flu this year, and when you go ahead and verify these numbers, you will find noncredible articles with idiotic titles such as “Flu rates have been very low this year. Here’s why.” And then the journalist proceeds to make up some garbage about how well social distancing has worked (just not for Covid) and how yay! we stopped the flu because sooooo many people got their flu jab (because they’re pretending to be British, how cute) and this just happened to be the year when the flu vaccine has an unprecedented 90+% effectiveness rate. I mean, wowie, what a blessing in the year of the Covid pandemic which completely supplanted the flu.

But honestly, I don’t care about the number of infections. Yes, it is relevant that Covid has become the flu, or the flu has become Covid. This alone should have us wondering what is really going on. However, the more important number has been and remains the death rate over the past year. And that is a number you will have a much, much harder time verifying. This is the most relevant number because nobody cares about a high infection rate, if the disease is mild. The common cold has a high infection rate, and few people die from it — elderly people, generally. Yes, it happens. The common cold can lead to heart attacks and/or piggyback infections like pneumonia in susceptible people.

And yet we don’t shut anything down for the common cold. We don’t shut down entertainment, businesses, churches, and holidays for the common cold. Heck, we don’t even shut down restaurants when half the staff is calling in sick with the much more dangerous flu. We just carry on and do what our parents have taught us to do: drink tea and pop vitamin tablets. Our respective governments have convinced us to shut everything down and huddle in our homes because of the supposed high death rate of Covid, not due to its rate of infection.

I live in the U.S., of course, and where do we get our death numbers? From the CDC. The problem is the CDC is usually behind by at least a year when it comes to finalizing death numbers. Where were these up-to-the-day death stats coming from? Well, hospital and coroner reports. Whereas hospitals normally are giant, slow-moving bureaucracies with incompetent people manning their computers, they were suddenly swift and sure and true! The same people who can’t type in a name or address correctly have been retrained by the seriousness of Covid to report that (as of late 2020) there an approximately 10%* excess death rate over the predicted death rate and we know this death rate practically to the day.

That’s a very high death rate. Think about how many people that is. I don’t believe the high number, but I can’t verify it either way. I have anecdotal evidence that I listen and pay attention to, but I can hardly convince others using anecdotes, nor even convince myself. E.g. I have eye-witness accounts that hospitals are doubling numbers. But I also know that people see what they want to see. I know of cases where families insisted their stage-four cancer suffering relatives were put in Covid wards so hospitals could add Covid to the death certificates. But I can’t prove it. Not ultimately.

In the end, I look around me, and I see that few people are taking Covid seriously any longer, and those who thought getting the vaccine would bring things back to normal have already gotten it. The rest won’t unless forced. Why? Well, perhaps this high reported death rate isn’t real to them. Why isn’t it real for them? Perhaps because it isn’t and wasn’t ever real.

But, hey, who am I? I’m just a curious culture watcher who likes numbers and who is very frustrated that I can’t actually verify them. I can only imagine this is how some politicians feel when election results produce a bunch of statistical anomalies, but they can’t challenge the anomalies because the Supreme Court throws out their pleas. An entity operating on a higher plane than they are is controlling the numbers, and what are the little people left to do, but shout at the wind until they get banned from shouting?

This isn’t meant to be depressing. The less I read the news, the less I care about Covid. The closest it has reached me is a daughter who tested positive and has had zero symptoms. I see people operating how they want to, going where they want, doing what they want, and not donning masks. There is only the background worry that as people stop taking it seriously, the “higher entities” will strike back harder.

*What I meant to say here is that the predicted death is expected to increase at a statistical pace at something like 1.6% over the previous year, and according to the data was at closer to 10% higher. Those deaths above the prediction would be considered “excess” deaths.

Is anyone else finding it difficult to go out into public these days? I find myself sniping at everyone who tries to enforce Covid rules, some of which are the corporation’s and not the state’s rules. The majority complicity in these nonsensical rules does not give me hope for the future. On the other hand, I find that locally run franchise stores and small businesses are more inclined to leave people alone and not enforce restrictive rules, which has caused more people to shop at these stores. One example is a local supermarket that I rarely shopped at prior to Covid that now gets almost all my business. I go there because they don’t enforce rules and have made a huge effort to keep their store stocked during shortfalls. Because of their new sales volume, they have added fancy gluten-free foods to their product line. This was one reason I didn’t shop there regularly before. I’m spoiled these days and no longer want to make homemade gf tortillas and bread for my children (who have bonified wheat allergies; no it is not a fad for us).

This has made me wonder again about the emergence of parallel economies thriving alongside the corporate taskmasters… because you and I both know that it will be our corporate taskmasters that will try to force even greater restrictions on us. I know this because they already have, e.g. closing down dressing rooms. Last weekend, we went to an underground concert that was an astonishing parallel economy. I won’t give the name of the bands or venue, for that reason. I simply want to note that we stumbled across it unwittingly — the entrance was at the backside of a building. Nobody wore masks, and everyone danced. The bands (or venue owners, perhaps) provided their own security with metal detectors, etc. By contrast, a more conventional concert venue that is hosting a band we’d like to see has a list of Covid restrictions a mile long. We will thus not be attending that concert, even though we were willing to plunk down over a hundred dollars for the bands at the alternative venue.

For all those who claimed a holier-than-thou it’s-all-just-temporary attitude, I would like to remind you that there are pastors and priests being jailed in so-called free anglophile nations more than a year after these temporary restrictions were put in place. I don’t like getting apocalyptic, but there are at least negative echoes of a fascist future in what is happening now. For heaven’s sake, I was joking a year ago that they would soon invent technology that will prevent us from leaving our homes if a virus is detected at too high levels in our bodies. Guess what? They’ve invented it: Covid chips. Again, I don’t go apocalyptic. I’m not a nutjob, but I’d be a fool if I didn’t pay attention to this nonsense. Did you think a year ago that our respective governments could indefinitely shut down businesses, including grocery stores and churches? It’s been a year. That’s it. Let that sink in.

I want to quickly add an addendum to this post. One of the reasons the “underground” concert I attended was successful was for its reliance on word of mouth advertising, as well as not advertising where the venue would be until the day of. It’s pretty hard to get the state police to investigate a moving target, and the local boys won’t do it. I just read about another concert that popped up suddenly in Albuquerque during their Art Walk event. The Art Walk planners did not know it was happening; however, the concert was loud and outside and landed in a news article. Look, journalists are twatheads. If they find you, they will write a tattletale article about how you aren’t following teacher’s rules (or, as my dad would say, “Mommy Grisham’s rules”). By contrast, successful parallel economies will tend towards being very quiet in their disobedience. I used to be more American in my “stand up and shout about it” manner. I no longer think that works. Maybe you have other ideas.

I’ll admit right now that I haven’t been able to give up my YouTube habit. I’m addicted to podcasts. My favorites include Gospel Simplicity and Pints With Aquinas. The men who run these podcasts, Austin [I don’t know his last name] and Matt Fradd respectively, conduct great interviews. I also appreciate Dr. Taylor Marshall, as he’s a very conservative Catholic and the author of the book I enjoyed reading most last year. There are a number of other Catholic YouTubers I listen to, as well a number of Protestant ones I’ve recently dropped due to their smug anti-Catholicism. I don’t like smugness from any arena, but willfully ignorant smugness re Catholicism gets my ire up.

With these types of podcasts encompassing my YouTube experience, one wonders why I suddenly began seeing recommendations for video stories of people who had walked away from Christianity on my YouTube homepage. I suppose it’s not as nefarious as it seems, but merely YouTube giving me what I want: videos tagged under religion. One, however, caught my eye because I recognized the name, Jen Fishburne, only I couldn’t remember why. While I listened to her story of walking away from Christianity, I remembered why.

Jen Fishburne ran, or still runs, the Jen’s Gems blogspot. I had read this blog with some interest many years ago, when my homeschooling friends were heavily invested in Vision Forum and the “Dougs,” as I liked to call them. Okay, this might take a bit of an explanation. Deep breath.

Although I don’t talk much about my family on the internet, most people know that I spent many years homeschooling my older children, and now that Covid has changed the landscape of schooling, I’m back to homeschooling my younger set once again. This brought me close to the world of hyper-conservative homeschooling. And at one time, Vision Forum and its creator, Doug Phillips, were all the rage in these circles. So was Doug Wilson. When one very ardent mother passed around Doug Wilson’s book, Reforming Marriage, it got passed around and passed around until it finally landed in my house. It had been meant for my husband, but my husband studiously avoids such books and wouldn’t read it. Being the obsessive human I am, I read it because I can’t stop myself from reading books that are sitting around. It’s like a compulsion that I can’t control. I’ve tried, God help me, I have tried, but I will probably read your grocery list on your fridge — if you ever invite me over to your house, and I’ve exhausted your other literature. I’ve even been known to add items to friends’ grocery lists, usually products that the person would never buy, such as a gallon of Jack Daniels and a carton of cigarettes. I’m apparently a pre-internet original troll, along with being a compulsive reader.

Wilson’s book didn’t bother me, per se. It was the culture surrounding the book that bothered me. What should have been considered extrabiblical advice was touted as law and gospel. I’m not exaggerating; when the relationship between a husband and wife is said to resemble the relationship between Christ and church, and thus the gospel, it becomes an integral part of the gospel. And that was what the culture surrounding Wilson’s book was touting. Some called it biblical patriarchy. Some liked to use the fluffier “complementarianism.” Whatever one chose to call it, it created artificial rules on how husbands and wives and their male and female offspring were to behave.

When arbitrary rules are imposed on a subset of a larger culture that doesn’t accept those rules as the norm, it’s difficult to pull off. The biblical patriarchy movement was bound to fail for that reason. Even the Pearls — God love them, another favorite within the conservative homeschooling set — came out against the movement. Consequently, I don’t hear much about the movement now, albeit there were a few scandals that hastened its collapse in my circles: one involving Doug Wilson marrying a pedophile to a woman in his church, and another involving Doug Phillips and an extramarital affair. There were peripheral scandals involving other pastors in the broader movement, such as Mark Driscoll. Honestly, I can’t remember all of them now, and I don’t care to. Some of these stories were and still exist in the realm of internet gossip. For example, do I really know what happened in the Doug Wilson controversy? No, I certainly do not. Propaganda is what it is, even if it backs up one’s personal bias.

Yes, I was personally biased against the movement from the get-go because it was pushed by controlling men and women prone to being hyper-critical and/or perfectionistic. Often, it wasn’t the man at all pushing patriarchy, but his overbearing wife. I tend to “slip, slide, and away” from such types. I’m a slippery eel. No matter how my friends tried to convince me of the rightness of their positions, I chose to stay away from such fringe movements. Fringe movements, not being the core of culture, fall apart and away, leaving broken people behind them.

And so I’ve seen it happen to the conservative patriarchal families, too: Christians marriages ending in divorce, adulterous affairs conducted by hurting people, and worst of all, once strident Christians walking away from Christianity altogether.

When I began to piece it altogether and remember who Jen Fishburne is, I thought, “Oh, great, another one from the movement has left the faith.” Back when she was detailing her awful dealings with Doug Phillips on her blog Jen’s Gems, she was still a believer. Now she’s not. I don’t wish to overanalyze her beliefs now, or insinuate that she’s operating off of misery and brokenness. She might be. Or, conversely, she might be quite happy to no longer be under the stress of Christian fundamentalism. But I view her walking away as an inevitable end to what people in this movement did, and that was to replace a relationship with God with their own intellectualism and perfectionism. According to her walking away video, it was a preterist viewpoint that spelled the demise of Christianity to her, as well as determining through hours and hours of study that the Bible is only for and of the Israelites, and that, while it’s true in many ways for them as a nation, it falls in the realm of historical fiction.

I’ll admit right now that I tend to overintellectualize the world around me. I’m firmly trapped in my head. But I also understood very deeply by the time I was in my twenties that I was deficient as a human because my spiritual and emotional censors didn’t work as they ought to have. Why was I this way? I don’t know; God doesn’t make mistakes, but the world can beat God’s voice out of a human. Hence, I’ve sought to remedy this problem over the years. Man’s wisdom is foolishness to God — that is what the Bible says, and it’s true. When men seek knowledge, when they get trapped in the labyrinth of words on a page, they miss the forest for the trees (a cliché, but useful). And certain types of people try to find God through yet more studying and reading, even though it hasn’t worked for them in the past. It’s a banal pursuit after a while. The only remedy for me was to seek a relationship with God through Jesus.

When you step away from the parsing of words on a page, you begin to see something else: an epic story that’s been played out through history. And you want to be a part of it. This is, by the way, why I eventually turned to Catholicism because their greatest thinkers looked for the grand pattern of history and connected the dots rather than isolating the minutia. They also seemed to recognize that experiencing Jesus, as part of the godhead that bridges the gap between us and our creator, was what really repaired the hearts of men. Not perfectionism. Not intellectualism — the truth was in experiencing Jesus, which was and is the entire point of going to mass.

By the way, that’s why Taylor Marshall’s book (Sword and Serpent) resonated with me so much when I read it. It collects the patterns of history and puts them together in a story, in this case both the legendary story of St. George and the dragon, and the myth of Andromeda chained as a sacrifice to the monster. I believe Jen Fishburne asked the question in her video, “What do we need saving from?” though perhaps it wasn’t couched exactly in those words. This is my answer: from the dragon. The monster. And that story is not unique to one culture; it couldn’t be said to exist as only the history of the Israelite nation. It’s a story that exists throughout time and history. Even antichrist men like Jung recognized it as being a universal archetype.

To be fair to patriarchals, I believe they were and are trying to live out the imagery in the Bible of a man who rescues the enchained woman who is being sacrificed to the dragon. But it’s not the husband’s job to be a savior, and it’s not a wife’s job to be perpetually rescued by him. Trying to intellectualize something that happens in the soul, to codify it into a set of rules, is a recipe for disaster. What happens when these “savior” figures fall, as they will? People who have poured their faith into that system walk away. It’s especially easy for someone prone to study to walk away, as it’s not that hard to read your way into the cell your logical conceits have left you with.

That’s what we have, ladies and gentlemen of the United States. Recently, Biden backed away from being responsible for a “vaccine passport,” instead stating that it would be the responsibility of private companies to create their own.

Snort. No, really, I mean it. I’m snorting with laughter. The problem with the world today is that everybody has given up subtlety for openly declaring what is going on. Come on? Private companies are going to produce their own vaccine passports? Of course they are. And fools will claim that it’s right and good that they do so because “we didn’t want to bake the cake,” or some such nonsense.

Yes, at one time, I would have stood with private businesses. At least, I would have stood with normal businesses, not these international conglomerate corporations that destroy competition and waive themselves of all responsibilities. Sure, they ought to be able to censor what we do and say and force the average Joe to get vaccinated in order to conduct business or travel abroad. Because freedom.

Years ago, I noted that liberalism, i.e. freedom, is an incoherent philosophy on which to build a nation. It does not lead to freedom when there is no other foundation to stand on. It does not lead to freedom of the average Joe when it allows corporations to have the freedom to monopolize markets and to force customers — who don’t have the wherewithal to, out of the blue, create their own airline companies, their own internets, their own publishing venues — to jump through all their fascist hoops.

Of course, Mr. Biden wants to leave it up to private corporations, i.e. our oligarchy. What a joke. Private corporations should have no access to our medical records and should not be able to demand access to them in order for us to have the privilege to do business. Period.

The only recourse most of us have at this point to fight against overt censorship, cancellation of beautiful things, and the new-world-order of Covid medicine to be jammed down our throats is to support whatever small businesses we can through our cashflow. I get it — you can get it cheaper on Amazon, but conglomerates like Amazon are soulless harridans of the beast. I’ve already started doing my shopping at a small locally-owned franchise grocery store, even though I have to pay more for fancy things. To be honest, I can’t even get very many fancy things there, but I can buy meat and vegetables and dairy, and what else does a family need? Not much, to be honest. Also, start collecting and archiving for the future. The more people who collect and archive books, films, and music, the better off we’ll be after these times of stupid cancellations are over.

I’m sorry I don’t have anything more uplifting to say, but our president is a total sham. I think we all knew that, even those who honestly voted for him just to oust Trump. I don’t know what they were hoping for when things “went back to normal,” except for the aims of Bush-Obama et al when they spread war across the Middle East and built cages on the border. I mean, maybe they were hoping their college loans would be erased or for free healthcare, but I doubt we’ll even get that out of the deal. Not that I want free healthcare. I’ve seen what happens when our incompetent government takes charge of a sector: see the VA for an example.

On a positive note — because, to be fair, there’s always one — I’ve also been collecting used books wherever I go since things are more or less open now. I don’t have a place to store them, but I don’t care. The more books, the merrier. I buy them from the Goodwill and other second-hand shops; I have a daughter who scouts out old vinyl. Anyway, it’s not much, but it’s something. Have a blessed Easter, as Jesus surpasses all this worldly nonsense. Yes, he wants us to be active in our times. After all, we weren’t born randomly, not one of us. We were born to respond to these weird days. Respond accordingly, but do take time out to worship the Savior, as we can this year. We can! The churches our open. They should never have closed, but that’s another discussion.