Unconditional Love

Lessons Learned

Certain events have global consequences. Like, a meteor hitting the earth. An ice age. And, more recently, the invention and explosion of the first atom bomb. Even more recently, 911. And, finally C*vid.

The C*vid pandemic changed the world in a way nothing else in my lifetime has done. And now, a few years down the road, there are important lessons to learn from what happened. If we choose to.

When C*vid first showed up, people divided themselves into three categories:

1. Those who simply believed what they were told and followed orders, getting fully vaccinated and agreeing with fearful rhetoric about the threat from those who had “vaccine hesitancy,” those who didn’t trust the “settled science.”

2. Those who took a stand against blind obedience without being fully informed. They refused the shot and paid a heavy price. Some lost their jobs, most lost friends.

3. Those on the fence, unsure about the sales pitch but fearing for their jobs and family connections if they didn’t comply. Most did comply.

Now, we can look back and see more clearly how insane the whole thing was. Incentives for getting a shot included “million-dollar lotteries, full-ride college scholarships and all manner of freebies such as beer, sports tickets and even guns to reach fence-sitters.” Why the need for bribery if the product was as advertised?

All these incentives were designed to persuade people to “do the right thing.” In this case, the right thing was apparently to abandon all semblance of self responsibility for assessing the value of what we put in our bodies (converting even people who wave My Body My Choice signs and always read labels in the grocery store) to follow the advice of profit driven pharmaceutical companies who lied about their product (as they routinely do and have been financially penalized for to the tune of many billions over the decades).

One by one, the conspiracy theories have proven true. Yes, the virus probably did leak from a lab in China. Yes, it was the result of gain of function research. No, the vaccine did not prevent infection. No, it did not prevent spreading the infection. And, sorry about this, there are serious side effects. Reports estimate that over 400,000 people could have died as a result of these largely untested shots.

Still, most of those in group one continue to ignore the statistics (just more conspiracy theories, they believe) and insist that all is well (despite the injuries, the deaths, and plummeting birth rates attributed to these rushed-to-market products). Those in group two, who are better informed, feel relieved they took a stand instead of a shot. Many of the wafflers in group three have regret, wishing they hadn’t gone along with the herd. Many of them are suffering side effects, some are dead.

But… the gift in all this is a sudden awareness of the danger of ALL vaccines. C*vid revelations have made it less of a surprise to learn from dependable sources that all vaccines have their serious down side. Note this data from here.

But there’s a much bigger lesson embedded in this story, a revelation about unconditional love.

This lesson relates to trust, curiosity, and acceptance. In my case, as I’ve awakened to the deceit in our health/disease care system I got angry. OK, that’s judgment. And I don’t want to be judgmental. So, I pivoted. My insights as I did:

1. I can’t trust experts and organizations with financial conflicts of interest.

2. Curiosity is a good thing; it could save my life.

3. I refuse to polarize. Believe what you want, behave as you choose. Don’t hurt me or others. I’ll support your individuality and please support mine. And, let’s all share what we learn to help each other stay healthy.

Could this global event and the insights arising from it persuade us to pay more attention to each other than “experts” with chronic conflicts of interest? Might we learn to honor our differences and let our neighbors follow their own path, without our judgment? What if we all stopped judging each other? Didn’t The Beatles have a song about that? “Let it be.” This attitude raises us above unthinking compliance, replacing the peer pressure to “do the right thing” (according to who?) with genuine curiosity to learn from each other how to make the best decisions.

Let it be.

“Some people do not love their fellow man… and I hate people like that!” This comment from 70’s satirist Tom Lehrer exposes the hypocrisy in those who utter the words but don’t deliver with their behavior. Burning a Tesla is not a demonstration of unconditional love.

So, let’s learn just this one lesson from the C*vid era and the shock of discovery that much of what we’ve believed has never been true. Let’s let each other be. Maybe we can learn something of value from each other, because of our different beliefs and behaviors not in spite of them.

We just might make different choices if we believed in each other more than we automatically believed in the fear based propaganda of profiteering puppeteers.