The Cobra Effect

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

Last night I dreamed that I was at the local supermarket. The weather was dark and overcast and there was a cold drizzle falling as I walked across the parking lot. As I got closer to the entrance I saw my neighbor, an elderly woman I have known almost as long as I have lived here standing outside of the doors, waiting to go in. Something compelled me to go to her and as I came up behind her I reached out and took her hand in mine, gently, like you would hold a baby chick.

Her hand instinctively clasped mine tighter and as she turned to look up at me her wrinkled face lit up. We stood there for an instant looking at each other and both of us broke into smiles to see one another again and almost before I could sense what was happening, she pulled me towards her and embraced me with her frail arms and I hugged her back, the two of us under a slate gray sky, damp from the rain. Even now, half an hour after waking I can remember what she felt like, her body shuddering with relief at some human contact.

In the dream we were surrounded by onlookers, heavy women with chopped grey hair and angry faces, lifting up their hands and pointing at us as they stood in a line waiting to get into the store, each one ten feet apart from the next. They began to shout at us, to shame us for this moment of humanity and compassion. They called out for the police, said awful things and made accusations, all of them pointing their fat fingers like witnesses to a crime, eyes filled with a blind, white hatred while the two of us stood there in mutual defiance of their anger and wrath as the cold rain fell.

The past month has been a surreal mix of pure joy and a deeper sort of fear that edged towards paranoia whenever I’d read a story about the maelstrom of toxic politics and a spread of some invisible contagion that has taken place, seemingly all over the world. On the farm we’ve been calving and sugaring, collecting eggs and splitting wood. We make sausages and smoke sides of bacon, jar pickles and clean equipment, an endless cycle of chores and tasks that keep us firmly rooted not only to the soil upon which we live, but to purpose in this world.

My son and I work together every day; we’ve slaughtered some hogs and we bottled some syrup and all the while we do these things side by side, talking constantly and then lapsing into a reflective silence. We placed an ad for the piglets on Craigslist and almost immediately the calls came in followed by the arrival of buyers to pick up two or four at a time. We’d help them load them up and take their cash and exchange a few words about the farm or the view and eventually there’ be some discussion about what was happening- not the spread of the virus, but the descent into madness that seemed to grip the entire world.

It would be easy to miss it all here on the farm. This is the way we live already, apart from the rest of the population in a spot with a 360 degree view of nothing but forest and fields, not a single house in sight. My wife continues about her business caring for the vacant Summer homes of the wealthy along the shores of the big lake. My daughter chats with her friends on Skype while she does the dishes and fills out the mailing labels for the syrup.

My youngest son spends his days collaborating with a small group of boys by computer, writing script for some interactive game they’ve come up with where they build multi-level environments for animals that float in the ether of digital space until he grows bored and then heads outside to jump on the trampoline for hours at a clip, surrounded by his dogs that lay on the lawn beneath him. We take turns with meals each night using a wide variety of ingredients and then we either play games or read books in the circle of our home and our love for one another. This was the life we wished for and through some inexplicable gift from God, it has been given to us.

During the British occupation of India in the Colonial era there were concerns about the venomous cobras and the threat that they posed to humans. The British, never known to pass up a plan from inside some office where tea was sipped in equal measure with gin, placed a bounty on the snake and soon the locals, eager to make a farthing so as not to starve to death, arrived at the headquarters with baskets full of dead cobras.

This continued until it was discovered that some of the more clever wogs had begun to breed the cobras in captivity in order to meet the demand and to reap the reward. The British, unhappy with being taken advantage of by lesser men, rescinded their offer and the cobra market crashed. The cobra breeders quickly adapted to the directives of their overlords and released their snakes back into the wild, leaving the resident of Delhi to deal with a tidal wave of deadly vipers.

This is the cobra effect. An unintended consequence of turning natural processes into an economic proposition based on the double-edged sword of hubris and selfish interest.

For ten years our family has been working towards the goal of becoming self-reliant in a world that has been racing in the direction of global dependency. We work from the ground up while the powerful elites have been working against people from the top down. We have tried to follow the lessons taught by nature while they have built a panopticon to control and direct every aspect of life on Earth. Their desire for dominion and their complete divorce from the natural world has delivered to us a fractional reserve banking system, quants and tranches, endless surveillance, and an ever increasing involvement in our lives inside and out.

The wildest fever dreams of Orwell and Huxley could not have envisioned a world where obese men and bitter old women would be able to order- and be obeyed by entire populations- such draconian infringements as mandatory lock downs and stay at home orders over fears of a natural process that has existed since human beings first became a species. The spread of any influenza results in death, it always has. The weak, the sick, the addicted and malnourished, the diseased and the elderly are the victims as they have always been because the virus stresses the immune system.

Those who live in close quarters, like our modern metropolises and their wide spreading metroplexes are at risk not because this outbreak is fundamentally different than any other, but because the conditions are. Our nation, once whip thin and fit from hard work and good food has become toxic, where 8 out of 10 Americans are overweight and nearly half are obese. One half of our citizens are on some form of prescription medication and nearly a third use illicit drugs.

The foods we eat do not come from gardens, but are churned out by an industrial mode of agriculture that looks only to the most efficient means of delivering calories to consumers regardless of the processes, no matter how inhumane and destructive. Our entertainments are a mix of degradation and violence, pornography has replaced traditional bonding of men and women and almost weekly we are exposed to concepts like sex robots and replacing our entire workforce with automated systems that leave us without meaning, alienated from even the most basic human interactions. We have created a global cobra effect that threatens not only to enslave us all, but to dehumanize every step of the way.

My cousin still lives in my hometown and we have remained close despite the distance. Two years ago his father died and last Fall his mother suffered from a heart attack that required her hospitalization. It has been a difficult couple of years, but he has remained upbeat throughout it all and we talk every couple of days to make sure we maintain that attitude. His mother’s operation did not go well and she has been in the ICU for almost three months now, on a ventilator, unable to speak. He visited her daily to keep up her spirits until they decided last month to move her out of the hospital and into a private care facility to “make room for the expected COVID-19 patients”.

Since they moved her he has not been allowed to visit because of the quarantine, but because she cannot speak, he has been cutoff from even making a phone call to her and she lingers on, alone, kept apart from the ones she loved and raised and would have given her life for and likely will. The rules in New Jersey would make it impossible for us to even attend her funeral should she pass away from her condition, which seems more likely day by day and it is slowly killing my cousin as well, I can hear it in his voice.

I am not an important man and I hold no degrees, no office. My take on what is happening today is not one shared by many and I share it only with those I know and trust. There is no way to know what part of what we are being told is true and what part is false. The story has changed so often and with so little thought to it’s reason or logic that no rational being could be expected to understand what is actually happening, but I can see the effects even from my little farm on the edge of the mountain. The virus is real, I do not contest that point, but the reaction has been a form of collective madness only read about in stories from the Dark Ages.

Our observations are a modern day Decameron, a human comedy. The effects of these insane decisions have barely been spoken about above a whisper, but they aren’t debatable. We’ve been sent to our rooms by our betters for something we didn’t do, told to maintain our distance from one another while they monkey hum one another on podiums nightly, standing so close to one another they can tell what each one had for breakfast. They have destroyed our economy, shuttered virtually every privately owned business, repealed our right to peaceably assemble, to worship, to marry in front of witnesses, to mourn our dead.

They have pointed at an unseen pathogen as an excuse to attack the population, to threaten them with imprisonment and fines for simple going outdoors, where sunshine, God’s natural disinfectant would do us the most good. They’ve separated friends and families, emptied the retirement accounts of tens of millions, left families destitute, seen to the greatest layoffs in our history, told us what we can buy or sell and for how much and when, while they hand out trillions- yes, trillions of dollars right back to the very people who just wrecked the entire economic system so they can be made whole, and then promised a mess of pottage to the ones they stole everything from.

All of the lies that we’ve been sold for the past quarter of a century have been exposed for everyone to see, borders that we were assured could never be controlled are suddenly shut up tighter than a well diggers ass. Criminals who prey on the weak have been released en masse onto our streets, while the military has begun to be deployed in order to control the law abiding citizens who simply want to buy some food for their families. We’ve been told that all of the sacrifices Americans made in the service of a global economy was worth $1,200, but that we should stop expecting anything else in the future as supply lines collapse under the weight of their callous indifference and hubris.

During the past month or so there has been a steady stream of young people coming up to the farm to pitch in. All of my son’s friends who went off to college are back now, with diplomas and zero job prospects. The ones who were employed in an effort to pay back their student loans are now jobless and they have had it. They work side by side with us learning new things, how to butcher a hog, how to cure a side of bacon, how to start seedlings, run the evaporator that turns out sweet syrup, the difference between hardwood and softwood and how to split and stack it.

One of them has moved onto the farm in his van and asked us last night if he could stay on through Summer and pay for food and lodging with his labor and we gratefully accepted. One of my friends drove up from Boston yesterday to help me package meat for the freezer and to pay me for a freezer full for his family. He said that the roads were empty and it felt good to make the drive out, but he also noticed that while he is unemployed currently, the toll taker were still at their jobs raking in the revenue for the hungry State that must be fed no matter the risk to the poor woman who has to take the money from those fleeing the lock downs.

I can see the silver lining in all of this- the time people are now spending with families they hardly knew because of their workload, the dawning realization of just how important it is to depend on oneself rather than a corporate boss or a government agency and it gives me hope. There is the awareness of just how poorly everything has been handled, the incompetence and arrogance that always seem to travel together when these poobahs speak, a day late and a dollar short at every juncture.

There has been an endless string of missed opportunities and failed missions, the squandered resources and emptied budgets that despite the billions spent year after year couldn’t manage to keep a ready supply of something as simple as filter masks. And all of this is on view for everyone to see if only they open their eyes.

Last night I had a dream. And when I awoke I lay there in the dark before the dawn and I let the dream run through my mind until I understood it, and then I wrote this before I could forget, but there is still one thing I have to do. I will go out to the sugarhouse and put together a box of things for the old woman down the road; pickles and hamburger, a box of eggs and a jar of sauerkraut. And then I will drive it over to her house and if she doesn’t mind I will give her a hug.

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Llpoh
Llpoh

Nice to see you writing, HSF. Always a pleasure to read your stuff.

Now, where is Stucky? We need him, too.

M G

Cue Stucky! Yes!

hardscrabble farmer
hardscrabble farmer

He’s not answering his phone or returning calls.

Will keep trying.

Llpoh
Llpoh

Thanks HSF. That is a worry.

RiNS

comment image

flash
flash

Scenarios are being tested … It’s just a ride…

Pg 18 onwards

Scenarios for the Future of Technology
and International Development

Rockefeller Foundation

China’s government was not the only one that took extreme measures to protect its citizens from risk and exposure. During the pandemic,national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified. In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems—from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty—leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.

At first, the notion of a more controlled world gained wide acceptance and approval. Citizens willingly gave up some of their sovereignty—and their privacy—to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability. Citizens were more tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight, and national leaders had more latitude to impose order in the ways they saw fit. In developed countries, this heightened oversight took many forms: biometric IDs for all citizens, for example, and tighter regulation of key industries whose stability was deemed vital to national interests. In many developed countries, enforced cooperation with a suite of new regulations and agreements slowly but steadily restored both order and, importantly, economic growth

http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf?fbclid=IwAR333NZ2Eml0yVWBzCsSqUx8RCZZBneW_Ss9frn0IoymmGhFRPP5YWmTztw

flash
flash

Divinely inspired, I think. Great work HSF.

Happiness. Get some.

SeeBee
SeeBee

LOVED IT, FLASH! As a city rat (as an observer, not a participant.) I can relate!

SmallerGovNow

HSF, what a great piece of writing. I could smell, see, hear, and feel what you wrote about the old woman and the fuddy-duddy women who ridiculed the both of you. The rest of the post is spot on. We’ve all been placed in “time out” by our elected officials. It’s draconian IMO. But it seems most I talk to are like the women in your dream. All the best to you and your family and the rest of those here on TBP…. Chip

You all might enjoy this article on the CV…

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/no_author/nation-in-coronavirus-turmoil-is-there-no-way-out/

ursel doran
ursel doran

IMPERATIVE get the economy back to work QUICK QUICK, as killing the patient to save a few frost bite dead fingers is DEADLY.
Must stop the INSANITY!!
Economies won’t be able to recover after shutdowns

James
James

I will go out to the sugarhouse and put together a box of things for the old woman down the road; pickles and hamburger, a box of eggs and a jar of sauerkraut. And then I will drive it over to her house and if she doesn’t mind I will give her a hug.

You are a good man Farmer,and,you give me a bit of hope in these trying times,tell the young lady James say Hi if you would,best to all of us.

Unreconstructed
Unreconstructed

I’ve been living in town for 10 years now but still have my old place in the old neighborhood in the country. I have my garden and other things there (man-cave.) Noticed my old neighbor’s car didn’t appear to have been moved in a while (he lived alone.) Tried to call him w/no answer. Called other neighbors. Nobody had seen him lately. Tried again the next day; same. Stopped and knocked on door and shouted with no answer. Next morning I called sheriff for a welfare check.
They broke in house and found him dead. Been dead for 5-6 days. Non of the other neighbors had cared enough to check. His house was on the corner of a dead-end street. If you live on that street you have to pass his door.
Nobody gives a shit anymore. Check on your neighbors!!!!

hardscrabble farmer
hardscrabble farmer

Thanks for doing the right thing by him. Sorry it had to be you.

GrandPa
GrandPa

Brought tears to my eyes. Thank you.

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