What Shut Me Up

And Why I Can Now Speak

Chiapas, February 6, 2020: I’m on an extensive car trip around my adopted country with my beloved husband. We pull in at a roadside restroom, un-air-conditioned (as is normal rural Mexico), at the same time as a busload of Chinese tourists. Oddly, they are all wearing surgical masks. I wait in line with women speaking Mandarin to each other. The ones ahead of me pull down their masks in the hot sun. We go inside and they continue talking loudly in the still air of the bathroom, then shouting at each other from their stalls. I enter one of the stalls right after them. Three days later we are in Coatzacoalcos and suddenly both my husband and I spike a 102F fever and go from nasal congestion to a deep, wet cough in a matter of hours. We hole up in a hotel room for 2 days, but the illness passes.

Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, March 20, 2020: As soon as we wake up, my husband says, “This is it. The Great Reset.” Social media, posters on closed businesses, and police cars with loudspeakers have all made it clear that we are to stay at home. The airport in Cancún is closed and no tourists can get in; all the hotels here in the tourist district are vacant; all the shops and bars and restaurants are closed. The streets of the tourist district, where we live, are barricaded, so we cannot leave by car even in an emergency. The normal bustle of the street outside has been replaced by an eerie silence.

March 22, 2020: I write and publish on my (paying) Medium blog an article entitled, “Why Lockdowns Will Kill More People Than They Save.” It sources authoritative medical and governmental statistics to show (in a nutshell):

1. Job loss and financial stress result in an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes

2. Stressful life events result in an increased risk of developing cancer and also of dying from it

3. Heart disease and cancer are among the most common causes of death in the world

4. Tens of millions of people will die from stress-related cardiovascular disease and malignancy, who would not have died if the lockdowns hadn’t happened.

March 23, 2020: Medium pulls the blog post down, stating that it “violates [their] terms of service against ‘Health claims or advice which, if acted on, are likely to have detrimental health effects on persons or public safety.’” You can read the whole post here: https://wordpress.com/post/consistentprinciples.wordpress.com/700

March, April, and May blend together into a fog of sickening horror. Iguanas skitter fearlessly down the center of the main thoroughfares. My husband has conversations with people outside the windows who don’t exist. We are haunted always by the fear porn the media is blaring about the Dreaded Plague:

• My 2017 science-fiction book trilogy about a bacterium which escapes from a lab and destroys all petroleum and plastic, globally, was beginning to get some sales momentum on Amazon. Suddenly, all purchases and page reads just … stop. Fall off a cliff. Amazon messages me that the ads for the books “violate terms of service.”

• My husband, whose mother passed on in December, begins to act strangely: hostile and distant, forgetful and irrational.

• My friends on social media become hostile and insulting at any suggestion that the lockdowns are anything but beneficial. The blue-vs-red divide is stark. Just the name “Trump” triggers a thread of name-calling and misspelled verbal abuse from both camps. US cities are in flames from BLM riots, and comments about those are full of vitriol. I shut down my Facebook account indefinitely.

• My rheumatologist does a telehealth consult. She takes me off all the medications that have kept my disabling psoriatic arthritis at bay because they might lower my resistance to COVID-19; my gym is closed, and I can’t do the yoga classes that also were therapeutic for the disease. The police are stopping people in the street and telling them to go inside unless they are grocery shopping or going to the doctor. And the skin eruptions that developed from a reaction to a biological drug I tried in December keep coming back in worse and worse waves, until my arms, legs, and sometimes my face are covered in blistering hives.

• My daughter in Florida is pregnant with my first grandchild. I book a ticket to travel to Florida in August, a few weeks before she’s due. The airport remains closed through April and May; there’s no guarantee I will be able to fly to Florida to be with her when the baby’s born. It’s thousands of miles by land, and the border is supposedly closed for non-essential travel. But apparently there is no actual enforcement of this prohibition at the crossing. I begin to research making the trip by car. My husband announces he will not be coming along because he “hates being around screaming children.”

• My freelance medical editing gig turns into a grim parade of COVID-19 articles.

June 30, 2020:

The airport’s reopened!

My daughter in Florida develops life-threatening pre-eclampsia. She begs me to come to her. My husband still won’t go: he doesn’t want to be in the States because of the riots (nowhere near where I’ll be going). I beg him but he won’t come.

July 2, 2020:

I fly to the USA amongst other creepily-masked passengers. You can smell the fear at the airports, on the aircraft, at baggage claim…

I am staying at an old-school AirBnB. I have pivoted from my sci-fi and mystery writing and poetry, to writing erotic romance under a pen name, which is light and easy and fun and keeps me occupied. My daughter’s husband is depressed and paranoid, so I spend time at her home when it’s just her and me, avoiding him as much as I can get away with. She is hospitalized for blood-pressure control. She has multiple tests run. We’re afraid the baby will have to be delivered by C-section at 10 weeks premature.

Back home in Playa del Carmen, everything is opening up. My husband is day-drinking, attending cooking classes, going on catamaran rides, celebrating at birthday parties. I’m glad his mood is better, but also envious because I’m sitting alone in the AirBnB crocheting baby blankets and writing smut. He seems to mention one friend in particular, more and more often, an alcoholic ex-casino-cocktail-waitress with bleached blond hair and huge breast implants. I am naturally suspicious, but he reassures me.

August 13, 2020:

I wake up to a dream voice yelling in my face. I know my suspicions are correct. I log in to Facebook for the first time in 4 months, and there they are, knee-to-knee on the catamaran, tagged together at beach bars and restaurants, in front of all my supposed friends. And the “group” 3-day trip to an all-inclusive resort? It was just the two of them, sharing a room.

If you have experienced spousal infidelity, you know the insane emotional pain I was in over the following weeks and months. If you haven’t experienced it, you might be minimizing the transgression, making up all kinds of reasons I should have known, ways I could have prevented it, excuses for his behavior, and reasons that my reaction shows I am emotionally unstable. If you’re in this latter group, I say to you: fuck all the way off. Infidelity is abuse. Excusing it is victim-blaming. The end.

August 30, 2020: My beautiful, wonderful, sweet first grandchild is born healthy at 38 weeks’ gestation, a bright spot and a source of hope in a very dark time.

March 24, 2021: We’ve decided the best thing to do is to get away from the milieu where the affair took place and move to Florida to be near the new grandchild. We’ve sold our Mexican registered car, packed all our belongings and our rescued Cancún alleycat into a high-top van driven by a team of seasoned pros. They take us from the Yucatán peninsula to the border crossing at Nuevo Laredo in a grueling 36-hour marathon drive, then offload us into a U-Haul for the rest of the trip.

The less said about the ensuing repeated separations and “wreckonciliations,” the better.

January 12, 2022:

Our divorce is final.

My now-ex-husband crashes his new Harley Davidson on the highway. He escapes with road rash and a broken rib, but at the hospital he is diagnosed with kidney cancer. I agree to nurse him through the surgical recovery, which I do, and then drop him off at his shabby little trailer once he can take care of himself.

May 30, 2022

Which brings us to the present moment.

A ton of psychotherapy, meditation, EFT tapping, and self-help have enabled me to get to a state of hope. I’m mentally and emotionally happier than I’ve probably ever been in my entire life.

The experience of being locked down in a foreign country while my own compatriots turned against me and my body erupted in a violent reaction to a toxic drug was a protracted nightmare.

The experience of being betrayed by the one person I loved beyond time and reason and trusted with my whole being was shattering.

The experience of being silenced and shunned while the global mob was stampeded into doing an awful, immoral thing made every attempt I made to write and publish into a new source of darkness and anger within me.

All of that is now in the past: the nightmare, the shattering betrayal, the impotent anger.

Now it is sunshiny Summer in Florida. My grandchild is learning to walk and talk. I have a beautiful apartment to myself, my arthritis is under better control, and I’ve joined a wonderful church. Singing the hymns, I am finding my living voice.

Writing this blog, I am finding my writer’s voice again. I’m cross-posting on Substack.

I’m writing a new novel, tentatively titled The Savage Earth: Sea of Lies. I’m writing short stories and poetry again.

Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Silenced as a Writer When it Counted

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F Kennedy

As soon as authorities began locking down entire nation-states, closing borders, shutting down schools, and shuttering businesses, it was obvious to me that the cost in terms of human suffering would be immense. 

East woman peeking in the gap between the black ribbons with the inscription prohibiting

In the Wealthy World

Millions of small businesses (which employ half the US’s working people) would fail, hundreds of millions would be unemployed, stress-related illnesses like heart attacks, strokes, and cancers would skyrocket. 

In the Developing World

People whose parents grew up in dirt-floor shacks now live themselves in homes with indoor plumbing. It’s impossible to stress how much extreme poverty has dropped in poorer parts of the world over recent decades. But that reduction in grinding generational poverty was the result (however much leftists strain to deny it) of global free trade which brought employment, infrastructure investment, and stable currency inflows to those places. With the rich-world lockdowns grinding economic activity to a halt, only the most economically illiterate person would be unaware that the rug was being pulled out from under them just as they climbed into the middle class.

I Spoke Up

On Medium, I posted a thoroughly documented essay, with links to mainstream news and politics sites as well as academic medical research about stress illness (recall that when I’m noit a poet or fiction writer, I’m a biomedical copy editor), demonstrating the death and destruction that the lockdowns could be expected to cause. 

I also squawked about these effects on my social medium of choice.

In the meantime, my trilogy of post-apocalyptic novels which center around a rogue bacterium escaping from a lab and sweeping the planet, were selling only slightly better than first novels usually do. I decided to run an ad relating them to the current outbreak of a virus. 

I Was Silenced

Within 12 hours, Medium had pulled down my essay saying it was contrary to public health. Hunh. Funny, since I was blowing the whistle on a grave threat to public health resulting from an ill-thought-out public policy. I edited the article, toning down its conclusions, and reposted it. Within 12 hours, it had been pulled down again. It was only after 800 Yale epidemiologists, physicians, and public health experts signed a statement challenging the lockdowns, that Medium allowed the third posting of the essay, even more watered down, to remain.

At the same time, Amazon rejected an ad (which I’d revived after running it a year earlier without any difficulty) for Machine Sickness, the first book in the series. The headline for the ad read, “Exploding From a Lab” and the ad mentioned a GMO microbe. The ad was banned because, to quote Amazon’s e-mail, “It is Amazon’s policy to not advertise content in which our audiences may see a controversial topic, person, or event.” Needless to say, that’s a ridiculous deception. Anyone can go on Amazon and be served ads for thousands of books full of the most controversial, hate-soaked, diatribes, filled with transparent lies and misinformation.

I also noticed that none of the stand-alone posts I made on Facebook, objecting to the lockdowns and pointing out the lives that they would destroy and stunt, had any reactions or comments, meaning that they were not being served in people’s feeds. Then, I observed that Facebook would appear to time out every time I attempted to comment on any post pertaining to Covid-19 in any way.

Death to a Writer

For anyone, it’s upsetting to be told shut up, your opinion doesn’t matter. For people locked into their homes and unable to communicate in any other way, it’s even more stressful. But to a writer, it’s a taste of death. I have a gift to write. It gives meaning and purpose to my life, especially since I became disabled from my earlier profession. While millions of people became depressed due to the unwelcome changes resulting from lockdowns, the despondency and helplessness I felt was profound.

One of the Lucky Ones

I am not one of the hundreds of millions of people around the world who lost jobs and livelihoods, life savings and generational enterprises, marriages and homes, as a result of the lockdowns. I am, God willing, not one of the tens of millions who are dying and will die of stress-related illness or untreated conditions due to these lockdowns. I’m certainly not one of the billion or so people who will slide into extreme (less than $2 a day) poverty as a result of the global recession we are having. And make no mistake, we are having it. The only real question at this point is, how long will it last?

How Many More Like Me?

But I have to ask, how many others were muzzled as I was? The reaction was chillingly instantaneous. The “correct” viewpoint was passed down from on high with no dissent tolerated. Relevant to my experience, the only acceptable stance was “Lockdowns do save lives, and the virus did not come from the virology lab in Wuhan.” I am not the only one to observe that there is good evidence that lockdowns kill more people than they save, and certainly far from the first to regard the proximity of the Wuhan lab and the first outbreak as suspicious. (You’d have to be an idiot not to wonder about that!)

The mass use of the internet has been changing the world for about twenty years now. Ten years ago, it was a tool for mobilization of mass movements in color revolutions, occupiers, tea partiers, and ethnic Springs around the globe. The fact that an American could read what a reporter in Turkey was writing or see Tweets by the millions from Egypt made us aware of our common humanity in ways nothing ever had before. And the publication of videos like “Collateral Damage” or the Abu Ghraib torture photos by Wikileaks, and reporting on programs like “Operation PRISM” by the Intercept gave the world hope that the unspeakably corrupt abuses the powerful committed in silence could be prevented by speaking their truth.

But look what happened to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Exile and imprisonment. Then the authorities got wise. They called the heads of the social media and search engine companies to heel by subpoenas before Congress in which they were implicitly threatened with regulatory harassment. That was the stick. They they were awarded multibion-dollar database administration contracts and top-secret access to the intelligence infrastructure of the Empire. That was the carrot.

And now, the World Wide Web is no more. It’s no longer a web, but rather a managed cascade, in which government actors pour true and false information and rhetoric in the top, and it’s managed by a massive unseen army of search technicians and moderators, operating sluices and stopcocks to make sure that the information and ideas they want amplified flow freely and the ones they want suppressed languish in stagnant pools.

A Lot

What heartened me in my despair was that I had already begun to assemble a censorship-resistant information flow. I’ll write more on this later, but one of the biggest ways was by e-mail subscriptions to viewpoints I disagreed with as well as those I agreed with. I saw that what entered my e-mail inbox from the right and the left was very different from what I saw on curated and credentialed press sites. The people who reached out to me in response to comments I made, and in response to this blog, assured me that I am not alone in recognizing the obvious. It also made it plain that that recognition has almost no correlation with whether one likes Trump (I don’t) or hates him (I also don’t). What it does correlate with? That’s a topic for a later column.

My inboxes have been crowded with e-mails from people who’ve seen my words and reached out in support. E-mail newsletters and blog subscriptions reflecting diverse dissenting viewpoints keeps me grounded in the reality that the approved worldview is only one of many potentially valid ones. 

I’ve wandered far from my original point here, but I think it was a necessary preface to what I need to say.

Which is this:

The Cage Has Been Slammed Shut

In the internet environment of ten years ago, the harms of lockdowns could have been debated and recognized almost instantaneously. That this didn’t happen is a horrible, inexcusable mistake that our children will pay for. That this didn’t happen is totally down to the authoritarian measures taken by governments since. I’m referring to restrictions on internet expression, both legislative (hello, EU GDPR) or extralegal (we know you’re on the line, DNI, we can hear you breathing). 

These measures were adopted in the wake of the 9-11 attacks when Bush was in office, expanded under Obama, and now they continue in the time of Trump. Those three Presidents had little to do with the application of these dystopian instruments. And whoever is elected in November will have little say in their application as well. 

Similarly, those who believe they are completely spontaneous and self-motivated in protesting the death of one of thousands who have died due to police brutality, one of the millions of victims of violent racism around the planet, are not. The speed at which they spun from “stay at home” to “hit the streets” makes that obvious. The violent emotions resulting from confinement and loss are being released in a coordinated campaign of distraction.

Keep Your Head Clear and Your Principles Consistent

My science fiction series is premised on an event which leads to a great apocalyptic unraveling of all political power systems around the planet. Lacking such an event, the political power systems will continue. 

All I can do as a citizen of Planet Earth is observe them carefully and heed discussions of them by people I know are cogent and thoughtful, throwing out the chaff and keeping the grain. All I can do as a writer is maintain a set of consistent principles and respond to my observations according to those principles.

800 Yale Professors Agree

This lengthy letter signed by over 800 Yale professors, most of them qualified in Public Health, Medicine, and Epidemiology, has just been published:

Read it for yourself.

The Yale letter agrees with many of the points I made in my previous post, which Medium censored twice before (so far) allowing to remain posted. Specifically:

• Science needs to guide messaging to the public, and no government official should make misleading or unfounded statements, nor pressure others to do so.
• Policymakers should base decisions on social distancing measures and closures on the best available science. ​
• Mandatory quarantine, regional lockdowns, and travel bans have been used to address the risk of COVID-19 in the US and abroad. ​​But they are difficult to implement, can undermine public trust, have large societal costs and, importantly, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable segments in our communities. ​
• Voluntary self-isolation measures are more likely to induce cooperation and protect public trust than coercive measures, and are more likely to prevent attempts to avoid contact with the healthcare system.
• Where mandatory measures are used, steps must be taken to ensure that people are protected from job loss, economic hardship, and undue burden.​
• Individuals must be empowered to understand and act upon their rights.
• The effectiveness of regional lockdowns and travel bans depends on many variables, and also decreases in the later stages of an outbreak.

 

Also of major import, John Ioannidis, a world-renowned scientist, qualified in the Departments of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health, of Biomedical Data Science, and of Statistics at Stanford University, has published an urgent communique available here . It is offered in open access, pre-publication, because of the time-sensitive nature of its contents.

The paper’s abstract is brief and pithy:

“The evolving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic1 is certainly cause for concern. Proper communication and optimal decision-making is an ongoing challenge, as data evolve. The challenge is compounded, however, by exaggerated information. This can lead to inappropriate actions. It is important to differentiate promptly the true epidemic from an epidemic of false claims and potentially harmful actions.”

One particular item of his long list of bullet points is relevant to the censorship of my previous article:

• Of the multiple measures adopted, few have strong evidence, and many may have obvious harms

I’m nobody. Just a biomedical copy editor, science fiction author, and disabled chiropractor. But I can recognize when actions are not justified by the research available. Now, world-class Ivy-League epidemiologists and public-health experts with a bird’s-eye view are forcefully stating the same thing I observed from my mousehole.

Will you listen? Will you make your voice heard as a voice of restraint and reason? Or will you join the mass, lemming-like rush over the precipice?

Censorship: What’s a Non-Geek to Do?

By now, unless  you belong to the minority who are completely disconnected from social media, you’re aware that that there’s been a gradually accelerating program of centralization, control, and censorship operating on the biggest platforms over the past few years. If your views are other than mainstream, it’s been apparent since well before the last election. If you are a straight-edge exemplar of normality who roots politically for Team Red or Team Blue, the 2016 election might have been your wake-up call. If you’re intelligent and curious but apolitical, this week’s purge of Twitter and Facebook accounts might have been the first you heard of it.

What younger people may not know, and older people may forget, is that the dominant players in today’s information game are babies themselves. They can easily go the way of MySpace and AOL (both of which still exist, by the way).

The virtue of the internet is its decentralized, networked nature. As John Gilmore said, networks interpret censorship as damage and work around it. You have the ability to accelerate this process. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

1. Opening accounts on alternate social media sites like Minds, MeWe, and WhatsApp.
2. Subscribing to alternative-media sites and blogs by e-mail.
3. Writing and reading content on curated platforms like Quora, Medium, and LinkedIn.
4. Actively editing my commercial-site/phone newsfeeds to include lesser-known journalists (being sure to keep a tendril extended outside my filter bubble!).
5. Putting a limited amount of my modest financial resources into cryptocurrencies and actively seeking ways to spend and earn them.
6. Using Incognito mode or Tor browsing and VPNs when needed. While most people are not in a position to take this step, it helps that I’ve expatriated to another country so my traffic doesn’t automatically go through a US-based server.

Have some faith in the truth. It will prevail.