The Hopeless Disgrace of The Dr. Osters

How many years has it been that the constant cry for unity has taken tones of desperation and even menace? Heard on all sides, it always strikes me with the most import from socialists. Their opponents, when they take it up, do so essentially in defensive formation. Political assemblies of most sorts are against their nature, for they normally have their lives arranged more productively and do not look to others for their authority to do so.

It’s the socialists who are naturally inclined, when not driven, to their benefits of mass. Those benefits consist mainly in power for the political “organizers” (not “herders” or anything like that) and the sick hope that somehow sustains the souls of the politically organized, in lieu of just about everything else in life. This congregation has rung with cries of unity from Tammany to TV, on every half-plausible pretext for generations, of course. I would contend that I saw the pace and intensity of the drive accelerate indiscreetly in my lifetime.

It may be only my sensibility, but two years of this Democrat politburo and their put-on, Biden, have given me the biles & winds every time I hear the word, “unity,” any variation, or even an implication or insinuation. Recent strains of “national divorce” heard in some quarters can leave me bored and irritable for their thin Balkan eagerness, but when when the commies start that song of their polyp-people, I reach for my contempt.

In the annals of unity-hopery, it’s hard to cite a more hopelessly pathetic note than the one published by Emily Oster (PhD) from her safe space at The Atlantic.

The word, “we” wafts through the piece with far more aroma than its (ample) frequency. The effect is imaginable as some tunic-testy schoolmarm idly racking the slide on her rifle, with occasional eye on the baby’s cradle next to her desk. You know; for the care. What brings this to my mind is the sheer attitude that goes beyond assumption, past presumption, and right through audacity. It’s out to the limits of reason, which must make a reasonable person wonder what’s next.

It’s not that Dr. Oster would command an army or even a street-blocking protest over anything at all. She’s an economist, you see, and the data are as unlikely as a sky-blue elephant to drive her to that. That’s not her place in the world, which is: to calculate the probabilities and externalities of everybody else’s existence and then guide the truly, scientifically, organized through the chaos. That specially busybody aspiration has a very notable record for its results in human death and misery.

It’s not, of course, as if Dr. Oster is interested in that. All that interests her is “amnesty” for all the “complicated choices” during the entire Covid pall on togetherness.

“We need to forgive one another,” she heaves.

“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

This woman must think that she’s talking to a 1957 Cub Scout den that got in a fight when someone mis-counted the marbles, or something a lot like that. A person in that situation could afford the authority of using that royal “we” without having to explain it to the children. It becomes a mystery with nearly sinister undertones when this person is talking about the scope and scale of militant destruction put upon America in the past three years.

Let’s note how Dr. Oster confesses that the ones who were in the dark are the ones who said and did what they did. They commanded people’s lives into virtual cages with orders against doing the business to sustain them. They ordered administration of ostensible medicines (“vaccines”) to as many people as they possibly could, under the plain extortion of threatening all other aspects of life — jobs, educations, transport services, medical services, for instance — as penalty for refusal. Honest medical analyses of these drugs are now revealing effects catastrophic to and horribly conclusive of human lives around the world. They smashed the souls and intellects of an entire generation of children, including all imaginable and unimaginable implications ranging from toddlers to adolescents and beyond, with scientifically laughable nonsense applied to schools: the very sorts of schools that once taught me enough to know how plainly psychotic the whole thing was

Dr. Oster: “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

That is, indeed, “the thing”. It’s the very thing that the commissars and research-fetishist should have been thinking, before they might have had to say it out-loud, after they’d done what they did, but if only they hadn’t done it.

It’s the thing that countless Americans were shouting as hard as they could into the gas-blast from “experts” and “authorities” who never stopped telling them how stupid and evil they were. They were viciously betrayed by the insidious promise of “public square” opportunity for “voice” in social media and then “canceled” (a word of marvelous facility, now) for dissent, with monstrous digital precision, by faceless corporations selling “community”.

And now, these people — this heathen caste — are professorially instructed that “dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop”.

There’s a phrase fit to Balkanize, for you.

By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — “The Gulag Archipelago”, vol. I, “Preface”, p. X)

At the lowest, most basic, level of principle, this caste of dissent is called upon to dismiss and dispose of the experienced reality which is the the material of morality itself. The harm that they’ve suffered, and the outrage of having it at the hands of obvious incompetents and malevolents, has shown them more than enough about how to live as human beings instead of despised subjects. Wholesale demolition of society is what they’ve seen and lived on every quarter, and that’s what they’re being told to forgive and forget, on the now plainly hollowed pretext of “the good of society”. This goes beyond contradiction and hypocrisy to psychological assault, with the added insult that it comes from a self-preened “unapologetically data-driven” economist. Nobody who has had to hear — remotely — of a dear loved one’s death because their presence was forbidden by “data-driven authority” should have to think about something like this for one stolen heartbeat before dismissing it with contempt or hatred or whatever the current research says about the completely sensible and righteous human response.

People who are morals-driven, even at their most charitable, are simply not now disposed to stand for this.

How well or whether the Dr. Osters of America might conceive an understanding of that fact, and why it exists as a fact, would tell a lot about whether the almost maniacal demand for “unity” is as flatly cynical as it seems. There can be nothing like that between people who think that the agonies of the past three years are to be understood and condemned, and people who cannot and will not see that demand as a matter of moral principles: applied studies in how to live, versus how let it all go to massive deathly mayhem.