Reading the work of a fellow blogger, one of the several WordPress top thinkers, and after enjoying his thoughts I read the comments. In one such the writer made some very good points but interjected the thought that she avoided touching on politics and covid. My silent response was, “yeah, you’d like to think so.”

Politics is ever present, a necessary component of any organized society and as such cannot be avoided any more than a humpback whale can avoid contact with salt. Everything in life is touched by politics down to the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. I would challenge anyone to name a single aspect of human life on this planet that is completely divorced from politics. Its pervasiveness leaves us with only two options, proactive participation or acquiescence.

Acquiescence has us existing in a world totally controlled by others while proactive participation offers at least a chance that we might have some influence on the quality of our lives. When the schoolyard bully starts pushing you around you can either stand there and take the blows or you can fight back and who knows, maybe even win the day.

As for Covid-19, you couldn’t ask for a better example of politics without rebuttal. From its inception as a manufactured virus in a biological warfare lab in the heart of an enemy homeland until this day it has been politicized and weaponized by several factions, foreign and domestic. This virus has been used to influence elections, control populations and create wealth and, having been introduced into an animal population, will now be impossible to eradicate.

Apart from the political there is no logical continuum of control methods in dealing with the virus. Everything being done has its contradictions and counter-contradictions. For the longest time vaccines were the holy grail. Vaccines are still being touted as the cure of choice, vastly preferable to treatment, even though they must now be followed with an undetermined number of booster shots. Has no one realized that the primary difference between treatment and vaccines is that the treatments are mostly done with drugs that are in public domain while the vaccines are all patent protected?

Pfizer earned 32 billion in profits before the trend toward treatment began. Treatment threatens future profits by limiting the number of people who will opt for the vaccine over being treated, should they contract the disease, with a drug that has been proven over many years. Solution, revisit those who have already consented to getting the jab and convince that they all need booster shots. Voila, another 32 billion to be shared with lobbyists and well connected politicians.

The up side is that America seems to be waking up to the politics that have been driving the pandemic, an awareness aided by the optics of a government releasing hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and Afghan refugees into the country, many carrying the disease, while wringing its collective hands over the deadliness of the disease.

Following the last presidential election I had a conversation with a friend, a high school science teacher, in which I stated my belief that we needed to return civics to the classroom, with age appropriate material, at every grade level. His first response was, “but civics is so boring, it would be impossible to keep their attention.”

The alternative to teaching how politics actually works and how it affects our day to day lives is to continue being governed by the results of having an uninformed electorate. As you watch the current stagflation grow daily, the spiraling energy costs, food shortages, surges in illegal border crossings and having criminal cartels now in de facto control of both sides of our Southern border and then factor in the new mask mandates and the number of jobs being lost because people are reluctant to have substances injected into their bodies that have not been time tested, ask yourself how avoiding the boring subject of politics is really working out for you, and for your nation.

And if you still opt to stay out of the fray at least send up a word of thanks for those who are in the battle on your behalf. And pray they can win without your help.