Extraordinary circumstances can show people's true mettle, on a psychological level. Can I listen to views I disagree with without going insane? Can I accept data the contradicts what I know or should I just hunker down in one end of the spectrum and blindly reject the other point of view?
Can I isolate myself from the mass hysteria and stay calm or do I take a leap of faith with dramatic shouts and join the masses, because it is so warm and fuzzy there.
Over the past two months, I have seen several studies (some more scientific than others) on the post-coronavirus future. Each has its own prediction of Utopias and distopias, each one in its own unique way.
Total surveillance, they say, or chips that would monitor our biological indicators and relay them to the government, or that a world of ecological democracy and sustainability will emerge, in which air travel will be eliminated, and Zoom vacations will be the new thing. What unites all these texts is the gray part, the part in the middle.
On Saturday I rode to the park and had to go through Rosa Luxemburg Platz in the city center, kind of like Habima square. For several weeks now there have been demonstrations in that square, and the crowds have grown with each passing week. The police officers disperse them, only to have them re-emerge several minutes later, as a collective body, at a different venue. They are protesting the limits placed on personal liberties, which you cannot be against in principle.
They are protesting against the mandatory vaccinations, which they believe will come to effect on May 15. They are against Bill Gates, whom they say is behind this scheme and has supposedly paid the World Health Organization to implement it.
His goal, they claim, is to shrink the world's population by two thirds in order to create an ideal world. They think that the mandatory vaccinations will kill a lot of people, because of the natural selection, and that is what he wants.
Those who survive will somehow get a chip installed in their brains, under the pretext of a vaccination. And then the chip will relay the government information on your thoughts, feelings and activities. The government will be known as the World Government and it wants to control the world, using COVID-19 as its launchpad.
When a television crew asks one of the protesters who is behind the World Government, he is at first reluctant to answer. "You know who," he says. The reporter retorts, "No, we don't, who is it?" And then the protester responds in a whisper: "The Jews." After he blurts that word (which is forbidden in Germany) and no lightning strikes him, he continues, but this time in a loud voice: "The Jews, the Jews, the Jews!"
In Germany, all the good people and people who think they are good, are very much troubled by the incredible number of conspiracy theorists, who emerge from the cocoons and pin the blame on the Jews. These psychos and delusional people are scaremongers, those good people are telling their followers on social media and anywhere else.
The good people upload pictures of themselves with masks, call the police when they see people in the playgrounds, and want the lockdown easing to stop. They are publicly calling for the infringing of civil liberties and the imposition of a total lockdown and want Germany's health minister to set a mandatory vaccination scheme because otherwise millions, including themselves, will die from coronavirus by September.
Now all that we have is either the good people or the delusional people, I think to myself. In between, there is the silent majority that could have said something had people been listening to it.
