The game of make believe

Children should play games of make believe, but they should also be allowed to do things that matter. The latter is where our society fails them and us. Not allowing a child to do things that matter is like telling them that they are good for nothing and doing so every day of their life. After destroying our own children we attract immigrants to do the jobs for us. It only works for a generation or so because the next generation is likely to be destroyed. So, then we take more immigrants and the cycle continues...and, yes, we hate them and our reliance on them. We hate them because they do what we cannot. Because they are stronger and better than us -- for a short while.

The people who are best at playing the game of make believe often end up in charge. Some are our politicians. Since games are similar throughout the world, the political class is like a group of related white men. They are the ones selected for their ability at make believe and so they are all similar. They sometimes appear trustworthy, but they almost never are. They are like actors only their looks matter less than their ability at game playing.

This game was most obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our politicians took strong action to show that they were doing something. It was is the kind of action taken by weak people because action without thought of consequences destabilizes an already frail society. They first applied the zero-COVID-19 policity: a game where they aggresively isolated the few detected cases of a virus that spreads like a cold, knowing that there were more cases out there that they could not find or isolate. They put patients without symptoms that caried the potentially deadly virus in hospitals and in old people's homes. Then because even they figured out the virus has spread, they closed hospitals, they closed schools, they closed all institutions, and even stopped people from walking on the street unless they knew the hours at which we went out. As expected the virus could not tell the time. Some of the measures hastened the spread, some slowed it down, but only temporarily. The results are surprisingly similar throughout the world: the excess death for 2020 is about 0.2% of each country's population for most countries -- with some exceptions that include Sweden who had less draconic measures. Now we have a vaccine, but the virus has always been a moving target. It mutates like most cold and flu viruses. So, we are told we should live with the virus, which was obvious from the beginning given the rate at which it spread. We could have never isolated all COVID positive cases unless action was taken when they were very few, i.e., long before it got to Europe and the US. I will take the third vaccine soon. I want to do everything I can to protect myself and my family, but while the vaccination program works, I feel the rest of the response is and has been woefully inadequate and has blissfully taken us to untested territory.

So what do people want from life today? To do as little as possible and to continue playing the game while spending as much time as possible on our mobile devices. The latter seems to have harmful effects, but we are all so addicted that we no longer notice. We prentend to care about the environment. Yet we cut the grass every two weeks to keep it neat and tidy. Cities even fine those who forget the grass cutting. We cut trees that have lived for hundreds of years. In the name of the environment, we, sometimes, replace a few of them with baby trees. We have concrete everywhere and then complain about the lack of biodiversity and the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In our game of make believe we take obviously inadequate action: we ban straws, we recycle through very energy inefficient processes, and we complain a lot about the weather. The latter is done to such an extent that it almost seems like doing something.

We'd like to have a future but only as long as we do as little as possible for it. We forget that every time we choose to do nothing we choose death over life. The only beings that do nothing are dead ones. So, it's not surprising that when we do that over and over again we approach an end. We are ill, we are depressed, we are overweight, and we can't easily get out of the cycle because all our lives we were told we are good for nothing. We write articles and tell ourselves that children who work are abused. Of course, child labour -- the backbreaking, toxic kind -- is wrong. But some resposibility for keeping the house clean, for feeding the animals in and near the house, resposibility for one's sibilings, for the elderly in our homes and in the neighborhood, for planting and watering plants, for painting one's room and even the house later on, for fixing things that break around the house, and for building some things that work and help those around us, etc is good. This responsibility used to be there in previous generations. It's gone today for most and it's replaced by screen time because both the adults and the school system are dysfunctional.

We choose our living conditions so that there is as little as possible to do. We should want to do as much as possible while we are young and can do it. Now instead of having teens that change the world for the better, we have teens that need to live in assisted living because they don't know how to change a light bulb. Yet migrants are the evil ones. When they cross the sea in plastic boats beacause of the damage done to their countries and to the environment and because our politicians like the game of not noticing the boat or their needs, we either emprisson or send them back because they are evil. They are our problem. And when we can't blame the migrants, we blame minorities since they are evil, too.