There is no Joy in Schadenfreude

“They’re calling it a Great Reset!” The first of my letters to silent friends.

Dear Em,

We have known each other for decades. First at work where you taught maths, and then as friends where we had coffee with the others each week. I recall you weren’t sure if the coffee meet up was your thing at all. I originally shared that sentiment; a weekly commitment might cramp one’s style. But years later, we were still all turning up, hating to miss it and valuing the deepening friendships.

We shared the joys of good news and the pain of bad news and found a myriad of ways to support one another. We attended Pee’s birthday and then her wedding. We heard the crazy stories of those working part time in schools. We advised someone about a dilemma, we rolled our eyes at someone’s silliness. We welcomed the occasional one-off participant, often it was Cee who would invariably get a huge piece of cake. He always made us laugh. Now he was retired, he was so much fun to be with without all the stresses of work. We would sometimes treat ourselves to a cake or a scone. We complained about the strength of the coffee, or raved about its deliciousness, we lamented the lack of healthy alternatives to cake. In short, we loved it.

Every week.

My favourite memories are of all the reminiscences about old times. I enjoyed finding out about the other sides to stories of our work-a-day lives and fleshing out the finer details of memories. We found out all kinds of hidden secrets, and I always enjoyed the stores of the old days, the times before I joined the college. I was able to put the record straight about some matters. That felt good, to upend misunderstandings and to cement the friendships I envisaged lasting a lifetime.

We were loyal to that little independent coffee shop, for week after week. And we did not know it then but the visits to that little shop were not to last as time rolled on and “covid” came. I wonder what became of those good people whose business was thrown to the wolves. I wonder if you care.

Probably not.

Still, you have your pension, so what did you care that these young people who had put everything into their business had lost everything. Furlough, you utter. Don’t make me laugh. People on publicly funded pensions (and big pay-outs) don’t know about furlough. But always you remain oblivious to the real world of commerce, business, its strains, uncertainties and fluctuations. It’s all background noise to you. Other people’s problems. Things, goods and services are just there for you. And, you know best. Boy, would I come to learn how much “you knew best” in the year of 2020.

Not a good year for vision as it happens.

Remember, how it was just “three weeks to flatten the curve?” And here we are, two and a half years later, unbelievable destruction all around, our town once renowned for its shopping, decimated. Businesses closed. Such a struggle. A ghost town. Not to mention the thousands of vax injured, deaths, disintegrating health services. Depression and families torn apart.

Now, looking back to old times is my current guilty pleasure. I cannot engage with the present media outputs, whatever they are, the news propagandises, everything else pushes an agenda I can hardly bear. And so I prefer to watch images of the past in a state of timeless tension. TV shows of yesteryear, watched again, and again, like playing a favourite record, only much more melancholic.

In the coffee circle, none of us were friends because we shared the same political views. We sometimes disagreed. We were friends because fate had thrown us together, and at times there were clashes. The first significant fissure was Brexit. In fairness, there was a fairly even split in the group between the two positions. Some of us spoke openly, confident that we had every right to say what we thought.  And so what if others thought differently? We were friends weren’t we? Others kept quiet fearing the consequences of, well, what exactly?

I know now.

This time it got nasty and passions flared. You and I were on the opposite sides of that one. I was the target you went for. It was ugly. I felt bullied and chose not to turn up some weeks. To this day I could not grasp how people (you) did not understand the sovereignty issue and that little matter we call “democracy.” Naively, I felt that public servants should be accountable. They should be able to look their constituents in the eye and know that their decisions will affect those voters. And risk getting the boot if it all goes wrong. I hated being ruled over by those I had not and could not have voted for. That all seemed to be swept aside and I remain astonished to this day that someone who pounded the streets for a political party named “liberal” and “democrat” could have misunderstood this most fundamental of concepts. It did not augur well for what was to come later on down the line.

When “covid” came.

In fact, if I had only realised it then, it was a real predictor. The prospect of the WEF one world government makes EU colonising seem like small fry indeed. But to you, it was the all-important start wasn’t it? Now I realise that you wanted the coming slide to a totalising, technocratic, systems led evil. And the lessons we never really learn are to always follow the money and that the crowd can be mobilised behind a good cause. Even if it isn’t true. To you the cause is some modernised phantom of “Mother Earth” that you want to “save” from the marauding masses.

Human beings.

A brittle truce was called. I had, years earlier, lent you Jonathan Haidt’s book on The Righteous Mind. You never read it and you have not returned it to this day. That to me typifies a leftist tendency, you assume that no one should own anything (except, paradoxically, you), therefore you assume what actually belongs to me is yours to keep. It’s now been over a decade and you could easily have afforded your own copy.

But you did not want to read it, and so you did not want to pay for it. And, after all, why pay when you had my copy. I imagine it sitting somewhere out of sight, gathering dust, getting foxed. Maybe you chucked it in the bin. If you had read it, you would have learned about the necessity of understanding different political viewpoints and how enriching it is for individuals and society at large to be exposed to different political thoughts. Diversity? But that’s a pain in the backside when you always know best. And you do, don’t you?

Know best, that is.

And the big battle cry was always about the environment. Sigh. Like a stuck record. So pained the expression, so earnest the lament. But that idea morphed into a new thing called global warming and then climate change. You never say which climate. You never say that the climate has always changed.  And for all the talk, the environment could get stuffed really, couldn’t it? All that oil needed for the turbines, all that destruction of beautiful landscapes, all those birds shattered to smithereens, all that fossil fuel used to power the wretched things and the sheer lack of power output in return all coalesce to make a mockery of all that facial gurning you do.

It's not about the environment.

This is because the pesky facts have a tendency to interrupt the narrative and will not fall into line. That old chestnut about reality. It always bubbles through eventually. Of course, your deep concern over the environment never extended to the humungous surgical splashguard mountain, in the many millions, that Britain alone sent to landfill. Every day. That is a big giveaway you know; did you realise that? Probably not.

It's not about health.

Never did your great theories account for those less fortunate than yourself. Now really, that was a thing. You, of all ironies, are the person who jet sets around the world more than anyone I know. And as you held forth at the coffee shop, we all sat in front of you as ones who hardly ever went much further than our nation’s capital, or the Lake District. Little Ess, with hardly a ha’penny to her name, would sit quietly as you whinnied on the same old clopping hobby horse of yours.

Even to this day. It has occurred to me that your trilling about how wrong things are, and how we must all change our ways, was really a self-hating strategy. That you knew you were utterly guilt ridden and in that rather masculine way of yours, you just projected it outwards.

It’s funny to think now that one of the key triggers for me no longer “believing” in the climate narrative was your face and your words as you did that stupid little nervous laugh you do, when you turned to me, mid speech, and said with just a hint of embarrassment, “you probably don’t believe this is true, ha ha….” Before continuing with whatever blather you were chuffing out. The stupid thing is, I kind of did believe or I thought there was something in it….but realised in that instant that you knew it wasn’t true, or you would not have said what you said in the way that you said it. There was too much of an apologetic whiff about it. A psychologist would have had a field day.

And now I know it’s not true. Or at least, I know the story is not what we’re being told it is. (Can I just mention, “global greening” here? Thought so). And now I know what your game is. Another hook for the New World Order to hang its vision.

You simply refuse to learn about the world through real observation and experience. And you’ll never accept that other people learn through experience. You know best. To this day, I don’t know how you managed to be a senior maths teacher. Data. It can be made to say whatever you want. I honestly don’t think you’d know a mathematical proof if you fell over it. Well, I guess you would, but if it’s convenient to do so you’ll deny it. I watched you do it. You gave the game away when you defended Neil Ferguson, who we all know now was employed precisely because of his ability to produce alarmist inaccurate data to order.

Ferguson makes those hooks upon which they can hang the narrative. How could you possibly have taken that wretched Imperial College modelling seriously? I know you understood it. And I didn’t know it then but I know now that you were pretending to skew it in a particular direction. “What about the false negatives?” you whined. You said nothing about the false positives which resulted in catastrophic destruction in all manner of ways for some people (but not, of course, you).

I was astonished that you could not see the cruelty of what was happening and that you clearly did not care. You criticised the Great Barrington Agreement with not a shred of evidence, you just “knew” they were wrong. You sat stony faced in that fateful zoom session. The last one I could bear to attend. The one where I explained about the real possibility that millions would starve as Professor Sunetra Gupta had envisaged would happen because of “lockdown” and the West closing off trading. It was a real tumbleweed moment. You also cut me dead when I told of my own mysterious “coronavirus” experiences in 2019. “Oh, we know that,” you said, irritated, the signal for me to stop talking. Zoom sessions. They just don’t allow for organic human interaction, do they? Anyway, we often re-told our stories. Women are like that. Jay was allowed to retell her fears for her son’s covid difficulties. We all knew that story didn’t we? But that suited the narrative. So Jay was allowed to repeat her story.

You simply would not engage with anything that disrupted the covidian narrative. Why, I kept asking myself, why? Why isn’t Em concerned for the weak, the vulnerable, the poor of the world, those without her double fronted detached house with its gardens, those with small businesses they’d built from scratch. Why doesn’t she care that big corporations are creaming it in, why doesn’t she care that fundamental freedoms won over centuries are being torn down on such a flimsy pretext? Why is she on the side of the baddies in all of this?

I’ve had time to wonder, what are the limits in terms of what you would do (or were told by your masters to do) to “save the planet” or bring about a Great Reset or, that hideous phrase, Build Back Better? Would you ascertain that what they wanted was really necessary? Would you want some kind of mathematical proof? If your masters told you that you must do whatever it is, like the Milgram experiment (“Please continue!”) my bet is that you would. Because these are the types of things that you “just know.”

Safe and effective. It’s only a jab, it’s only a mask, it’s only a test, it’s only a QR code, it’s only a passport.

I now know the whole thing was a lie. I’m guessing with some surety that you also must have known it. You lied and pushed the covidian cult narrative because it was what you wanted. You even talked enthusiastically about the great reset, trying to rally others to the cause. Ooh yes, let’s go to the promised land at last! The funny thing is that when you tried to use Klaus’s language, it did not flow naturally from your tongue. It sounded wrong, clumsy and self-conscious. I’m still trying to work out if it was stupidity or malevolence.

How could you have been so cruel? How could you tell such thumping lies. How could you be so insulting and cowardly as to be on the side of the goosestepping lock steppers. It is hilarious to think that you imagine yourself as being at Schwab’s top table as this debacle finalises itself. You really think you’ll be there don’t you? Sipping wine and eating luxuriously with the elites whilst we’re all eating insects to save the planet, yet powering up our phones, scrabbling for QR codes to access the necessities of life. Notwithstanding the fact that every internet search harms the holy planet! Or perhaps we’ll be forced to be chipped like an animal with a social credit score. Whatever, there will not be a mathematical proof in sight. And you won’t be at that top table. Believe me. On that one:

Computer says no.

Only the tragic thing is, you’re all getting covid now because you took the injection. If not you, then those close to you. And that’s not to mention the ailments that sound very like vax injuries to me. I read the group messages. And I do feel sad about all of them. I wish there were joy in Schadenfreude. All punning aside, there really isn’t any joy in Schadenfreude. You continue to give me the silent treatment and you’ll press for more resets, more pain, higher fuel bills, economic destruction, more suffering. You’ll support the lies and put on your splashguard. You’ll never engage, never debate, never put real proofs on the table, just join with the corrupted to press and bully people into submission. And, most tiresome of all, I bet you blame me and the sceptics, the pesky unvaxxed, the ones who seek out truth, for all the ills.

Yet we are the control group your masters do not want. We’re not getting sick.

You are.

You’ll do what you’ve done all along I suppose. By force of will you’ll try to make things true that are not true. And how long will you be able to you keep that up? My guess is, for too long. But not as long as you think you can.

One day I hope you’ll ask yourself, what am I actually getting out of this narrative? And when you realise what has actually unfolded, and reality hits you as it must do, will you join with those of us grieving for our old lives, and the imperfect world we used to know? Will you put your energies into truth, nature, reality and humanity? Will you fight for justice, for health and democratic values? Only you know how likely that is.

Perhaps one day in the future, those of us who survive this terrible time will meet once again at the designated time and place – the old coffee shop in our town. And we’ll order a coffee, or tea, maybe a piece of cake, and talk about the old days.

And despite everything, all the pain and illness, all the unnecessary suffering, I hope that on that day, when I look around to see who’s turned up, that it won’t just be me.

Pictures by The Sideways Thinker.

[My thanks to James Kullander who kindly shared his own very moving letters to a vaccinated friend with me. Those pieces, which I highly recommend to my readers, were published originally on the Lew Rockwell site. They helped to crystalise a vague idea I’d had about writing to friends who refuse to engage with things I have shared in good faith, and who persist in responding with what I call the “silent treatment.”]

All names in this piece are anonymised.