Headlines: “Panic Pride” Replaces Self Respect in America!”
The word “hysteria” originates from the Greek word ‘hystera’ for uterus. The Greeks believed the uterus moved through a woman’s body with a variety of symptoms including, anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, insomnia, irritability, nervousness, as well as sexually “forward” behavior. Does that sound like anyone you know? I’m biting my tongue so hard …..!
Merriam-Webster defines hysteria as:
- a psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability and disturbances of the psychogenic, sensory, vasomotor, and visceral functions;
- behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess. // political hysteria.”
Wikipedia defines hysteria as “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement; especially among a group of people, i.e. the mass hysteria that characterizes [Americans when they’re afraid to get sick] …the week before Christmas.”
Roya Rastegar, in “Where Have All Our Leaders Gone?” 7 April 2020 used the term in this context “The partisan approach to sharing information [about the flue] is resulting in confusion, hysteria, and death.” Maybe the death he means is the couple who died after drinking their fishtank water because it had “chloroquine” in it. If it were possible it would be interesting to statistically isolate those who overdosed on Over-The-Counter drugs and self-inflicted their vulnerability to the flu from listening to the media-manufactured hysteria. Add them to the 80% of fatalities who were eighty years old, smoked, never exercised and ate like pigs and I bet the risk to healthy Americans would be less than the statistically average flu season we’re seeing now.
America’s version of the Roman Senate bribing the Roman Legions (the adulterated ones before the Fall) – I mean, the United States military- began when the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before the House and Senate Armed Services Committee that they were failing to meet their recruitment quotas because the general population of recruitment age adults could not qualify for military service – physically, morally or legally. Well! We can’t have that! So Congress in its’ infinite wisdom allowed the Department of Defense (particularly the Army) to grant “moral and physical” waivers. That’s government talk for “reducing the standards for admission”. That’s when basic training instructors were no longer expected to train soldiers up to a performance standard. In the military version of “social promotions” basic training soldiers went to Advanced Individual Training (AIT) to learn their Military Occupational Speciality (MOS) and, like civilian academia, no one fails that. During this time “stress cards” were issued to recruits who felt they just needed a “time out” from that mean, nasty drill sergeant. The drill sergeant meanwhile was required to conduct “sensing sessions” with recruits to ensure they weren’t going to crack up. I’m guessing this was in vogue before Snowflakes invented safe places if they encountered anyone that expressed a different opinion in their presence (or in texts, Facebook, etc). Congress, being the savvy politicians they are, figured they would “take care” of the veteran at the other end of his career as well– regardless of how short it was by putting political pressure on V.A. medical doctors to grant disability ratings from an ingrown toe nail, being fat and snoring (sleep apnea), to a blanket disability for “PTSD” – a term coined by anti-Vietnam, Berkeley professors. Veterans who exaggerate their disabilities are more guilty of Stolen Valor than the non-hacking posers.
I was not raised to talk about – much less brag about- my medical issues to anyone much less strangers I meet in public. But that is the de rigueur topic of conversation today. Since veteran disability claims have been taken out of the hands of qualified medical doctors and de facto mandated by politicians, veteran disability claims for PTSD have mushroomed like a nuclear cloud. And 90% of them are pure bullshit. That’s why the VA was so badly backlogged a few years ago – fraudulent claims by pampered, self-pitying -I hate to use the term – veterans. There are a few honorable risk takers who don’t stoop this low. I know a few of them. They are the ones who “run to the sound of gunfire”. But they are in the minority from where I see it.
So, as American civilians (who couldn’t qualify for military service in the first place) have copied the military’s “safe places” it only makes sense that every American subjected to the politically-inspired, media-manufactured flu hysteria should qualify for PTSD. The BS coefficient is even pretty close between the (projected) COVID-19 infection rate and the artificial military PTSD claims.
It’s only fair that American civilians share in the pork barrel spoil being handed out by Congress to veterans. What else could you expect the snowflakes and lemmings scurrying around self-righteously demanding non-mask wearers why they aren’t wearing a mask to do ( in a perverse sense of Panic Pride)? Get off welfare and go back to work?
“We Love Hysteria!”
That would be “letting a good crisis go to waste”.
