Maybe this post should be better renamed "thrown under the bus". We are confronted with the cult of compliance, prominently categorized under 'death cults' by me. As long as I remember we have a yearly flu season, cause for alertness to various degrees among virologists, GP's and epidemiologists. We have the voluntary flu jabs for people with diminished immune responses like elderly people. Myself and most people experience only mild symptoms or refer to it as "catching a cold". There is usually not much of a debate and nobody bats an eye. In rare cases the flu can develop into a real dangerous illness. Combined with underlying diseases like heart failure, cancers, overweight etc. the flu can mean the end for some people, very sad on personal level but a natural course of events.
Not so much this year. This year it feels like someone pulled a switch and throughout the entire media landscape, from daily news, governmental declarations, via talk shows, spreading into the veins of social media, we were swept by a storm of reports about this unknown contagious and deadly illness. The Covid19 pandemic started in China and jumped over to the other continents as we saw. We find ourselves just a few months later and according to immunological studies, the overall death rate as a result of Covid19 appears in the range of a strong seasonal flu. A huge percentage of all patients develop moderate symptoms at the most or hardly notice anything apart from a cough now and than. However these new death cultists aggressively dismiss the scientific data and rely fully on the alternative narration provided by specific institutions, pharmaceutical companies, newspapers, politicians, celebrities, all echoed by the daily TV news. This alternative reality is firmly driven by the notion of "persons tested positive". As a aside there is also the question of flaws in the mortality statistics, because fatalities died 'from' and died 'with' Covid19 are freely mixed, but apart from these errors it gets even more sinister if we acknowledge that the whole Corona story is based on a test that is no test at all.
You probably think, did Roos Gartner lost her mind... what has all this to do with the June video? To answer these skeptics I would like to draw attention to the aspect of initiation. Typically the initiate is mentally shifted over a trajectory assisted by ritualistic behavior, starting at A and ending at B. You need to buy toilet paper before the supply chain breaks, stay home, wash your hands, follow the arrows, keep 6ft distance, wear a mask, all these different experiences rewire the brain to cement the desired new position B. You get initiated into the alternative state of being during a certain stretch of time. First the trauma A, the lockdown with emotional loss of human contact, confrontation with death and disease symbolized by hospitals and graveyards. Than there is the route, where you need to learn the new behaviors and learn to see your fellow man as potentially infectious. You need to train and internalize the new attitude to get rewarded when certain limitations are lifted. Finally there is the end goal, the release into the new normal B, when everybody is vaccinated. That's how I started to think about the bus ride or rather how we collectively travel to a new unknown destination if only we comply to the ritual.
Impossible for me not to think of Under the Volcano, the impressive novel by Malcolm Lowry. Director John Huston turned the book into a noteworthy film. There is this unforgettable bus ride that brings together drama, bravery, oppression and complicity. I saw the scene after I read the book in 1984 when the film came into rotation. I can't help to see it now as a pathological analysis of today's society, as the slick anchor sentence reads: "we are all in this together!".