It’s from "On Living in an Atomic Age, 1948", by CS Lewis:
“How are we to live in an atomic age?”
I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anaesthetics; but we have that still.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
They're most certainly playing the psy-ops on us, I suggest we heed that lady quoted earlier, who tells them all to jump in the lake, no matter what sort of mandating or fearmongering is the flavour today.
I'm thinking if that lady, from a time when people still had functioning spines, has the courage to do that - and I've seen it already with her in RL - then what on earth are we all being scaredy-cats for?
Legal non-cooperation at a minimum, I'd say. Sod off, the lot of 'em.
Yes, they should all sod off. And whenever the opportunity presents itself, to laugh at and ridicule them.
ReplyDeleteThe hierarchy of stupidity ranges from moron, through imbecile to idiot.
The majority of those who are paid to govern on our behalf; in both houses of parliament and in the civil service; are morons, guided like sheep by the few with a brain. Several of them are imbeciles and a few are idiots.
My hanging question is how on earth do any of these people get selected and how do they get elected?