Coronavirus has shown that everything is dumb — across the board

The coronavirus — regardless of what its true depth and scope turn out to be — is not exactly bringing a fractured culture together.

The opportunity for domination by the paranoid style simply can't be denied at this point after a Trump era constantly filled with vast conspiracy theories, knee-jerk character assassination, and Olympic-levels of virtue signaling. We are full Spinal Tap now. Ours goes up to 11.

That, to put it in layman's terms, means things are impossibly dumb across the board. The people you loathed before. Dumber. The people you respected before. Dumber. The people you never even considered before. Dumber. It's the other virus.

Healthy teenagers are being told they can't play hoops at the park after 8 p.m. around the country, but their elderly grandparents most vulnerable to COVID-19 can go vote in droves in the Florida primary. Americans are being asked to self-exile, but the southern border remains open for drug cartels and human traffickers.

Soon it will be allergy season, when millions of Americans will have a runny nose, sinus/respiratory discomfort, and a dull cough. What's stopping them from storming the health care system, convinced that this year it's not the mulberry bush in the backyard but Captain Trips?

We aren't just eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil now. We are devouring it, with everyone doing what seems right in their own eyes. While we were already emotionally, psychologically, and morally blind as a culture for decades. Sounds like a plan.

For example, I will simply not be lectured to about proper societal safety protocols by those long drunk on the creeds of atheism, socialism, abortion, and transgenderism. What on earth do they have to teach any of us about duty, community, and science? They've been abusing those very things in the name of their cherished iconoclasm for my entire adult life. Not only do they never let a crisis go to waste, but they perpetually manufacture them or blow them out of proportion in order to achieve their nefarious ends. Hard pass on complicity in that. We can't come together now because progressivism has been our brain on drugs. It has rotted our collective soul. To hell with it once and for all.

To hell with the out-sourcing of our national sovereignty and open borders as well. A virology study found the outbreaks in Washington and New York states were primarily introduced from contacts from China and Iran. Most of the world's antibiotics come from China, too, as do the vast majority of our manufactured goods that used to be made here at home. This has left us, the most prosperous and enlightened country in the world, uniquely vulnerable to a virus that originates from a place 7,575 miles away from our nation's capital. If progressivism has rotted our collective soul, turning China into our landlords has warped our brains.

I will also not be lectured to by the "conservative" Twitter brat pack that is constantly winking and nodding at one another that their Gnostic brand of right-leaning politics is somehow more coherent, because its strawmen come in different packaging. One took to Twitter early this week to proudly screech, "Every single person saying the economic cost is too great to contain this pandemic would be silent on that front of this virus targeted the young and healthy instead of the elderly and vulnerable. We all know it."

The "you just want old people to die" trope in response to asking questions every informed citizen should be asking, and deserves answers to, is already an oldie but goody. Of course, it could also be that actual grown-ups must and are expected to weigh and measure multiple variables at the same time when serving the highest good — rather than reactionary demagoguery. Fear and faux virtue won't make a dent tackling such hefty distinctions which adulting requires, but that horse has obviously left the barn.

Despite all our avarice and enlightenment, this is a culture in deep existential peril. We are off our moorings, and sustained mainly by our superior military might and little else. Many incapable or unwilling to critically think. Many wolves within, many sheep without.

Revival or bust.