Musings of a COVID19 Skeptic-Part 2, by Shoshanna Silcove

"Facts don't care about your feelings," Ben Shapiro, American conservative political commentator, public speaker, media executive, and author.

"The brain rules the heart," a Chassidic adage from The Tanya

    My mother's passing made me into an outsider from the age of five. I was the only girl in the entire Forest Road Elementary School who lost their mother. This gave me instantaneous playground fame. Everyone seemed to be staring at me, the adults with sad sympathetic looks and, the children with a combination of confusion and fear. Maybe it could happen to their mothers too? They whispered behind my back. I was that girl whose mother died. Her passing made me used to being able to walk a different path to those around me.

    Nevertheless, being an outsider did not mean that I would not become a victim of mind control. At one time or another we all fall victim to mind control. It's is all around us and,  takes on  various methods and forms. It can be ordinary advertising that uses repetition and emotional manipulation to motivate us to buy things, or it can be indoctrination by schools and religious institutions. 

    I went to Stonybrook University to get an education. I wound up getting an indoctrination into left wing ideologies. There simply were no alternative views presented, so like most students, I assimilated the usual left wing  'isims' of academia. It would not occur to me that I fell victim to mind control until I became religious through Lubavitch.

    Learning Torah true Judaism caused me to challenge every aspect of my life as well as all the secular orthodoxies I had been inculcated with. It was then I realised just how much mind control I had been subjected to all my life and vowed to never allow that to happen to me again. I would remain a questioner. This suited my new religious lifestyle just fine because Torah encourages questioning and is in fact largely based on discussion, critical thinking, and debate.

   However, while Torah encourages critical thinking, the culture of an Orthodox Jewish community sometimes does not. This often encourages conformity. It is to me a strange and inexplicable paradox that there is sometimes a gap between Torah learning, which emphasizes discussion and debate,  and the culture of Orthodox communities, which can tend to value social conformity.

    Which brings us to our current situation regarding the COVID19 phenomena. It did not take long for me to start asking the right questions.  Factual questions. While many around me were gripped by emotion, I lost sleep thinking and thinking, trying to figure it all out. Too much of what the government and the media was telling us just did not add up. While almost everyone around me in my community blindly accepted the mainstream narrative, I could not help but notice the inconsistencies and discrepancies.
    Was I scared? Who wouldn't be scared? The media was doing its level best to scare the wits out of everyone. Many in the local community here in Melbourne became totally preoccupied with the reports of  what seemed to be a horror show going on in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Many of the people here were connected to people in New York who either became infected or  passed away. They were grieving and traumatised,  so much so that often when I  aired my questioning of  the  narrative I would get the same reply, 'Do you know what is happening in Crown Heights?"  This line was supposed to prove to me that this was the most horrible pandemic since the bubonic plague, and that what was happening in Crown Heights was an apocalypse. The reports from Crown Heights was all the proof  one needed, and if I questioned that,  then I was being a cold callous person who cared nothing for human life. I kept hearing that same line over and over again by many different people in our community. It was bizarre how almost everyone was in the same panicked hysterical state of mind.  
    I realised that when a person is panicked their cognitive abilities can literally turn off, they cannot think rationally, everything becomes an emotional reaction. Of course,  I reminded myself that the facts don't care about my feelings, and I kept repeating the Chassidic adage of 'the mind rules the heart".  While others could hardly discuss issues rationally, while people retreated more and more into their homes, into their shells, cowering in terror, I kept researching and probing.  It did not take long for me to actually discover the inaccuracies we were being told. These inaccuracies are so blatant and the only reason they were so easily accepted is because of the mass hysteria. 

to be continued, in part 3.....