I’ve been in Brooklyn this week, and Manhattan.
My update is that the city and its boroughs have been damaged in a thousand tiny ways that I newly noticed — as if the population has been attacked by an enemy so clever that it arranged for each minuscule attack to go unnoticed, though the cumulative damage would be devastating:
Autistic Reactions are Being Normalized.
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I’ve written in my essay “Are Lipid Nanoparticles Subtly Changing Human Beings?’ about the fact that mRNA vaccines are designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and that thus they can cause, as Dr Chris Flowers of the WarRoom/DailyClout Pfizer Documents Research Analysts puts it, brain damage; as well as causing neurological damage. This damage can be florid — there are many reports of utterly changed personalities, of people suddenly raging, of accidents caused by road rage, and of loved ones who can no longer moderate their personalities or responses.
German neurobiologist Dr Michael Nehls, in his important book The Indoctrinated Brain: How To Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on your Mental Freedom, explains that the damage to the brain from mRNA vaccines, “lockdowns”, isolation and propaganda, can be physical as well as psychological.
I noticed that all around me, in heavily vaccinated Brooklyn, many people seem now to have lost the ability to “tune in,” in a subtle way socially, to others. Many people seem to have lost the instinct for the rhythmic dance of conversation and even for mutually responsive body language. Thus, many normal-looking, healthy-looking people with whom I crossed paths in Brooklyn and New York, seem now to be slightly “on the spectrum”, in far greater numbers than I had experienced before 2020.
We know that this change in the brain post-2020 can be negative. Many of us are aware that vaccinated or “lockdown-y” and “mask-y” people can erupt startlingly in rage, or say awful things to their friends and loved ones, and thus reveal in a dark way that their prefrontal cortices are not modulating their impulses normally.
But what I experienced this past week was that many people seem now to have lost modulation — in a positive direction as well.
Here is what I mean: there were two beautiful blue-sky days, after endless wet overcast days of polluted or whited-out skies.
The temperatures suddenly rose, humidity was low, the sun actually shone, red and purple tulips and yellow forsythia bloomed, and narcissi, planted in scruffy dirt squares cultivated around the urban trees, lifted their white-and-orange faces. Magnolias languorously exposed suede-glove-like white-pink blossoms; cherry trees erupted in clouds of rose-colored confetti.
Of course, we went to Prospect Park, which looked, blessed with Spring and sunlight, like a 19th century European colorized postcard. There were the perfectly symmetrical paths, the noble bronze statues of now-forgotten figures, and the turtles sunning themselves on the exposed rocks of the elegant lagoons.
It was magical, and people of all kinds crowded in, children and dogs in tow, to enjoy the delight of it all.
Then I noticed the weirdness. Random people kept coming up to me — our dogs were the initial reason for the connection — and just launching into cheery monologues.
It was fun at first. I heard about this one’s dog’s rescue, and what the dog now ate, and how much the dog liked to sleep, and how other dogs related to her. Then I heard about that one’s scholarship to a prestigious economics school, and the startups he had funded, and the fact that he had decided that relationships were too much trouble so he had gotten his dog (details have been changed to protect identities). There were many bulldogs named Lola. There were many cockapoos named Max.
It was nice at first to have perfect strangers be so chatty and informative. But by conversation markers at ten minutes, then at fifteen, then at twenty, I noticed that the usual dance of human discourse was broken. It was happy monologue after happy monologue — no questions, no curiosity, no externally-oriented interlocution at all; not even that self-conscious, belated, “But enough about me. How long have you been in the neighborhood?”
There was little self-awareness, it seemed, that another person was even present.
Could this be due to social media? All these people were younger than I; maybe that’s how younger people make friends now, I wondered? Broadcasting entirely in the “I”, trained to do so by one’s posting on socials? Or could this be due to long isolation?
Or was this odd verbal pattern — possibly a manifestation of something physical?
Whatever the cause, I noticed this emotional obtuseness with the parenting going on around me, as well. I’ve noticed earlier that parents post-2020 don’t seem to have that intuitive sense of their kids’ being in physical danger; that they allow their kids to race anxiously to catch up with them in crowded, dangerous settings, and let the kids wander off to climb over dangerous structures.
By the same token, I noticed this week in Brooklyn that parents in their 30s and 40s seem to have lost all sense of being tuned in to their kids’ nutritional needs. I was aware that the bodega where I get my coffee in the morning is thronged with lower-income kids buying Doritos and grape soda for breakfast, and I thought that that was just due to the tastes and budgets of kids. I myself as a child would sneakily consume a handheld pie and a chocolate milk, rather than my mom’s hippie paper-bag packed lunch — with its strange cheese-chunk sandwiches made of thick whole-grain bread — whenever I was rashly given a quarter.
But now, it’s not just the kids. Parents at the bodega urge their kids to get Hershey’s bars or potato chips for breakfast. And this trend is widespread. I saw this exact same lack of interest in the kids’ nutrition among many of the affluent Brooklyn parents: wealthy parents urging their small kids to choose cake pops or chocolate donuts for breakfast. It seems as if the truisms of parenting and nutrition in my generation, which included training in delayed gratification — “You can have dessert after you finish your dinner” or even the stern dictum, “Just one treat a day” — have gone right out of the window.
These parents acted as if they could not wait to get the kids onto their sugary treats, and then they themselves got fixated on their phones. The kids ate their donuts and gazed off into middle distance, and the parents stared at the screens.
No chat, no sustained conversation, no verbal play, no silliness, no making of faces.
It’s not just nutrition that is being neglected by moms and dads now. It’s all interaction.
I saw lots of affluent younger moms pull a plastic covering, like a clear Zip-Lock bag designed for baby humans, right over the toddlers in their strollers — rain or shine — and, as if the moms have closed up a business venue for the day, they’ll then wedge their phones against the push-bars of the stroller and walk the stroller, with their eyes glued to the screens. No peeking, no peek-a-boo, no excited high-pitched commentary about passing doggies and trees and birds.
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Silence.
All of these are the kids then whose faces are blank when they meet the eyes of strangers.
So a set of autistic-type reactions, and an overall blunting of emotional affect and nuance, are being inscribed by these interactions, into the next, otherwise perfectly healthy, generation.
Is this lack of concern by the parents for the kids’ nutrition — and even mood, because heaven knows there will be a sugar crash in their near futures — and language skills, and ability to connect, and affect – now cultural?
Or is this complete detachment in parents, from the nutritional and emotional as well as the physical wellbeing of their children — be perhaps partly now physical?
If you had wanted to ruin a great city, the center of a great civilization — change human interactions just a little bit; so that no one cares that much, or can tune in that well, to anyone else; and especially, so that no one really cares to tune in to the next generation of that fragile civilization.
