I received your wedding invitation in my mailbox the other day. I hurried inside and tore it open, eager to read the news. I pulled out the invitation card, the RSVP card, and the small, stamped envelope in which to mail my reply back to you. I was touched that you’d invited me. In spite of our different ideas about what’s going on in the world regarding COVID-19 and the so-called vaccines, I was suddenly looking forward to celebrating your big day with you and all our friends—and to finally meet the lucky man! To lay down our gauntlets of our disagreements and raise a glass to our long friendship. What a lovely way to usher in the New Year, I thought.
But then I pulled out fourth thing, a card that read:
PLEASE NOTE
For everyone’s comfort and safety, especially the most vulnerable among us, we are asking those who are not vaccinated to decline the invitation.
We deeply appreciate your understanding in light of the current situation.
I put all the papers on the kitchen countertop and gazed out a window at the first few flakes of snow from an approaching storm. My heart sank. I suppose I should have expected this from you. I know where you stand in this horrible mire. You’d gotten the double jab long ago. You may recall from my previous letter how shocked I was when you told me that. And disappointed. In the some 30 years that we’ve been friends, I’d always thought you had way more smarts than to be so easily fooled by this insidious, deadly shell game. I was also very angry. It was the last time we’d talked.
You felt obligated to send me the invitation, I’m quite sure. You didn’t want to leave me out. But you did leave me out, my friend. You know where I stand, too. I have not, nor will I ever, get the toxic jab. Fine, I thought as I put all those papers back into the envelope and put them all aside. If you’re still buying into this massive ruse, then I actually do not want to go to your wedding. This is not sour grapes. This is me standing my ground.
I could easily continue to be angry. And disappointed. But I’ve decided to have a change of heart and I am including this letter with my reply declining my attendance to let you know. You see, I had no choice in the matter to avoid sinking ever deeper into a pit of my own rage and despair. I’ve been concerned about my health. Chronic anger can make you more likely to get heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and mental problems like depression. I felt a kind of desperation to do something. Then I woke up one recent morning, after yet another sleepless night, with a new idea.
Here’s what I want to say to you now: I don’t want to harbor any grudge against any friend who doesn’t believe as I believe about all of this. What came to mind that morning is what Jesus taught us in his final words as he was dying on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” To me, these words rose from within like a summons—both in the moment and for all time—for every one of us to rise above ourselves to become our highest self. And by that I mean giving up our need to be in control and our need to be right. In other words, to love unconditionally.
As you know, I’ve had “anger issues” for a long time. And it’s safe to say that nothing has made me more angry than the colossal lies about COVID-19 and about the jabs being spewed by governments around the world and by the bootlicking media, and the people who are believing the lies. For the past two years I’ve been a festering cauldron of anger, most of it barely contained. I knew I needed to do something to change myself, but I didn’t know how. Then I read Viktor E. Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
From the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, where he was imprisoned during WWII, Frankl, writing is book, came to this conclusion: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” He also realized this: “When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as an inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves.”
I’d seen these two quotes here and there so many times through the years that I thought I read Man’s Search for Meaningyears ago. But I hadn’t. I decided to get it and read it in one sitting. I have no idea why I’d waited so long other than to say that the renowned book’s message is what I needed to know now more than ever. Of himself and his fellow inmates, Frankl writes: “What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
Frankl’s wisdom is rooted in the unique and terrible suffering he and the millions of other inmates endured in the Nazi camps, and they all struggled against greater odds than I will ever face. But his is a wisdom that’s blossomed into a kind of North Star upon which everyone one us can gaze and seek guidance throughout the ages—and throughout our lives. What I believe life expects from me regarding all my friends—jabbed or not—is kindness and understanding, a task I’d been able to realize in far less divisive times than these. This is the approach I’ve decided to take. Or rather renew. I cannot change this situation, for now. I certainly cannot ever change you. But I can choose my own attitude and I can change myself. The choice is always ours to make. Take the high road or the low road. Which one is actualized, Frankl observed, depends not on conditions but on decisions.
Resting in the calm waters deep in my soul, I’ve come to realize that out of a kind of gullibility, you trusted the sweet-talking despots wreaking havoc in the world to have your well-being in mind. I’d tried to warn you but you did not heed my alarm. That’s what I’ve been angry about with you more than anything. Now, I can see that there was absolutely nothing I could have done to take you by the hand and steer you away from being so easily led astray by the hope that these injections and mandates and lockdowns will help protect you and others from spreading the virus, and somehow return our lives to some kind of normalcy. Almost like a guileless child, you have strayed into the hands of demons cleverly disguised as benevolent parents. I am forgiving you, as well as all my other friends who’ve accepted the lies and the jabs, because you have all fallen under the spell of their sorcery; you truly don’t know what you have done, what you are doing. Grasping this—embodying this—is my cross to bear.
A prophet of old warned that God’s children are destroyed by a lack of knowledge. And so it goes, here and now. So I will say this: If you knew what was really going on, you’d understand that vaccinated people can spread the virus just as intensely as unvaccinated people, like me, who you’ve asked to “decline the invitation.” If you knew what was really going on, you’d ask the “vulnerable” people you’ve invited to stay home. If you knew what was really going on, you would understand that the jabs were designed to mitigate the symptoms in people who become infected, nothing more. They do not stop transmission. Never have, never will. Even the World Health Organization admits this. If you knew what was really going on, you would understand that even if you got the jabs, you can still catch COVID and you can still give it to others. If you knew what was really going on, you’d realize that these injections are destroying one’s own innate immune system, which some are beginning to say is one of the reasons why it is mostly the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated, who are getting sick and filling up hospitals.
Furthermore, if you knew what was really going on, you’d see that the creation of a divided populace separating the vaccinated from the unvaccinated to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, so stealthily built and so firmly put in place—in a large part because of your ongoing complicity—is entirely constructed on the foundations of a false premise. It is not even a house of cards. It is an illusion of a house of cards. Reach out to touch it and there’s nothing in front of you but a deceptive, hypnotic play of shadow and light.
Most of all, if you knew what was really going on, you’d see that the orchestrated mayhem was never about a real pandemic. This so-called pandemic was fabricated to force us to get the vaccine, to force us to get a vaccine “passport,” to force us to get a social credit score that will rank us on our behavior (which is ubiquitous in Communist China), and then to force us to use a universal digital currency that will be controlled by the government so that the government can deny anyone of us food, water, medicine, housing, travel…you name it, unless we fully obey by their rules. That is, to turn us all into digital slaves of a transnational plutocracy, a modern version of the godless world that the ancient prophet warned his people about in an effort to spare them from the false security of idolatry and burnt offerings.
Despite the unprecedented human calamity hurtling on and on before our eyes like a runaway train, I’ve often looked around these past few months to take in glimpses of the enchanting realm of the changing seasons—autumn leaves against clear blue skies, and now the pale winter light and falling snow, all of it oblivious to our plight. As I wonder what will become of us, I preserve in my heart the memory of our long friendship and those chilly days in years past that we’d spent together strolling in Central Park, all bundled up against the cold, but spilling out our souls to one another as I am spilling out my soul to you now.
If I could wave a magic wand and turn back the clock before this whole fraud began, I surely would. If I could help you see the light—in person, face-to-face—I surely would. But you won’t even let me near you. You still probably don’t believe a word of what I’ve written here about the lies and deception, and maybe never will. Which is why I don’t want to be angry any more, beating my head against the brick wall of your stubborn naivety. So be it.
Looking back, I can’t figure out exactly when millions of people like me across the free world, trying to expose the truth and demanding self-determination for us all—the two cornerstones of a healthy, happy, meaningful life throughout the ages—began to sound like fingernails on a blackboard to a lot of people, like you. But I do know that whenever it did happen the chances of our mere survival as a sovereign species took a catastrophic turn. And if it continues to go on in the same direction much longer, all is lost.
Yet, I hold onto a slim but sturdy strand of hope—hope, that’s another thing Frankl wrote about being crucial to one’s survival no matter the situation—that everything about this will turn out a lot better than what I see happening. I don’t want to be right. I hope that I am wrong. I so very much want to be wrong.
