The SPIKE
You may have heard of recent attempts to change our collective historical records. If these attempts were in effort to expunge actual errors, to bring more truth to light, each and all of us would gladly cheer.
Far too often, as you know as well as anyone, those efforts are made to sell a social, political, financial, or other goal – not to add to the world’s knowledge.
A few weeks ago a guy I met on a sea journey asked me what I thought of the idea of collecting people’s pandemic stories before everyone’s mind was washed clean by the propaganda machines that work overtime and everywhere.
My response was, “Well, Jesus Christ, do it man.”
We need an antidote to the drivel we are fed by the established media. They are almost all on the same side, and strangely, that’s never my side. Nor yours.
Maybe I should explain myself a little: I have been thoroughly fortunate enough to live through the very best 75 years the the world, has ever seen.
And all of it is due to the documents that defined democracy throughout the world 250 years ago. There are on-going concerted attempts to both re-define the language of those documents, and to either change or cancel them completely. The same thing is happening right in front of us, only even more defined, by the tearing down of statues and the assault on neighborhoods that goes unpublicized. In the print end of it, it’s called getting the Spike. References an old spindle editors had on their desks in the early newspaper days.
The vast majority of the pandemic stories out there were going to be on the spike, whether by neglect or intent, if not collected and published quickly.
The public stories that have already resulted from this pandemic run the gamut from hilarious to stupid to horrific. There are certainly hundreds, maybe thousands, of such stories we haven’t heard. As time goes by, and the incessant banging of the chosen drums to convince us we didn’t see what we saw continues to crescendo, detail and precision will be lost.
Now was the time to get those stories.
And here they are. Interesting? Yeah. Enlightening? Well, sure. Even exciting. And cheap! At less than a penny a story, you’d be nuts not to check this out. Every next page is an adventure. And, as you will see, nothing is spiked.
Bob Gray
Somewhere in Texas
Oct, 2021