I have to be honest – a piece of me died when I read that the city of Cluj-Napoca is going back into lockdown (🇷🇴) at the stroke of midnight, tonight.

All non-essential businesses will be closed, including bars, cafes, and restaurants. All schools are closed as well – online only.

And wearing a mask while walking down the street will be mandatory.

Insanity.

Wrong Way on a One-way Track

Eight months into this dystopian sci-fi film that we call “reality,” the countries of the world have divided themselves into two distinct categories: those that think STOPPING THE VIRUS is the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, and those with different priorities.

Romania, of course, is on Team Virus #1 FOREVAH. Other countries, such as Sweden and China, have moved on to more important things.

Oddly enough, the countries that aren’t currently flipping their wig and still going crazy monkey bananas over THE VIRUS are the ones where fewer people are getting sick. And fewer people are dying.

Gee, if something called science existed, we might be able to learn from that.

🤔

Life’s Mystery Seems So Faded

I’ve lost count of how many TV shows and films that I’ve watched that portray how a pandemic is supposed to go down, including patently fictional threats like “zombie viruses.”

Some pandemics wiped out 99% of humanity while others were less deadly.

Nonetheless, whether trying to hew towards authenticity or not, every single example that I found followed this formula:

• Patient Zero (i.e. the first person to get infected) is known/identified.
• Someone has to struggle to get the news about the pandemic out to the public.
• The government downplays the threat.
• The government’s #1 priority is quelling panic.
• It’s the public at large, not the government, who first come to grips with the truly horrible nature of the pandemic.

In other words, exactly like how every single real pandemic in history has gone down.

Okay, except for the Patient Zero stuff, which is part of modern epidemiology.

Otherwise, everything from the Black Plague of the 1300s to the charmingly racist “Asiatic” flu of 1889 followed the same script.

Hell, during the “Spanish” Flu pandemic, the American President Woodrow Wilson never mentioned it once.

At least six hundred and seventy-five thousand dead in the United States. And not a single word.

Just Drowning in the Rain

Which makes it even weirder that the script was completely flipped in 2020:

• We still have no idea who Patient Zero is.
• Reuters published an article about Covid-19 on December 31, 2019, because China had already reported it. The MSM has been flooding the news about the virus ever since.
• Governments (and the WHO) have continually amplified the threat.
• Panic, uncertainty, and stress are intentionally generated daily.
• The public at large is still not convinced that the pandemic is truly horrible at all.

Very odd, indeed.

I Can Go Where No One Else Can Go

Obviously, when I moved to Tiraspol in 2019 (in the Before Times), I had no idea that a shit storm was coming.

This is Tiraspol in 1990. And absolutely NOTHING has changed since then 😉😉😉 pic.twitter.com/4yX7MLZQsy

— 🇷🇴 Sam Cel Roman (@lifeinromania) October 21, 2020

But thanks to good luck or Divine Providence, my family pretty much couldn’t have found a better port to shelter in.

I won’t say too much, but we’re all doing pretty good here. Certainly a lot better than those poor folks in Cluj.

If you’ve never been to the city, then you might not realize that it’s built entirely around a large university student population.

And all the things that serve those students, including bars, cafes, and restaurants. I believe that, in the Before Times, there were more than 500 of them.

And now they’re all closed. Again.

All I can say is, “I’m sorry.”

<p value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">Meanwhile, I'm hanging onto my sanity here by the river.Meanwhile, I’m hanging onto my sanity here by the river.

BE STRONG!