Fists Of Freedom
As corporate media continues fear-based campaigns, college football returns with huge crowds and joyful celebrations
(Photo Credit: Sports Illustrated)
Anyone whom has had the good fortune of attending a University of Iowa Hawkeyes football game in Iowa City knows about the Wave.
At the end of the first quarter of each home game, fans, players and coaches all turn away from the field and wave towards the school’s Children’s Hospital, adjacent to the stadium.
Started in 2017 when a fan suggested it on social media, the Iowa Wave has become one of college football’s most cherished traditions.
Saturday, it returned as the Hawkeyes hosted Indiana.
That same day, Sept. 4, about three hours northeast of Iowa City, in Madison, Wisconsin, the crowd at Camp Randall Stadium on the campus of the University of Wisconsin celebrated their own tradition.
Tens of thousands of fans hopping up and down to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” may not be as heartwarming as the Iowa Wave but it is still a chill-inducing scene to witness.
We saw these events unfold across the United States Labor Day weekend.
For die hard college football fans (I include myself in that category, being a Big 10 school graduate) having the games back is one of the reasons September is a favored month of the calendar year. But the spectacle of it all — the crowds, the pageantry, the sheer noise coming through our wide-screen, surround-sound flat screen televisions — makes it all matter that much more, especially when framed in the context of 2021.
The games and the celebratory aspects of them demonstrated our basic human need for association and assemblage. Saturday’s National Football Festivity also served up a symbolic middle finger to the Fauciites and corporate media doomsday peddlers who can’t stop proselytizing from the Covid Book Of Psychosis.
Tuesday morning, the Frankenstein of Fear went on CNN and said this about the weekend crowds:
I don’t think it’s smart. Outdoors is always better than indoors…even when you have such a congregate setting of people close together. First, you should be vaccinated. When you do have congregate settings, particularly indoors, you should be wearing a mask.
Later that day on CNN, another interview with a doctor yielded this nugget of wisdom:
I looked at those television images, nobody was wearing a mask at all…I’d be very surprised if we didn’t have outbreaks here and these gatherings, these football stadium events in the coming weeks.
The CNN anchor conducting the interview then directed her next question to a nurse who complained about feeling ‘alone in this fight,’ presumably in reference to an unachievable end game — eradicating Covid from the planet.
These comments are of the same nature and context we are hearing more and more of from national public health foot soldiers — emotion-driven anecdotes. No context, no science-driven arguments. Just selective amnesia when analyzing large crowds and Covid.
All summer long there’s been large outdoor events involving large crowds. Locally, in the Chicago area, no event brought more people together than Lollapalooza.
Almost half a million (this author being one of them) gathered in downtown’s Grant Park for four days of music in late July. Fear-mongering corporate media hucksters squealed about its dangers and irresponsibility.
The headline of an article published in the Chicago Tribune on July 22nd said this:
“Lollapalooza Feels Like A Covid Mistake Waiting to Happen”
Feels like. The Feelings Media Tour rolls along this late summer into fall as the football season arrives.
On the same CNN segment Tuesday, the interviewee, Dr. William Schaffner based out of Nashville, puts on a cloth mask at one point while answering a question.
Is covering his face during a live interview supposed to make him feel better? I can’t think of any other reason to support that action. The data certainly doesn’t support it.
And the data proves that warnings about the safety of musical festivals like Lollapalooza were baseless, and quite frankly, deceptively misleading.
The public health epitaph on Lollapalooza from early August courtesy of Chicago Department of Public Health Director Dr. Allison Arwady, via NBC Chicago:
We’re not seeing any connection related to Lollapalooza. We’ve not had new data suggesting it was a super-spreader. We’ve not seen any change in terms of the demographics (of COVID-impacted patients) here in Chicago. We see no connection between that event, or any of the other large events that we’ve had.”
The ‘no connection’ reference by Dr. Arwady has been the case all summer, here in the Midwest and throughout the country. A music festival in Washington state, with 25,000 in attendance, was linked to 210 cases. An article from a Colorado newspaper about a series of festivals in that state tied eight cases to one two-day event and five to the July MLB All-Star game.
Yet note the headline in the article referring to the festivals:
“Another Outdoor Concert Declared a COVID Outbreak”
Technically, the article is correct. Colorado, like most states (Illinois included) define an “outbreak” at gatherings as ‘requiring at least five confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19 in a fourteen-day period.’
But where the credibility gap lies is between the public health definition and the perception of what ‘outbreak’ means to the public at large.
In September 2020, when Operation Warp Speed was in production, the vaccine rollout confined only to wishful predictions, an outbreak of Covid infections within the wrong age group could be hazardous. Referring to “outbreaks” and implying their danger to vulnerable population groups was appropriate.
But a year later, the vaccination rate amongst the population 75 and over at 85% (over 88% for those 65-74 years of age), there should be an about-face with our panicked messaging and response to Covid-related outbreaks.
There is no reason to label a handful of cases as Damnation Days. Instead, give the news a shrug of the shoulders and say a prayer in hopes that Aunt Merle, the one older member of the family holding out on getting the jab, didn’t attend the Dave Matthews concert at Alpine Valley that night.
If she did, the hangover might be worse than the virus anyway.
But corporate media, and the Fauciites, led by the Lab Coat Tyrant himself, refuse to accept where we are in August of 2021 — sick of masking, sick mandates.
They can’t quit Covid.
They won’t acknowledge natural immunity or that they were wrong about the efficacy of the vaccine. It works in preventing serious illness but not in stopping the virus’s spread. But that news doesn’t make for good talk show teasers. Who wants to hear from public health representatives at college campuses about the rise in Covid cases despite vaccine mandates?
Consider this — we had substantially more Covid cases this Labor Day weekend than we did a year ago.
But those facts make for dull embrace debate topics. In their place, we gin up terror speak about death tolls and hospitalization rates.
What recent studies are showing is how we are reaching a phase of Covid — vaccine dosage combined with natural immunity — that has earned its labeling as just another virus we have to learn to co-exist with.
But because the No Covid Cultists are relentlessly devoted to misery and will continue to bend the knee to their respective monarchal Mask Kings, the optics of football games on Fridays (high school) Saturdays (college) and beginning this weekend, Sundays (NFL), matter more than ever.
Because everyone in those packed stadiums analyzed the risks associated with being there and decided — on their own — to go.
And they will all be just fine and happier because they experienced the Iowa Wave and heard “Enter Sandman” with 60,000 new friends.
So while we still can this fall, shun the killjoys and Prophets of Doom.
Gather in large quantities, be joyful and prosper.
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