In an email to me, artist Jordan Henderson offers an oddly positive way to look at the unfolding COVID-19(84) tyranny of 2020:
“Think of how much a French Revolution historian would give to go live through those events. I know it sounds perverse, but I feel privileged to live through a period of worldwide tyranny and fraud. It is every bit as fascinating as if I were given the opportunity to go live through the French Revolution or World War I.
“We don’t have to just read about the psychological manipulation of mankind, we get to watch it and feel it, and have the satisfaction of interacting with it by directly opposing it. Of course, perhaps, we will end up in COVID camps for being dangerous non-compliant people or in some other way the victims of state oppression.
“Already, so many have been pushed into poverty, or from poverty to destitution. I cannot even begin to imagine the mental anguish and desperation that has driven others to suicide. But such horrid specters, and brutal realities, don’t change the undeniably, intellectually stimulating quality of this situation. Any guilt I feel, for my fascination with the oppression of mankind, I can assuage through my active opposition to it.”
Leave it to an artist to see the beauty in the bleak. For a glimpse of Henderson’s active opposition, check out his oil on canvas, Sanity, Her Son, and the Credulous.