A condition best termed “mental whiplash” is approaching epidemic proportions in the United States. It is called this because of its similarity to the condition that occurs when a driving accident violently shakes the heads of its victims.
The numbers of the infected vary among age groups: few if any among grade and middle school children, and many among older adults who spend considerable time watching or listening to the news. Experts say the following events are among the causes of the epidemic:
One cause is Biden’s handling of the Covid vaccine. When Trump first announced “Operation Warp Speed,” Democrats said he was grandstanding. They said no vaccine had ever been created in less than five years (some said ten), so there was no way he could get one developed sooner. Somehow he proved them wrong. Not just one vaccine but three met his timetable. I said to myself, “Here at last is an achievement they can’t ignore or explain away. They have to give him credit for it.”
I was mistaken. The Democrats evidently hated Trump so much that they found a way to deny him credit—by assigning credit to the man who had been hiding in the basement all the while the operation was being planned and carried out—Joe Biden. It took a lot of effort for the media to give that lie traction, but they somehow managed to do so.
Flash forward to the last couple of months. A significant number of people continue to resist taking the vaccine for a variety of reasons, and an even greater number of people are refusing to allow their children to take it. Many Democrats are outraged by this resistance and blame Trump and his followers for undermining the health of the nation! It was at this point that I felt a pain in my head I later realized was Mental Whiplash.
Why the pain? Because Trump was responsible for the development of the vaccine! He also got the vaccine himself and encouraged all adults to get it. So how could he possibly be its greatest champion, yet at the same time its leading opponent? (For those who are saying, “Wait a minute. Trump did advise against young children getting the vaccine, so didn’t that harm the nation’s health?” The simple answer is that he was speaking about children, not adults. What’s more, a number of medical authorities were making the same point he was making. In fact, whole countries, notably England, have the same view.)
The truth is, there are a number of explanations of why many people are refusing to take the vaccine, none of them related to the former President. For example, 1) They are cautious because vaccines in general contain harmful ingredients such as aluminum and formaldehyde. 2) They know that the CDC has confirmed that vaccines in some cases can cause serious side effects. 3) They are concerned that despite the government’s campaign for Covid vaccines, the FDA withheld approval for them until very recently. (The first and, as of now, only approval has been for Pfizer’s and that came August 23 2021.) . 4) They have difficulty understanding why the media and the Biden administration have railed against therapeutics that have been supported by many physicians, notably hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. (The development of the latter made American scientist William Campbell co-recipient of a Nobel Prize). 5) Finally, they regard state and federal government mandates and punitive actions concerning the Covid vaccine as infringements of their constitutional rights.
(Is it possible that people who refuse to get the vaccine are making a dangerous, potentially life-threatening mistake? Of course. Is it reasonable for others to point out the potential dangers of the vaccine? Of course. Do others, in particular elected officials, have the right to use intimidation, force, and/or punishment to make people obey? Definitely not.)
A quick recap: We are supposed to credit Biden with Trump’s achievement and then blame Trump for problems that occurred during Biden’s watch and have little or no connection to Trump. And that is absurd. Nor is that the only example of views that cause normal people mental whiplash.
Another cause of Mental Whiplash is the facts concerning the long-porous U.S. southern border. Illegal immigrants had violated American law and created social problems and financial burdens for decades before Trump’s presidency. Obama/Biden did nothing to change the situation during their eight years in office; if anything, they made it worse. Then came Trump with a plan to solve the problem—build a wall to stop illegal entry and improve the legal entry process. Even as he was making unparalleled progress toward both goals, Democrats and the media accused him of racism and xenophobia by putting people in cages, separating children from parents, and other immoral behavior. (Never mind that the “cages” had been created and used by Obama/Biden.)
When Biden took office, he announced that he would correct the “terrible problems” Trump had allegedly caused at the border. He then began taking down the wall and restricting border enforcement. As a result, the number of illegals crossing the border surged dramatically. Instead of restoring the policy that had reduced their number, however, Biden ordered that more structures be built to house them. Illegals were then crammed in, causing worse sanitation conditions and exposure to disease—including Covid—than had existed under Trump or, for that matter, under Obama/Biden.
Undaunted by the failure of his policy, Biden ordered that buses be used to transport the illegals, who at that point were largely unscreened for disease or criminal records, to various cities around the country, in most cases without consulting state authorities. While doing all this, Biden praised himself for solving the problems he had lied about Trump creating. The mental whiplash this caused was intensified by the fact that at the same time Biden was ignoring Covid among illegal immigrants,’ some of whom were no doubt busing the disease to various states, he was castigating Americans for not doing more to avoid infection! (Note to readers: Cold compresses to comfort cranial nerves are available at Amazon.)
A third cause of Mental Whiplash concerns the protests/riots in numerous states over the alleged pattern of police brutality that had begun before Trump took office and continue to this day. As the riots grew more out of hand and dangerous, and the police had more difficulty handling the perpetrators, Trump offered to help them deal with the problem. Instead of accepting his help, Democrat governors attacked him for being a racist who had caused the uprisings! Those governors generally favored defunding and even abolishing police departments. As a result, crime increased, especially violent crime in black neighborhoods. Voices of reason from around the country clamored for more, rather than fewer police. But governors, mayors, and other elected officials either couldn’t hear the clamoring over the sound of the rioting or didn’t understand the logic of having the police fight crime. So they put their heads together and came up with what they considered a dynamite solution—change the mantra of “defunding” the police to “reimagining” the service they provided. An even more brilliant solution (in their view) was to have social workers ride in patrol cars. That combined response was sure to fix the problem. Right. Some leaders no doubt bought new outfits for their award ceremonies.
To the Democrat politicians’ amazement, however, the crime rate not only didn’t decrease—it increased, even in black neighborhoods. In desperation, Democrats returned to their always-serviceable default response—blame the rise in crime on Trump—despite the fact that he was no longer in office. (Better double that Amazon order for cold compresses.)
Yet another cause of Mental Whiplash has been Biden’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan. He began by repeatedly promising to get Americans, and locals who had endangered their lives helping our troops, out of that country before extracting the troops. Then he did the exact opposite—removing the troops first and leaving our civilians and America’s allies at the mercy of the Taliban he knew to be barbaric. To confirm that profile, the Taliban promptly killed thirteen American troops! As if this absurdity was not enough to rattle rational people’s brains, Biden left behind for our enemies 83,000 high-tech guns, as well as tanks helicopters, planes, and night-vision goggles, all of them state of the art and worth a total of over $8 billion! The absurdity continued when the Biden State Department refused to let planes with Americans and Afghan heroes land at safe airports, because (they claimed) some passengers might not have been properly vetted—this while the administration was showing zero interest in the vetting of illegal aliens at the southern border. To top all this off, Biden has since claimed, again and again, that his plan for leaving Afghanistan had been a rousing success!
To get a better grasp of how shocking the handling of the Afghanistan situation has been, imagine posing the basic challenge to a group of seventh graders in this way: “Imagine that a group of your friends were in a dangerous country. A number of American soldiers were also there to protect them. American leaders decided to bring all of them home. Which should they remove first—your friends or the soldiers? I believe every hand would immediately begin waving and that almost every student would offer the same answer: “Friends first, then the soldiers.” I also believe that if asked to explain their reasoning, virtually everyone would say, “Because the friends couldn’t protect themselves the way the soldiers could.”
And this simple answer the Biden Administration, with all their degrees and experience, could not discover by themselves!
I could offer many other causes of the Mental Whiplash Epidemic. For example, the plans now being made in New York and San Francisco to pay criminals for promising not to commit crime. Or Biden’s order that government agencies and private companies with over 100 employees require them to get the Covid vaccine or be tested once a week. His reasoning evidently is that unvaccinated people pose the danger of infecting the already vaccinated. But wait, hold on . . . The same Joe Biden has emphatically told us that being vaccinated protects people from subsequent infection. Does our President mean to say that the vaccine both works AND doesn’t work? Apparently so.
I’m sorry but I have to end this essay. Just recalling all this absurdity at once has given me a headache, so I’m off to take several ibuprofen and wrap my head in a cold compress or two. God help us all.
Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Ryan Ruggiero. All rights reserved
