This Post Is About: Toby Rogers, The Power of Music To Release Trapped Grief, An Ode To Anders Tegnell And A Song About A Little Boy

I seems what is happening now is we are all finding our way back to grieving, and music is playing a central role in allowing this necessary passage for us all.

(Wow, that sounded really stiff.)

In any case, Toby Rogers wrote a transcendent piece continuing his theme of addressing how we all struggle with the (false) belief that somehow being smart, accurate, data-based, etc somehow will collapse the Beast. (Tangent: There have been many of Toby’s pieces I intended to write around and about and cross post. This was one of my very favorites. It’s called: “The Bougiecrats Descend Into Mass Psychosis.” An amazing thing, it is, this piece. I burst out laughing when I reach the line: “We are dealing with people who are completely mad." This piece proves my insistent claim that “wilder” writing owes no apologies to Anglican Proper. It’s so freeing when caveats all fall away. The flame of true expression sometimes only freed when language itself must be transcended.

I understand exactly where Toby stands now. It’s a very sudden realization; I had it about the HIV/AIDS battle around 2013, after so many years of combat and battle, to break down the deadly thicket of lies that was trapping and killing so many, so brutally. One day I suddenly went: “Oh. It’s just abuse.”

(Nod and homage to the great works and thoughts, writings and deeds of Tom DeFerdinando, who always understood this, since the earliest days of AIDS War, when he and Michael Ellner co-founded HEAL, which tried to protect people from the blighting terrors of an HIV positive “test.”)

The realization I had, so late, was that we were fighting a spirit of abuse/degradation, expecting it to transform into respect by way of just the right scientific paper being waved under its Beast nose.

I suddenly understood that the spirit of abuse is never trying to not be the spirit of abuse. It’s never trying to understand what is in your scientific papers that it had not yet fully absorbed as in “Oh, aha! Now I see it!”

These phenomenon: AIDS, and Covid, (for a start) are examples of, and cathedrals of “abuse as medicine.”

Here’s a René Girard quote I think is somehow connected:

“It is because Christ deprives them of Scapegoats that the Powers and Principalities will be destroyed. People will escalate violence in reaction to the Revelation because they will be increasingly unable to find an outlet for their mimetic struggles.”

I had a conversation with Toby about this once perhaps a year ago. I recall I was driving and I asked him to read out loud the short VAERS report of a small child who had—you know what? Never mind the details. It’s too dreadful.

In “Fighting The Spiritual Battle On The Spiritual Plane,” Toby quoted Ann Tomoko Rosen’s true and powerful statement that if we can believe and access the power of the love within our vast worldwide community, we can find the power we feel we lack. True on every plane.

I began this piece because, like Toby, I heard a song that made me weep long held back Covid tears. It is linked below, from Turfseer, who is part of our community. He writes that the song is about a boy whose mother was adamant that he not wear a mask. I was quite taken aback by how this song allowed me to connect to what happened to the souls of so many hundreds of millions of children (leaving aside what happened to their bodies, and their parents, their entire worlds.) It made me feel not wrong to yearn to make a pilgrimage to Linköping to leave white roses and a letter of thanks to Anders Tegnell. He saved a generation of his country’s children from maiming, lifelong trauma. Thoroughly vindicated, he no longer has a job, it seems. (I will return to this.)

A newspaper passage from 2020, first in Swedish.

“Sveriges statsepidemiolog Anders Tegnell är i telefon med länsstyrelsen i Stockholm. Det är torsdagsmorgon och rektorn på ansedda Campus Manilla i Stockholm har just beslutat att tillfälligt stänga skolan efter att en elev testats positivt för det nya coronaviruset. Beslutet hade väckt uppmärksamhet ändå, men toppar nu alla nyhetssajter eftersom Sveriges framtida tronföljare prinsessan Estelle är elev på skolan.

“Flera rektorer i Stockholm är oroliga och verkar beredda att vidta samma åtgärd, och därmed gå rakt emot Anders Tegnells rekommendationer.

“ Jag har försökt tala om vilka konsekvenser det blir av att stänga skolor alldeles i onödan. Jag tycker det här är lite upprörande, måste jag säga,” säger han i telefonen.”

Dagens Nyheter March 11, 2020

Translation: “Sweden’s State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell is on the phone with Länsstyrelsen (untranslatable bureaucracy) in Stockholm. It’s Thursday morning and the principle of the esteemed Campus Manilla in Stockholm has just decided to temporarily close the school after a student tested positive for the new corona virus. The decision would have awakened attention in any case, but now it is the leading story on every news site since crown princess Estelle is a student at the school.

“Many principles in Stockholm are worried and seem ready to take the same step, and with that, go directly against Anders Tegnell’s recommendations.

”I have tried to speak to the consequences of closing schools unnecessarily. I must say I find this a little upsetting,” he says into the phone.

Wow.

Now to the song about the brave boy and his mother.

“During the height of the lockdowns, I met a woman who had a young son named Roman.”

That’s where the story begins.

I cried, not at all briefly. How will we ever cry it out, or fathom it, especially since it was designed not to end? One thing we can do is continue to issue these human thoughts, feelings, and words, that bear witness to our human-ness, which came under comprehensive mortal attack in March of 2020.

O Holy Roman