Another Year

Will anything substantially change?

The temporal line dividing one year from another is an artifice, Imposed by humankind, it creates, I suppose, a certain threshold or vantage point from which one may look both forward and behind. As each new year rolls around the media glut themselves on reviews and predictions, as if the stroke of midnight is a hammerblow from Thor or marks the vision of a promised land. New Zealand has the honor of being the first country to celebrate this juncture, in yet another example of arbitrary partitioning. In fact, it’s really just another day in a long series of days that have, because of the past four years, become a weary, anxiety-ridden trudge to nowhere as we hustle on, glancing often over our shoulders or above our heads as if in waiting for another catastrophe to engulf us.

I’ve spent this evening looking back a little and looking little ahead. With each arbitrarily passing day I see the relentless growth of human power over the material world: faster, higher, stronger. But to what destination, and to what end? Every technological advance has worked towards reducing human effort or human pain or human limitations of speed, strength and reach, the ultimate goal of immortality and omnipotence guiding this quest.

But despite the thunderous splash made by AI, will we really ever get there — will we achieve that thirsted-for fountain of deathlessness and complete power? Or will we, in pursuit, destroy ourselves? Or will, perhaps, we sacrifice the mania for sovereignty and embrace a natural order marked by reverence for our mortality and guided by the hand of charitable love?

As I think back upon the past few years I continue to be astounded by the multiplicity and the multifaceted nature of the deceptions practiced upon us, thrust upon us, and pounded into us with cheerful unabashed relentlessness, so as to have created an unrecognizable society of ever-fearing denizens dancing to the tune of their manipulative superiors. Fortunately, the campaign of fear and fraud did not win over everyone, but it will be a rough slog for the critically thinking minorities to bring their less perspicacious brethren over to the side that prizes liberty, open debate, and thoughtfulness.

Will the coming year bring substantial change? Will the seeds of justice take hold? Will the lies, damned lies and jabs begin to cease? Will the killing begin to stop?

Every waking day I think upon the sheer scale of the murder across our world, and its many means, hot, cold, cold-blooded, open and insidious, slow or quick — and every waking day I try to imagine history, the history of power, the subjugation and impoverishment of the many by the few, now culminating in a novel way, to heights made possible by advances in computational science and concentration of control grown exponentially and growing still.¹

Thanks to the Covid Operation an immense transfer of wealth made the rich much richer and the poorer much more poor. One of the implications of this overwhelming disparity in wealth is that it has just become a whole lot easier for the rich to purchase the allegiances of their underlings, to bend them to do their bidding — whether it’s buying votes, or buying politicians.

As I write tonight on the cusp of the coming year the contract between the government of New Zealand and Pfizer has yet to be made public. And as I write a score of doctors continue to be persecuted and harassed by the Medical Council for not following the Pfizer playbook.

With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, the Pfizer document will come to light in 2024, and the bullying of my friends and colleagues by the corrupt Medical Council of New Zealand will end.

That one small step and one giant leap are devoutly to be wished. Here’s to a better year ahead.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

December 2023

1. Nonetheless, this extravagant accretion of computing wizardry hasn’t done much for our ‘return’ to the lunar surface. One wonders how the primitive computers of the late Sixties and early Seventies managed to make manned lunar missions so routine.