A Year Later
A Year Later
Junious Ricardo
Stanton
It’s been
over a year since the World Health Organization declared a global health
emergency on January 30 2020 despite the fact that except for Italy most of what was called COVID-19 was
relegated to isolated parts of China
mainly in Wuhan.
During that time we have seen over one hundred nations take unprecedented
measures ostensibly to “mitigate” the spread of the virus. These nation’s
leaders shut down their whole country except for “essential workers” which
turned out to be people like sanitation workers, first responders, and healthcare
professionals as opposed to many bureaucrats and white collar workers many who
had experience working from home.
What have
we learned from this experience? What lessons and take-aways can we glean from
all this? First we know that the actions of local, state nation and national
governments, the corporate and digital media and pharmaceutical cartels were
based on faulty mathematic and algorithmic models. People like Neil Ferguson of
the London Imperial
College predicted 500,000 people in
the UK would die and over 2
million in the US
would succumb to the virus. It is globally acknowledged that Ferguson’s predictions were wildly
inaccurate. His “predictions” were used to bring life as we knew it to a
stand-still with devastating consequences that were far worse than COVID.
The social and economic disruptions
of the lockdowns and social isolation have been horrific. Economic privation
has worsened due to the shut downs of economies, loss of income and jobs, depression
and suicide have spiked and media induced hysteria have been rampant.
A study of COVID policies in South
African revealed the adverse impact of the COVID lockdowns were extremely
destructive in terms of personal happiness and sense of wellbeing for society
in general. Researchers there discovered the negative impact of lockdowns in
these specific areas: social capital: unhappier people display less altruistic
behavior in the long run (Dunn et al.). They are also less active, less
creative, poor problem solvers, less social, and display more anti-social
behavior (Lyubomirsky et al.). If unhappier people display more anti-social
behavior, South Africa
could see an increase in behavior such as unrests, violent strikes and perhaps
higher crime rates.
Health care: unhappier people are less physically healthy
and die sooner (Lyubomirsky et al.). Additionally, unhappy people engage in
riskier behavior such as smoking and drinking, thereby placing unnecessary
pressure on national health systems.” The good, bad and the ugly of lockdowns
during OCIVD-19 Talita Greyling, Stephanie Rossouw and Tamanna Adhikar
South Africa is
not alone. In the US
the lockdowns resulted in: massive spikes in suicide rates and mental health crises
increase in drug overdoses and substance abuse, economic devastation, food
insecurity and hunger and a surge in domestic violence. https://fee.org/articles/4-life-threatening-unintended-consequences-of-the-lockdowns/
Yet despite
these known facts, policy makers, public health officials and the media still
continue to promote and advocate for what caused these horrendous outcomes! To
add insult to injury the powers that be are hell-bent on controlling the
narrative so that no discussion, debate, alternative options and therapies
other than vaccines are considered! What’s up with that? Its okay to admit you
made an error in judgment or that your data was flawed. But you cannot in good
conscience keep doing the same thing over and over and think you will get a
different result, especially when what you are doing has never been done in
human history. That is the definition of insanity.
The damage has been done. Now we need
to investigate ways to create open dialogue to damp down the division and
acrimony, decrease the censorship and work to find ways to restore mental
health, confidence and good decision making. Unfortunately we are being driven
towards what is being called The Great
Reset ahttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/
social engineering agenda being formulated by oligarchs that like the COVID-19
“mitigation policies” will turn out to be far more disruptive/worse than COVID
itself.
A year has passed let us learn the
valuable lessons from this experience and move towards real healing, recovery
and stability.
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Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin
Junious Ricardo Stanton
As
we celebrate Women’s History Month we will focus on women of African descent
who may not be well known but who nevertheless positively impacted their
communities, the nation and the larger society. Today we are going to share the
life story of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin an activist, journalist and newspaper
publisher in Nineteenth century USA.
Josephine
St. Pierre was born in Boston
Massachusetts on August 31, 1842
into one of that city’s prominent families. Her mother was an English born
white woman and her father was a Black man born on the Caribbean island of Martinique
who migrated to the US and
was the founder of the Boston
Zion Church.
Her parents sent her to Salem
to attend schools that allowed African Americans students.
In 1858 at the
age of fifteen Josephine married George Lewis Ruffin and the couple established
their home in Boston.
George Lewis Ruffin was the first Black to graduate from Harvard
Law School;
he also served on the Boston city council, the Massachusetts legislature and as a municipal judge in Boston. The couple had
five children and they were very active in the abolitionist movement.
During the War
Between the States Josephine Ruffin was active in recruiting soldiers for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiments in the
Union Army. She was engaged in charity work in Boston. Like many Northern Black activists,
the Ruffins saw the Civil War as an opportunity to make ending slavery a focal
point of the war.
Following
her husband’s death, Mrs Ruffin remained active in social issues. “In
1879, Ruffin created the Boston Kansas Relief Association. The organization was
dedicated to helping African Americans settle in Kansas. After the death of her husband in
1888, Ruffin became even more involved in social activism. She became the
editor of The Woman's Era, a newspaper devoted to the needs and concerns of
African American women.” https://www.ourbiography.com/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin/
She
was enthusiastically engaged in the women’s suffrage movement and was a major
force in the bourgeoning women’s club movement on the local and national levels.
She helped convene several national women’s conventions. “In 1894,
Ruffin formed the Women's New Era Club of Boston and served as its first
president. She also brought together several African-American women's groups
for the First National Conference of Colored Women in 1895. The following year,
the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the Woman's Era Clubs of Boston
and the Colored Women's League of Washington, D.C., merged to become the
National Association of Colored Women.
Ruffin was also active in the women's suffrage and the
temperance movements. She was member of the Massachusetts School Suffrage
Association and the Massachusetts Moral Education Association. Through these
organizations, Ruffin became acquainted with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone.
She may have been accepted into clubs for white women, but she still faced
racial prejudice.” https://www.ourbiography.com/josephine-st-pierre-ruffin/
“Believing that a national organization
for black women was needed, she convened the first annual convention in 1895
which drew 100 women from 20 clubs across the United States. She named the
organization the National Federation of Afro-Am Women, which a year later
united with the Colored Women’s League to become the National Association of
Colored Women. Mary Church Terrell was the organization’s president while
Ruffin and several others served as vice-presidents.” Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ruffin-josephine-st-pierre-1842-1924/
Ruffin stated the goal of the
women’s club movement was to get African-American women engaged and into the
fore of social change. “We are women, American women, as intensely interested
in all that pertains to us as such as all other American women; we are not
alienating or withdrawing, we are only coming to the front, willing to join any
others in the same work and welcoming any others to join us.” https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2014/01/african-american-women-in-the-civil-war.html
Mrs.
Ruffin was a journalist, editor and publisher. She edited Women’s Era the first newspaper edited and published by
African-American women from 1890 to 1897. She was a founding member of the
Boston NAACP in 1910 and remained active in Boston social affairs for many years. She
made transition on March 13, 1924.
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