Bread and Toilet Paper

I am from sunny Northern California. When I moved to Maryland, I was shocked to discover that any time Mother Nature would so much as threaten a breath of snow, everyone would flock to the grocery stores to buy bread and toilet paper. This was a topic of mild amusement to my family and I, but seemed a relatively harmless mass hysteria. I simply chose not to go to the store at such times, as the roads would be cleared in no more than a few days tops, and we almost always had an extra roll or two on hand. It’s not like it was going to be a Donner Party size snow storm that would bury you for weeks, where you would end up having to eat your dog or maybe your cousin. But then along came ‘Rona, Corona, the Corona virus, Covid 19, the Novel Corona Virus, the Wuhan Flu, or maybe the off-white plague, since compared to the Black Death it barely registers as a color. And toilet paper vanished from store shelves from mid-March until the end of May.

At first, I thought it was the usual bit of irrational, mildly neurotic scrambling common to every winter storm. But it never ended! The shelves were absolutely bare of all paper products and they stayed bare. Forbes magazine opined it was just a stocking back log, and once everyone got themselves a little stash the supply lines would see the stores stocked up again. No dice. I hypothesized that with everyone home, people had to buy more because they weren’t sponging off the free paper at work. I don’t think so, because people were stealing toilet paper from the restrooms where I worked as fast as we could replenish it. It was a panic! You could say there was a ‘run’ on toilet paper.

Another theory I entertained had to do with the fact that over half of our country is either clinically obese or at least way overweight. During the course of my reading on the topic, I ran into a Reddit thread where an obese man described the horror show he had to go through when wiping after a bowel movement. Because his physical size prevented him from reaching his anus, he had to wind a four-foot-long toilet paper rope from those big industrial rolls and floss it out as best he could. Apparently, he did everything he could to avoid taking a bowel movement in public. But it didn’t really explain the protracted hoarding that was clearly going on, nor the traditional minor panic when snow threatened. Plus, once we got past Memorial Day, there was a psychological relaxing you could actually feel, and toilet paper returned like songbirds in spring.

I believe that Reddit thread held a clue to the mystery. It had to do with fear, and not just the fear of running out of household products. It was something far more existential than that. From our vantage point here in the 21st Century, we might imagine ourselves far superior to our brutal, ignorant and primitive ancestors, whose lives were nasty, brutish and short. We have climbed to the pinnacle of civilization! We have achieved fantastic material wealth by the standard of any age. We live in enlightened Democracies informed by sophisticated political philosophy and enjoy an economic system that has generated unimaginable wealth. In our arrogance we even imagine ourselves to be the caretakers of the entire planet. Then along came Corona and our Kings, our High Priests of Science, and the Global Nobility who rule us all totally dropped the ball. Faced with the tiniest of threats, a humble virus, they lost their collective minds. There is no cure! The sky is falling! We are all going to die, unless we… sacrifice the peasants! So, they told us to stay home and stay safe. They did the modern equivalent of burning the crops when they shut the world down and put 40 million people out of work in the U.S., so that they wouldn’t feel threatened. And then they dropped the mask just a little bit when someone decided to trot out the phrase “non-essential”. When your rulers straight up tell you that you are non-essential, it’s pretty much half way to calling you expendable. Hilary said it, with her basket of deplorables quip. And now another Democrat, the second of the last two nominees for the Democratic candidacy for President, has recently said about 50 million Americans are just bad people. I suppose non-essential people should count themselves lucky to be told to stay home, stay safe, and go broke so we can save the stock market. It beats warming up the ovens!

And we did stay home, like the good little peasants that we are, holed up in our hovels, broke and unemployed while our Nobles travelled the world in private jets and broadcast platitudes from their palaces, warning us millions would die if we didn’t cancel our lives. We were rendered powerless, pitted against one another while our elites flaunted the rules at every turn. And we all went crazy because of it. When people of good will are lied to and stripped of power, they naturally try to find something they can cling to, some shred of control over their own lives. We reverted to the first thing most people ever learn to control: their bowels. Potty training is self-control 101. I may be non-essential, but as least I can have the dignity of wiping my own ass. When that’s become your “bottom line” for dignity, then of course you will hoard toilet paper, as if your very life depended on it. Mystery solved. You are welcome.

When the fear left after Memorial Day, when we realized that all of our sacrifice was in vain, that the crisis turned out to be a pack of lies and bad science which helped the rich and ruined the rest of us, the toilet paper returned. And out came the rage. Blacks have known since they got here, of course, just how powerless they are, and how their rulers, black and white, have abused them. White people haven’t quite figured it out yet. We still think we live in a Democracy, not a Police State. We still believe in our power, our so-called privilege. Black people still believe in it too. As a culture, neither black nor white has yet figured out that oppression is no longer race based. We have been pitted against each other by the true oppressors who actually run things, the amoral globalist oligarchy whose only interest is its own survival, and which tirelessly sacrifices the masses in pursuit of its own interests. When we are told to bend the knee it is mere acknowledgement that we are all at the mercy of the Police State, on the Deep State side, or the Anarchists, on the Democratic side. The working class are little better than Afghanis and Iraqis, we just have a velvet glove covering the iron fist of the Bipartisan Globalist Corporate War Machine. Until we learn that the only color that matters is green, we will be powerless to stop the eroding of what little freedom we still have left.