The Great Awakening Doesn’t Wear a Watch

People are either wide awake, in the process of coming to, or still out cold.

My youngest daughter Sasha habitually sleeps like a sloth who popped one too many Benadryl. Nothing—and I mean nothing—can wake this (now adult) kid when she’s eyeballs deep in a dream state.

We’ve bought alarm clocks that wail like air raid sirens. We’ve tried the flashing kind and the one that mimics sunrise and the type that actually, physically, shake the bed. We’ve set multiple models minutes apart and scattered them about her room to be extra annoying. (The only person this ever annoyed was me.)

We’ve tried everything short of dropping an actual bomb in her bedroom, although I suspect if we had, she’d have snoozed right through it.

High school was a joy.

Her sister Sophie is like me: a squirrel can sneeze three streets over and we’ll both bolt upright in bed, wide-eyed and with roughly zero chance of hopping back on the slumber bus. It’s not that we don’t enjoy a nice nap; it’s simply that we can naturally and easily shake off the shackles of sleep.

Out there in the world, through no choice or fault of their own, there are early birds and night owls. Some of us were born to rise and shine with the sun; others can barely drag themselves out of bed to catch General Hospital. The preference is mostly genetic. In Sasha’s case, it wasn’t as if I were going to let her doze until some internal alarm finally went off on a school day. Being famously co-dependent, every weekday morning I’d schlep up to her room, again and again, playing obnoxious music and removing cozy covers and opening blinds and waving delicious hot beverages beneath her nose until consciousness finally overtook catatonia.

(It’s probably worth mentioning that my husband wholeheartedly disagreed with this approach. “Experience is the greatest teacher,” he’d chirp, fully prepared to let her suffer the consequences of oversleeping. I feel as if dads are far more equipped for this type of tough love than moms are. They’re also not the ones who are typically left to pick up the pieces when said child has an epic meltdown before racing out the door with bedhead and no breakfast and whose tire screech tells you all you need to know about how mindful she’ll be of your parting plea to “drive safely!”)

And so it goes with the corrupt circumstances around COVID. People are either wide awake, in the process of coming to, or still out cold—and the “why” is probably at least partially hard-wired into their DNA. An awakening, great or small, doesn’t wear a watch. And as I’ve pointed out previously, you can lead a sheep to enlightenment, but you can’t make him think.

Some people were clear-eyed before the very first whispers of a “novel” virus spreading in China. They’d been raised by skeptical parents or had been studying government psyops on their own for years and were naturally immune to propaganda. Many, like me, had been dutiful, sleepy rule-followers in the past but recognized that something about COVID was just plain off from the beginning. Lots bought into the hype for a while, maybe until they or someone they knew suffered a vaccine injury or they began to realize that most of the pandemic measures and mandates being forced on humanity didn’t make a lick of sense. And some, sadly, are still stuck in hibernation mode, sawing logs so loudly that they can’t hear the alarms the rest of us have scattered about the planet in the hopes of rousing them from their comfortable comas.

Some days, I envy them. It was so much easier, so much less stressful, being clueless. I spend so many hours a day now researching and reading and writing about COVID and corruption that I often stop and wonder—literally, out loud even—what I used to do with my “free time.” Oh, I relaxed and hung out and had mindless conversations about meaningless issues? Remind me what that felt like again?

Because here’s the thing:

Being awake comes with responsibility. It just does. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to recognize it as fact.

If your house catches fire in the middle of the night and you’re the only one aware of the inferno, are you going to wait for an engraved invitation to rescue your kids or feel bitter about having to be the one to do it? When my family has to get up at 3 AM to catch an early flight, everyone knows it’s on me and Sophie to bang the gongs—at least, if we want to make it to the gate on time.

What’s also important—and incredibly encouraging—to note is that consciousness is contagious. Think back to just about any slumber party you ever attended in your life. No matter how late everyone stayed up or how sound asleep they are, it’s never long between the moment the first person starts to stir and the last one struggles into a sitting position. (There’s always that one.) If the early bird busts out a trombone or starts blasting AC/DC, the process can be expedited exponentially.

I know what you may be thinking, because I hear it every day in the comments section of my Substack. You’ve tried. You’re tired. If people can’t recognize you as a valiant firefighter trying to pull them from a burning bed, well, you just can’t save everyone. C’est la vie.

Trust me, I know how exhausting it is to try to wake up someone who doesn’t want to be woken. It’s a tedious, thankless job that’s frequently met with outright resentment. And at the risk of pointing out the blazingly obvious, of course it is! 

Sleep isn’t just a decent way to spend a few hours; it’s a magical experience. It’s peaceful and restorative and completely divorced from the demands and drudgery of daily life. Who wouldn’t rather be mentally performing on Broadway or reuniting with long lost loved ones or finding a palatial undiscovered wing in your house than having your eyelids pried open and being told it’s time to go to work?

We speak and hear a lot these days about people being “asleep” in the context of world events. But consider my tough-to-rouse daughter. On any given morning, it’s not that Sasha’s never going to wake up; she’s just not awake yet. And because she has important things to do in this life, I’m not going to stop gently nudging her into consciousness. Maybe if we look at the rest of humanity through that lens and remind ourselves that there’s strength and safety in numbers, we’ll rethink our responsibility to stir the stubbornly sleeping masses.