Retrospective on the Plague Year
Atlanta, GA
There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
– Thomas Sowell
Publisher Bill Bonner once acknowledged that anyone can make a mistake. But for a real catastrophe, you need the government.
Over the last year, politicians around the world have outdone themselves. In ways that would’ve been unimaginable thirteen months ago, they’ve destroyed lives, decimated communities, and deprived people of simple pleasures that lend invigorating joy to dreary routine.
As the embers smolder and smoke clears, let’s dig thru the rubble, assess the damage, and anticipate the next move.
The official reaction to this virus is probably the greatest peacetime calamity in American history. It’s certainly the biggest “public health” disaster. With sanctimonious paeans to fabricated “science”, states and countries bludgeoned their people with ham-handed diktats ostensibly meant to mitigate a molecule.
Yet being impervious to policy, the virus did what viruses do, regardless the edicts of our public health hacks. Early on, as their futility became apparent, genuine science would’ve suggested that a reassessment was in order.
But recognizing limitations requires humility. And that is a condition from which most politicians and public health bureaucrats are apparently immune. Inaction is unacceptable among the world-improvers. Meddlers must always appear to be “doing something”, and “taking action”.
So they did…with a vengeance.
Like wastewater from a burst sewer main, authoritarian “guidelines”, restrictions, mandates, and directives poured forth, and did indelible damage without doing a damn bit of good. As lives were ruined, Covid deaths continued. Like the Times Square “Debt Clock”, they were relentlessly reported. Daily counts crawled morbidly beneath solemn anchors on the evening news.
But behind the headlines, the collateral damage from Covid “containment” piled up (and continues to mount)…without benefit of a televised tally. A year of most people’s lives was arbitrarily snatched from them, regardless their level of Covid vulnerability or risk tolerance.
Loneliness spread, depression soared unemployment flourished, opportunities vanished, careers stalled, and suicides spiked. Cancers went unscreened, and heart disease undetected. How many early deaths resulted, or will be caused in coming years? Who knows? But none will be attributed to Covid policy, or receive a moment of silence.
Millions of third-world poor were told to exchange an almost non-existent risk from Covid for a very real chance at starvation. Fortunately, most of them protested these homicidal quarantine edicts, and told international health authorities to stick it. Even The New York Times warned that global lockdowns could cause more than 1.4 million incremental tuberculosis deaths. Few cared.
In many places, young children don’t see human faces outside their own home. If under a year-old, they may have never seen a non-family member smile. To such infants, how creepy must the wider world seem? It’d be like growing up in a Twilight Zone episode.
Such kids are deprived opportunities to read facial expressions, and perceive non-verbal cues. What are the psychological and developmental implications of all this? We don’t know, and few thought to ask. But we may one day find out.
And for what? For nine months, countless charts have documented Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among and within most every state, county, country, and town. Within or across regions, rates rise or fall almost simultaneously or in tandem, regardless the prescribed policy. None of “mitigation measures” seemed to mitigate anything, except the normal pleasures of daily life.
These data have been widely available, yet mostly ignored. But they tell a tale, and it is unambiguous. Like many such infections, this bug appears to be seasonal and regional. It is policy agnostic, spreading or receding irrespective the “rules” they set, or how closely we follow them.
This is one of the rare viruses that is as much political as medical. Depending on the perspective of the afflicted, it will elicit more schadenfreude than sympathy. But at least it reveals who’s really sick.
Lockdowns were always counter-productive, unremittingly cruel, and periodically lethal. But they were also useless, at least in meeting their stated objective.
Yet they hit societies like a sledgehammer. Relative vulnerability was routinely ignored. The young and the healthy were treated as if they were old and infirm. Schools closed when nursing homes were sealed. It was like giving everyone chemo to protect a few from cancer.
In most states, these top-down, one-size fits all approaches were applied to a virus that was unusually transparent about who it afflicted. But again, the data was irrelevant, and the science didn’t matter. Healthy people were redefined as “asymptomatic”, implying everyone was ill and all were lethal. It was one step removed from leeches and entrails.
Except psychologically, or in how they make people feel (about the contagion or themselves), masks are also mostly meaningless. Dogmatic mantras to the contrary notwithstanding, data show that “face coverings” have had no discernible effect on viral spread. It may seem like they should, or appear to be “common sense” that they do. But they don’t.
Yet it’s not that masks don’t matter. If they don’t slow the virus, they do squelch our personalities. Under masks, it’s more difficult to emote, or to communicate at all. Voices are muffled, expression is muted, and nuance is lost. People don’t “smile with their eyes”. It’s more difficult for them to smile at all. And fewer of them want to anyway.
Without the face, as Ivor Cummins put it, the eyes yield little, appearing dull and resigned…like cattle in the pen or sheep at the shear. We become interchangeable automatons, stripped of individuality and shorn of spirit. Which may be the point.
The most disappointing part of the Covid fiasco isn’t the government tyranny. Horrific as it is, that’s to be expected. It’s the nature of any beast that gets hungrier as it eats. Especially when it’s meal keeps feeding it.
The worst realization of the last twelve months is just how acquiescent and compliant the American people are in the surrender of their own rights, and in yielding significant chunks of their own lives.
I’d have never thought it would be so easy. I doubt governments did either. Some of their directives were so stupid, oppressive, and outrageous that it was almost as if they were trying to instigate a revolt, just to see where the line was. Unfortunately, aside from a few pockets of feeble resistance, they’ve yet to find it.
For perceived “safety”, Americans quickly yielded or diluted even what we’d think matters most. Church, school, travel, family gatherings, friendly dinners, irreplaceable moments in a child’s life, and perhaps the last ones in an adult’s.
To the extent many of these activities remained, they were diluted by “distancing”, or relegated to “virtual events”. The sterility of Zoom replaced the vitality of life.
We don’t know how many years we have. But many seemed quite cavalier yielding the most recent one they were given. And they expected everyone else to do so as well. After all, “we’re all in this together!”
The psychological damage from this grotesque experiment is immense, perhaps irreversible, and probably intentional. Like a crop duster over a cotton field, the Covid cult sprayed fear like Round Up on a rose bed.
As panic spread, power concentrated. Governors became dictators, and “public health” officials our high priests. And, like dutiful Stasi, many of the minions were more than willing to become their unmarked missionaries.
Neighbor turned against neighbor. Families divided. Friendships were lost. As people were trained to view their fellow man as disease vectors, suspicion rose, trust eroded, and the fabric of society frayed. “If you see something, say something” moved from the airport to the corner market. Among our moral arbiters, snitching has become a badge of honor.
To review real data, contextualize risk, and resist idiotic orders was to be a heretic…to be called, in predictably juvenile fashion, a “Covid denier”. That’s like assuming that anyone opposing the Patriot Act or objecting to being felt up at airports must think the Twin Towers are still standing. But such is the discourse among those who, as Monty Python put it, are so wise in the ways of “science”.
Throughout this ordeal, most governors have held their middle fingers to the wind. Now, it’s starting to change direction. Several have decided to open states they never had any right to close. We can only hope that, to the extent crowds gather…in stadiums, offices, airplanes, or concerts…attendance isn’t contingent on vaccine passports and tracing apps. Within only a year, many Americans have been conditioned not only to accept, but welcome, these electronic intrusions. If that is the ransom, large numbers are willing to pay it.
From the moment this debacle started, we’ve tried to do as many things as we could with as much normalcy as possible. Being in one of saner states, which for most of this mess has had everything open with no restrictions, has made that easier. Georgia lifted lockdowns after only a few weeks last spring, and has never mandated masks. Our sons’ classes are open, and David’s sports have resumed.
Since last April, we’ve had friends over, gone to restaurants, met people in bars, and traveled where we could. We extend a hand to shake or an arm to hug, rather than an elbow to tap or a fist to bump.
A year ago, these would have seemed like small steps. Since then, in many minds, they’ve become giant leaps. Like the Romans after Cannae, we’ve done what we can to re-capture lost ground, reclaim our territory, and live our life.
After all, it’s the only one we have.
JD
