Friday, March 05, 2021

Lockdowns Could Reshape American Politics for a Generation, or Several

 

“The fear cannot last. When it breaks, we are going to see multitudes of people – small business owners and workers, parents of kids in school, patients who couldn’t see their families while in the hospital, adults with parents in long-term care facilities from which they’ve been locked down, families who canceled one vacation after another, people of faith whose religious communities were shattered, and all those people who were forced for the better part of a year to live life with zero fun or entertainment outside the confines of their homes – lash out at those who did this to us. And they will be inspired to understand why and make sure nothing like this happens again. “
Now one year into this disaster, my worry that humanity would just accept this and move on is proving unwarranted. We’ve been prevented from gathering in groups for most of the year but people are starting to creep out of their homes and communities and talking to neighbors, friends, and other groups. People are discovering that there is plenty of dissent out there, and it stretches across the partisan divide.
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Lockdown vs not: this has the capacity to be a theme that will resonate far into the future. It also unites people on the political “right” again with small business, genuine civil libertarians, and champions of religious liberty. It permits the “left” to again find its voice for human rights and freedoms. For that matter, they do not have to be activists; they only need to be people who do not want their houses of worship padlocked, their business closed and bankrupted, or their speech curtailed.  
It also put the emphasis on the correct point: the protection of American libertarians not from some shadowy foreign enemy but from our own governments. It also draws in the left that has long been suspicious of the place of big business, and, in this case, rightfully so. The largest corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, for all the good that they achieve in this world, have leaned decisively in favor of lockdowns. Same with large media. The reason is not just that they are harmed less by lockdowns and, in many cases, actually benefited from them. It’s because the people ruling these companies enjoy ruling-class lives, and they see the world through them. Lockdowns were the favored policy for cultural and political reasons, which is itself a scandal.
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Then you have the increasingly ridiculous “track-and-trace” regime that pretends to hunt down and control the virus, even though the CDC now speculates that as many as 1 in 4 or perhaps 1 in 3 people have caught this virus with a 99.8% survival rate (it approaches 100% for people under 50 years of age). Get a positive test (never mind that more than half or more could be false positives) and you find yourself kicked out of school and work for two weeks, stigmatized like the lepers in the bible. It’s grotesque and pre-modern, and it has no public-health benefit.  
Why have the people put up with this? Under normal conditions, they never would have. None of this would have been possible. The one reason they did this time: fear. Fear of getting sick and dying or, if not dying, experiencing permanent health effects. This emotion can last far longer than one might think. But eventually emotions do catch up with facts, among which is that the danger of severe outcomes was wildly exaggerated and the lockdowns achieved nothing in terms of disease mitigation. You mean all this suffering and horror was for naught? Once that realization dawns, fear turns to anger, and anger to action. If you understand that dynamic, you can see why the architects of lockdowns from Dr. Fauci to the CDC are doing their best to delay that dawning, with daily doses of alarmism designed to keep people hiding in their homes.
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The fear cannot last. When it breaks, we are going to see multitudes of people – small business owners and workers, parents of kids in school, patients who couldn’t see their families while in the hospital, adults with parents in long-term care facilities from which they’ve been locked down, families who canceled one vacation after another, people of faith whose religious communities were shattered, and all those people who were forced for the better part of a year to live life with zero fun or entertainment outside the confines of their homes – lash out at those who did this to us. And they will be inspired to understand why and make sure nothing like this happens again.

GRTWT.

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