Sorry to be contrarian but this was nonsense for all but a select few. I'm glad it was nostalgic and poignant and blah blah blah ...but it wasn't the reality for the vast majority of people on planet Earth during the pandemic.
The over-educated laptop class got to sit at home and have their needs delivered to them like some modern day Marie Antoinette or some pathetic, mentally challenged dependent while the rest of us got to eat cake. Let's not forget who kept the lights, water and sewar turned on at your house during that time. Let's keep in mind the millions of blue color workers that grew, slaughtered, packaged, transported and stocked and then sold you the food that you had delivered or maybe "bravely" went to the store to get. Let's not forget the first responders who tried to maintain order and save lives while bureaucrats partied at number 10 and then vilified and fired for not wanting the jab. We should be mindful of the hundreds of thousands of shop owners and daily wage earners that lost their jobs never to be employed again. The family businesses that were destroyed by The stroke of a government pen while the laptop class and their Boomer parents huddled in fear willing to sacrifice their own children over a civilizational boogeyman that only ever really existed for for their useless aged asses.
Remembering covid? ...well for the hundreds of thousands of people that have been vaccine-injured they remember it every day. That is the ones who are alive to remember. I guess their family still remember them after their dead which many of them are. The United Kingdom currently is experiencing between 10 and 15% increased all cause mortality that coincidentally showed up right after the rollout of the vaccines. By the way, millennials, You are the ones dropping dead on the pitch in disproportionate numbers... Primarily heart disease and vascular disease but all sorts of neurological diseases as well. That nightmare Will Go on ad infinitum until all of those who took the jam are dead ...maybe sooner rather than later...
Those of us less fortunate than the over-educated will never forget those years. We will never forget the loved ones we could not say goodbye to. We will never forget the cowardice and the tyranny of the over-educated. Even as we pay off the debt we won't forget that most of the money went to the top 10% and the enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper elites was of historic proportions in the trillions of dollars. Trust me we won't forget.
When the populace finally find their Pol Pot of the modern age and The guillotines are once again rolled into the streets the only thing we will forget is our humanity ...until the sewers are filled with blood and we all realize that this man-made disease cost us more than just our lives and our livelihoods. It cost us our souls... but maybe that was the purpose all along...
It’s easy to look back with the knowledge we have today and feel bitter, but I think it’s sad that anyone would choose to. How do we handle pandemics when we don’t have many facts? It seems some people really wanted to just let it loose and see what happened. I’m glad the virulence of Covid has waned, but in the next pandemic we will be faced with these same choices once again. Were we too cautious in the end? Hard to say until the dust settles.
They knew almost immediately that unhealthy old people and the morbidly obese were the only large demographics who were in serious danger.
They knew in March of 2020 that it wasn’t really affecting kids and that healthy adults would get knocked down for a few days before recovering.
Yet the insanity of mask mandates and attempts to mandate injections went on for well over a year.
Schools in deep blue areas were closed for over 18 months.
It was sheer unscientific insanity, and I am never going to forgive these authoritarian morons who condescendingly told us they knew best when it was clear they were stupid and incompetent.
For those of us that care enough to pay attention the dust is settling and words are emerging such as exploitative tyrannical even murderous. Big pharma lying to people about what they produced... Tyrannical governments ruining people's lives and censoring... And the deafening silence while there's a 10 to 15% increase in all cause mortality to our populations in the west ... People are dying of some mysterious cause in record numbers that no one is talking about... Lots of people died unnecessarily because of decisions made and giving people the benefit of the doubt who have proven to be duplicitous in these events and who have gained financially seems naive to me...
As George Carlin noted, you don't need a conspiracy when interests converge. If you watch for example The Big Short you'll see this sort of effect in action. Poor mortgages were sold as good investments because everyone stood to profit.
The mortgage-holders got to live in homes with some hope of owning them one day.
The mortgage-sellers got to get commissions on mortgages.
The small banks got to sell their mortgages as assets to the largers banks.
The larger banks got to put the good mortgages with the bad mortgages and sell them as Collateralised Debt Obligations.
The ratings agencies asked to rate them as AAA knew that if they didn't, the banks would go down the road to the next ratings agency, and pay them to do it instead.
The government turned a blind eye because the increased money flowing through the system made it look like the economy was growing (though it was mostly inflation), and accidentally created some real growth along the way, however ephemeral (even the guy making coffees down the road from Lehmann Brothers got to have a minimum wage job for a decade, even if it suddenly stopped one day).
At no stage did anyone get together in a cigar-smoke-filled room with uplights to make them look sinister and conspire to rip the US off to the tune of trillions of dollars. They didn't need to, because their interests converged in fraudulent activity.
Now, I'm not an anti-vaxxer or the like. But it's true that some people profited mightily from others' suffering, and that governments used the crisis to arrogate more powers to themselves.
The Hong Kong Flu in 1968-69 killed 1-4 million people. This was the time of Woodstock. But we didn't have Zoom, so we didn't have a Laptop Class who could demand to stay at home while poor people brought them things and took all the risk.
We had plenty of facts. We had influenza pandemic plans. Some now object that this was different - but influenza and SARS-Cov-2 are both communicable respiratory diseases which can be transmitted by sustained close contact indoors, so it's the same thing. Those pandemic plans were instantly discarded in favour of panicked responses.
HIV/AIDS has, since 1981, killed some 43 million people, by the way. At the end of 2019 it was 35 million. After killing fewer than a million people a year, it went up to 2 million a year. Why? All the resources diverted to vaccines and antivirals for covid-19 meant less were available for HIV/AIDS.
I think it is an urban/rural thing. I live in CA, but in a town of about 20K. We did largely shut down for a few weeks, but after that, everyone smiled and nodded when someone from the state or Sacto Public Health was looking over our shoulders... and then we got on with life once they left.
And out here right-wingers were trying to convince the rest of the country that California had become a tyrannical Soviet style communist dictatorship and nobody was allowed to step a foot outside their dwelling.
Oh, I have family in the Bay Area and I can attest that there and in LA it was REALLY bad. Not as bad as NYC I think, but close. I found going into Sacramento (30 min north of me) pretty alarming even in late 2020 and early 2021 -- people would scream at you for not wearing your mask over your nose. Meanwhile, in my town, we hadn't been wearing masks at all for months.
The really sad cases are the people who never recovered. My family in S.F. still leaves the house only when absolutely necessary, even now, 4+ years later. Last week I was working backstage at my daughter's orchestra concert in Sacto and 2 of the performers were still wearing masks. COVID really broke some people's ability to accurately assess risk.
Well I know people STILL getting covid and they will wear masks for a while during and after their sickness if they have to go out to a store or wherever, so don't judge people wearing masks even now. They could be doing so to protect you. Like when people cover their mouths and nose when they cough or sneeze.
No. These families have been doing it all year. It's not for a temporarily sick grandma or because someone is recovering from a cold.
No normal American wore masks in the regular course of life (shopping, school, etc...) prior to March of 2020. Even if you accept that it made sense for a while (which I do), Covid is 100% in the rear view mirror now. Even the Japanese (talk about a mask wearing culture) now classify it as a minor, flu-level virus. At this point, a failure to return to your Feb, 2020 behavior is a sign of improper risk assessment. The longest Covid of all appears to be a mental illness.
I am in the same boat. I do know that different areas had different experiences, but being in the US Midwest, in a semi- rural area, this video doesn't actually resonate with me at all. It's just...weird, LOL
The plandemic literally ruined my life. I had just found love, moved abroad to sunnier climes, and begun to really discover who I was, when suddenly I was living in a surreal and hellish prison where the vast majority of the other inmates seemed to instantly go along with the most insane shit I'd ever heard.
As someone who had always respected alternative researchers (please don't use the phrase 'conspiracy theorists', it was a term invented by intelligence agencies to discredit them) and had been one at times in certain contexts, so wasn't intellectually surprised it might happen, but was still emotionally devastated and felt so alienated that at times I considered suicide.
I flouted the deliberately-demoralising 'rules' wherever possible, and did everything I could to keep myself and my partner going. But the economic and psychological toll was so great that I ended up homeless and penniless, lost my job, and my mental health became extremely dire, to the point where I can't discuss it here as it would simply be too upsetting for most people.
Worst of all, from my POV, I lost the love of my life, and that is the wound for me that will never heal. Had the majority of English people seen through the ruse when BoJo was still in his 'herd immunity' phase, and made it impossible for the lockdown to occur here, I would very likely be flourishing, and in the most special relationship I can imagine.
So for me, it's not just 'never again' , it's 'every individual needs to do what they have to TO MAKE SURE it never happens again'. This is a big ask. I know what it involves and what it may cost. But if not enough people are prepared to confront reality in this way, then this nightmare will repeat. And it will be worse next time.
Indeed, we need to say NEVER AGAIN and really mean it. Like, absolutely never, ever again. No matter HOW bad they say the next pandemic will be.
Bozo is the perfect poster child for what happens when you try to please everyone, and end up pleasing NO ONE. He was the Neville Chamberlain of the plandemic, basically. Don't be a people-pleaser, it WILL backfire and you WILL regret it.
I encourage you to consider that while both Chamberlain and Johnson were puppets of a kind, BoJo was much more conscious of his involvement in the wider agenda. I mean, he faked an illness and was privy to some pretty serious meetings that occurred during that time. What I'm saying is that he wasn't trying to please people, he was complicit in the most elaborate psychosocial hoax ever. When he was about to launch the herd immunity policy full bore is when they sat him down and had The Talk.
I watched it and don't see anything weird about a mom and daughter doing this. It doesn't look exploitative. It's nothing even close to how sick child actors are treated.
It was interesting that she was wearing her school uniform. The child has a very unusual face.
In all likelihood both mother and daughter will look back on this project and remember it fondly. As for the "lockdowns", I went where I wanted to and wore a fakish mask so no one would talk to me. Children were much better off at home than in school. People who think otherwise obviously do not understand what is going on in the American public school system. The real horror of it was the power of the state being flexed to the point it was able to destroy the small businesses of this country and force people to die isolated and alone. For those things, I shall never forgive. But I had already had a long list of things for which I'll never forgive the government.
I was in an unusual situation during Covid because I had been suffering of a serious chronic illness that forced me to live isolated inside my home between 2016 and 2020, so when the lockdowns started, I was glad that I was no longer alone. Suddenly, everybody shared my lonely fate. I was also afraid of catching the virus in my vulnerable state, and so initially I agreed with all those policies. But in retrospect, I realize how absurd they were not only because so many countries destroyed their economies and the mental health of school children, but also because, as a society, we decided that we had to eliminate death altogether, and no measure was too insane if it could be justified under "it will save lives." Now, we know that lives weren't necessarily saved, and to have a society that tries to outlaw death is pretty insane.
Yes exactly - some governments forgot entirely that they make life and death decisions every day (around funding medicines etc) and their role is to mediate the competing cost-benefit of policy decisions across society. Instead due to the social contagion and a saviour complex certain leaders developed we stopped society to save the lives of the most vulnerable while hiding and deferring the cost to everyone else. It would be like banning driving to eliminate road deaths.
During lockdown I was working in the field of social work among immigrant children with special needs living in poverty. We forget/underestimate how much essential services for special needs children are in the schools, and how this was suddenly turned off when lockdowns began without a back-up plan for these children. Because they were living in poverty, their parents were also mostly working essential, minimum-wage roles, and so were put in a difficult spot to maintain the care of their children. Luckily the immigrant communities (largely nonWestern) are rather less individualistic and more likely to utilize community supports, but they faced hardships in this era that their middle/upper class peers did not. I once tried to talk about this with a middle-class, progressive friend who was and remains very pro-lockdown, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears. There seems to be a virtue issue at play—to be “good” one has to be pro-lockdown and also pro-communities like my patients, so there is some denial I think.
Lots of people had great pandemics. I know a lot of those people. They got richer. They spent more time with their family. Found new hobbies outdoors. It was like an extended holiday with some odd bits around the edges like masks, sanitizers, and lots of vaccines. Then there were those that had a terrible pandemic and hundreds of millions of those we don’t even know the depth of their horrors. How many died due to deprivation? The true evil of the moment, the insanity of imposing lockdowns on daily wage earners in developing countries. Imagine no social safety net, and your own government preventing you from doing the very thing that means the difference between eating that day or not. Knowing governments were willing to do that for this virus haunts me to this day.
The reason people have memory holed the lockdowns is because no one took any action. My family and I moved from the Northeast to Florida because we did not agree with the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I will always remember.
Thankful I live in suburban Texas where the national big box stores had signs saying you had to mask but the employees couldn’t enforce it because of the sheer volume of people who ignored them.
My son in law worked with families in inner city London
A family of seven in a two bed flat on the tenth floor of a high rise come to mind. There IS a problem in that ‘the chattering classes’ are defining ‘reality’.
I knew you would say this. But South Dakota (I have been there) still has towns and schools, and hospitals and shops and civic buildings; that is, places where people congregate. I think their Governor was a wise and courageous lady.
Indeed. I mean, when she's not shooting puppies, yes, I agree.
But seriously, she handled the pandemic better than just about anyone else, better than even DeSantis (who initially did a brief quasi-lockdown before wising up.)
However, I do note that everyone's set that time aside, as you said. Just today my son (12) was commenting that he kept thinking 2018 was four years ago - 2020-21 were just blanks. I've heard that from many adults, too.
Politically and legally, everyone wants to set it aside, too. Neither the politicians promoting border closures and lockdowns nor those opposing them ever mentioned it all after 2021, and all the court cases about it all have just been dropped or tossed aside summarily.
Certainly, lockdowns are like Iraqi WMD - everyone claims they never believed in them, or that even if they were a dodgy thing, the intentions of leaders were good and so were the outcomes.
Indeed. No one who supported lockdowns back then seems to want to admit they did, just like the Iraq War. Because no one wants to admit to having been on the wrong side of history, let alone having been fooled.
I, too, don't wanna talk about the COVID era of my life because it was hard for me, mentally speaking. For example at the beginning of the lockdowns, i was worried that my loved ones would die and i wouldn't be able to bid them farewell (it was the first time i was experiencing this), i was feeling like one of the "Companions of the cave" every time i went out to buy sth i needed, and although i finally got Omicron despite the fact that i'd gotten two shots of AstraZeneca vaccine, by that time, i had become less depressed than before. Generally, it was a very unique time for me.
Unfortunately we will likely encounter a pathogen that legitimately requires significant coordinated action or inaction for a truly short period of time and we won’t do what is required as the boy has already cried wolf and the over reaction, manipulations, lies and indignities of the Covid era have taken their needles toll…
Sorry to be contrarian but this was nonsense for all but a select few. I'm glad it was nostalgic and poignant and blah blah blah ...but it wasn't the reality for the vast majority of people on planet Earth during the pandemic.
The over-educated laptop class got to sit at home and have their needs delivered to them like some modern day Marie Antoinette or some pathetic, mentally challenged dependent while the rest of us got to eat cake. Let's not forget who kept the lights, water and sewar turned on at your house during that time. Let's keep in mind the millions of blue color workers that grew, slaughtered, packaged, transported and stocked and then sold you the food that you had delivered or maybe "bravely" went to the store to get. Let's not forget the first responders who tried to maintain order and save lives while bureaucrats partied at number 10 and then vilified and fired for not wanting the jab. We should be mindful of the hundreds of thousands of shop owners and daily wage earners that lost their jobs never to be employed again. The family businesses that were destroyed by The stroke of a government pen while the laptop class and their Boomer parents huddled in fear willing to sacrifice their own children over a civilizational boogeyman that only ever really existed for for their useless aged asses.
Remembering covid? ...well for the hundreds of thousands of people that have been vaccine-injured they remember it every day. That is the ones who are alive to remember. I guess their family still remember them after their dead which many of them are. The United Kingdom currently is experiencing between 10 and 15% increased all cause mortality that coincidentally showed up right after the rollout of the vaccines. By the way, millennials, You are the ones dropping dead on the pitch in disproportionate numbers... Primarily heart disease and vascular disease but all sorts of neurological diseases as well. That nightmare Will Go on ad infinitum until all of those who took the jam are dead ...maybe sooner rather than later...
Those of us less fortunate than the over-educated will never forget those years. We will never forget the loved ones we could not say goodbye to. We will never forget the cowardice and the tyranny of the over-educated. Even as we pay off the debt we won't forget that most of the money went to the top 10% and the enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper elites was of historic proportions in the trillions of dollars. Trust me we won't forget.
When the populace finally find their Pol Pot of the modern age and The guillotines are once again rolled into the streets the only thing we will forget is our humanity ...until the sewers are filled with blood and we all realize that this man-made disease cost us more than just our lives and our livelihoods. It cost us our souls... but maybe that was the purpose all along...
It’s easy to look back with the knowledge we have today and feel bitter, but I think it’s sad that anyone would choose to. How do we handle pandemics when we don’t have many facts? It seems some people really wanted to just let it loose and see what happened. I’m glad the virulence of Covid has waned, but in the next pandemic we will be faced with these same choices once again. Were we too cautious in the end? Hard to say until the dust settles.
They knew almost immediately that unhealthy old people and the morbidly obese were the only large demographics who were in serious danger.
They knew in March of 2020 that it wasn’t really affecting kids and that healthy adults would get knocked down for a few days before recovering.
Yet the insanity of mask mandates and attempts to mandate injections went on for well over a year.
Schools in deep blue areas were closed for over 18 months.
It was sheer unscientific insanity, and I am never going to forgive these authoritarian morons who condescendingly told us they knew best when it was clear they were stupid and incompetent.
For those of us that care enough to pay attention the dust is settling and words are emerging such as exploitative tyrannical even murderous. Big pharma lying to people about what they produced... Tyrannical governments ruining people's lives and censoring... And the deafening silence while there's a 10 to 15% increase in all cause mortality to our populations in the west ... People are dying of some mysterious cause in record numbers that no one is talking about... Lots of people died unnecessarily because of decisions made and giving people the benefit of the doubt who have proven to be duplicitous in these events and who have gained financially seems naive to me...
Not everything is a conspiracy. I hope you find peace.
As George Carlin noted, you don't need a conspiracy when interests converge. If you watch for example The Big Short you'll see this sort of effect in action. Poor mortgages were sold as good investments because everyone stood to profit.
The mortgage-holders got to live in homes with some hope of owning them one day.
The mortgage-sellers got to get commissions on mortgages.
The small banks got to sell their mortgages as assets to the largers banks.
The larger banks got to put the good mortgages with the bad mortgages and sell them as Collateralised Debt Obligations.
The ratings agencies asked to rate them as AAA knew that if they didn't, the banks would go down the road to the next ratings agency, and pay them to do it instead.
The government turned a blind eye because the increased money flowing through the system made it look like the economy was growing (though it was mostly inflation), and accidentally created some real growth along the way, however ephemeral (even the guy making coffees down the road from Lehmann Brothers got to have a minimum wage job for a decade, even if it suddenly stopped one day).
At no stage did anyone get together in a cigar-smoke-filled room with uplights to make them look sinister and conspire to rip the US off to the tune of trillions of dollars. They didn't need to, because their interests converged in fraudulent activity.
Now, I'm not an anti-vaxxer or the like. But it's true that some people profited mightily from others' suffering, and that governments used the crisis to arrogate more powers to themselves.
The Hong Kong Flu in 1968-69 killed 1-4 million people. This was the time of Woodstock. But we didn't have Zoom, so we didn't have a Laptop Class who could demand to stay at home while poor people brought them things and took all the risk.
We had plenty of facts. We had influenza pandemic plans. Some now object that this was different - but influenza and SARS-Cov-2 are both communicable respiratory diseases which can be transmitted by sustained close contact indoors, so it's the same thing. Those pandemic plans were instantly discarded in favour of panicked responses.
HIV/AIDS has, since 1981, killed some 43 million people, by the way. At the end of 2019 it was 35 million. After killing fewer than a million people a year, it went up to 2 million a year. Why? All the resources diverted to vaccines and antivirals for covid-19 meant less were available for HIV/AIDS.
Yeah, I'm just going to be honest here... I watched it. I don't get it.
I find no connection between COVID lockdowns and mopping a floor with someone's hair.
That's OK. I think Marciel Duchamp's toilet seat is stupid and brutalism is architectural barbarism. Maybe I'm not the target audience.
I don't get it either. My memory of those days is just feeling like everyone had gone insane. I still moved around as I pleased.
I think it is an urban/rural thing. I live in CA, but in a town of about 20K. We did largely shut down for a few weeks, but after that, everyone smiled and nodded when someone from the state or Sacto Public Health was looking over our shoulders... and then we got on with life once they left.
And out here right-wingers were trying to convince the rest of the country that California had become a tyrannical Soviet style communist dictatorship and nobody was allowed to step a foot outside their dwelling.
Oh, I have family in the Bay Area and I can attest that there and in LA it was REALLY bad. Not as bad as NYC I think, but close. I found going into Sacramento (30 min north of me) pretty alarming even in late 2020 and early 2021 -- people would scream at you for not wearing your mask over your nose. Meanwhile, in my town, we hadn't been wearing masks at all for months.
The really sad cases are the people who never recovered. My family in S.F. still leaves the house only when absolutely necessary, even now, 4+ years later. Last week I was working backstage at my daughter's orchestra concert in Sacto and 2 of the performers were still wearing masks. COVID really broke some people's ability to accurately assess risk.
Well I know people STILL getting covid and they will wear masks for a while during and after their sickness if they have to go out to a store or wherever, so don't judge people wearing masks even now. They could be doing so to protect you. Like when people cover their mouths and nose when they cough or sneeze.
No. These families have been doing it all year. It's not for a temporarily sick grandma or because someone is recovering from a cold.
No normal American wore masks in the regular course of life (shopping, school, etc...) prior to March of 2020. Even if you accept that it made sense for a while (which I do), Covid is 100% in the rear view mirror now. Even the Japanese (talk about a mask wearing culture) now classify it as a minor, flu-level virus. At this point, a failure to return to your Feb, 2020 behavior is a sign of improper risk assessment. The longest Covid of all appears to be a mental illness.
I am in the same boat. I do know that different areas had different experiences, but being in the US Midwest, in a semi- rural area, this video doesn't actually resonate with me at all. It's just...weird, LOL
I think that's the point. It was a very, very weird time.
The plandemic literally ruined my life. I had just found love, moved abroad to sunnier climes, and begun to really discover who I was, when suddenly I was living in a surreal and hellish prison where the vast majority of the other inmates seemed to instantly go along with the most insane shit I'd ever heard.
As someone who had always respected alternative researchers (please don't use the phrase 'conspiracy theorists', it was a term invented by intelligence agencies to discredit them) and had been one at times in certain contexts, so wasn't intellectually surprised it might happen, but was still emotionally devastated and felt so alienated that at times I considered suicide.
I flouted the deliberately-demoralising 'rules' wherever possible, and did everything I could to keep myself and my partner going. But the economic and psychological toll was so great that I ended up homeless and penniless, lost my job, and my mental health became extremely dire, to the point where I can't discuss it here as it would simply be too upsetting for most people.
Worst of all, from my POV, I lost the love of my life, and that is the wound for me that will never heal. Had the majority of English people seen through the ruse when BoJo was still in his 'herd immunity' phase, and made it impossible for the lockdown to occur here, I would very likely be flourishing, and in the most special relationship I can imagine.
So for me, it's not just 'never again' , it's 'every individual needs to do what they have to TO MAKE SURE it never happens again'. This is a big ask. I know what it involves and what it may cost. But if not enough people are prepared to confront reality in this way, then this nightmare will repeat. And it will be worse next time.
Indeed, we need to say NEVER AGAIN and really mean it. Like, absolutely never, ever again. No matter HOW bad they say the next pandemic will be.
Bozo is the perfect poster child for what happens when you try to please everyone, and end up pleasing NO ONE. He was the Neville Chamberlain of the plandemic, basically. Don't be a people-pleaser, it WILL backfire and you WILL regret it.
I encourage you to consider that while both Chamberlain and Johnson were puppets of a kind, BoJo was much more conscious of his involvement in the wider agenda. I mean, he faked an illness and was privy to some pretty serious meetings that occurred during that time. What I'm saying is that he wasn't trying to please people, he was complicit in the most elaborate psychosocial hoax ever. When he was about to launch the herd immunity policy full bore is when they sat him down and had The Talk.
Indeed
I watched it and don't see anything weird about a mom and daughter doing this. It doesn't look exploitative. It's nothing even close to how sick child actors are treated.
It was interesting that she was wearing her school uniform. The child has a very unusual face.
In all likelihood both mother and daughter will look back on this project and remember it fondly. As for the "lockdowns", I went where I wanted to and wore a fakish mask so no one would talk to me. Children were much better off at home than in school. People who think otherwise obviously do not understand what is going on in the American public school system. The real horror of it was the power of the state being flexed to the point it was able to destroy the small businesses of this country and force people to die isolated and alone. For those things, I shall never forgive. But I had already had a long list of things for which I'll never forgive the government.
I was in an unusual situation during Covid because I had been suffering of a serious chronic illness that forced me to live isolated inside my home between 2016 and 2020, so when the lockdowns started, I was glad that I was no longer alone. Suddenly, everybody shared my lonely fate. I was also afraid of catching the virus in my vulnerable state, and so initially I agreed with all those policies. But in retrospect, I realize how absurd they were not only because so many countries destroyed their economies and the mental health of school children, but also because, as a society, we decided that we had to eliminate death altogether, and no measure was too insane if it could be justified under "it will save lives." Now, we know that lives weren't necessarily saved, and to have a society that tries to outlaw death is pretty insane.
Yes exactly - some governments forgot entirely that they make life and death decisions every day (around funding medicines etc) and their role is to mediate the competing cost-benefit of policy decisions across society. Instead due to the social contagion and a saviour complex certain leaders developed we stopped society to save the lives of the most vulnerable while hiding and deferring the cost to everyone else. It would be like banning driving to eliminate road deaths.
We should never forget how we were treated & the consequences. Thanks for a reminder, even though it sounds harrowing.
I think what people have memory-holed is their complicity in going along with madness and tyranny.
BINGO
During lockdown I was working in the field of social work among immigrant children with special needs living in poverty. We forget/underestimate how much essential services for special needs children are in the schools, and how this was suddenly turned off when lockdowns began without a back-up plan for these children. Because they were living in poverty, their parents were also mostly working essential, minimum-wage roles, and so were put in a difficult spot to maintain the care of their children. Luckily the immigrant communities (largely nonWestern) are rather less individualistic and more likely to utilize community supports, but they faced hardships in this era that their middle/upper class peers did not. I once tried to talk about this with a middle-class, progressive friend who was and remains very pro-lockdown, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears. There seems to be a virtue issue at play—to be “good” one has to be pro-lockdown and also pro-communities like my patients, so there is some denial I think.
Lots of people had great pandemics. I know a lot of those people. They got richer. They spent more time with their family. Found new hobbies outdoors. It was like an extended holiday with some odd bits around the edges like masks, sanitizers, and lots of vaccines. Then there were those that had a terrible pandemic and hundreds of millions of those we don’t even know the depth of their horrors. How many died due to deprivation? The true evil of the moment, the insanity of imposing lockdowns on daily wage earners in developing countries. Imagine no social safety net, and your own government preventing you from doing the very thing that means the difference between eating that day or not. Knowing governments were willing to do that for this virus haunts me to this day.
Domestic violence, robbery, murder, suicides, all spiked up. But hey, white collar workers got to work from home so it was all worth it!
I'd say it was worth it just for effectively forcing them to put cameras in every classroom, thus exposing the indoctrination going on there.
Indeed
The reason people have memory holed the lockdowns is because no one took any action. My family and I moved from the Northeast to Florida because we did not agree with the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I will always remember.
Thankful I live in suburban Texas where the national big box stores had signs saying you had to mask but the employees couldn’t enforce it because of the sheer volume of people who ignored them.
Our gyms reopened in late May of 2020.
My son in law worked with families in inner city London
A family of seven in a two bed flat on the tenth floor of a high rise come to mind. There IS a problem in that ‘the chattering classes’ are defining ‘reality’.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-cruel-reality-of-online-school-in-a-12th-floor-flat/
I never was a COVID denials, but let's not pretend that the lockdowns were cost-free.
I knew you would say this. But South Dakota (I have been there) still has towns and schools, and hospitals and shops and civic buildings; that is, places where people congregate. I think their Governor was a wise and courageous lady.
Indeed. I mean, when she's not shooting puppies, yes, I agree.
But seriously, she handled the pandemic better than just about anyone else, better than even DeSantis (who initially did a brief quasi-lockdown before wising up.)
I've no interest in watching the film.
However, I do note that everyone's set that time aside, as you said. Just today my son (12) was commenting that he kept thinking 2018 was four years ago - 2020-21 were just blanks. I've heard that from many adults, too.
Politically and legally, everyone wants to set it aside, too. Neither the politicians promoting border closures and lockdowns nor those opposing them ever mentioned it all after 2021, and all the court cases about it all have just been dropped or tossed aside summarily.
Certainly, lockdowns are like Iraqi WMD - everyone claims they never believed in them, or that even if they were a dodgy thing, the intentions of leaders were good and so were the outcomes.
Indeed. No one who supported lockdowns back then seems to want to admit they did, just like the Iraq War. Because no one wants to admit to having been on the wrong side of history, let alone having been fooled.
At most you get, "well maybe we went too far, but it was a novel virus and we weren't sure what to do and..."
I, too, don't wanna talk about the COVID era of my life because it was hard for me, mentally speaking. For example at the beginning of the lockdowns, i was worried that my loved ones would die and i wouldn't be able to bid them farewell (it was the first time i was experiencing this), i was feeling like one of the "Companions of the cave" every time i went out to buy sth i needed, and although i finally got Omicron despite the fact that i'd gotten two shots of AstraZeneca vaccine, by that time, i had become less depressed than before. Generally, it was a very unique time for me.
Unfortunately we will likely encounter a pathogen that legitimately requires significant coordinated action or inaction for a truly short period of time and we won’t do what is required as the boy has already cried wolf and the over reaction, manipulations, lies and indignities of the Covid era have taken their needles toll…