History ignobly records and rightly condemns those despots who tried to excuse their trampling of people’s rights by arguing: “I kept you safe.” Astoundingly, such despots are often enabled and, indeed, applauded by those they oppress.
In the wake of regressive governors attempting to abort Thanksgiving celebrations (and the entire holiday season), the bitter lessons of history are repeating.
The political paradigm the Left crafted to destroy President Trump was that he had done little to “stop the virus”; and, ergo, his inaction had killed over 200,000 Americans. This narrative was included with and undergirded by the pandemic porn peddled for ratings and profits by the elitist media.
The result? Much of the public was frightened into believing COVID-19 would kill them. And much of the political class was scared witless the virus would kill their careers. The unfortunate confluence of these circumstances was the lockdowns.
The logic became as circular as it was cynical: the politicians needed to look like they were doing something—anything—to “keep people safe.” The public needed the faux hope the politicians were doing something—anything—to “keep people safe.” Thus, though first announced as a two-week expedient to “flatten the curve,” the first wave of lockdowns, including mask mandates, persisted; and, now, the current recrudescence of lockdowns.
This current imposition of lockdowns comes despite the reality that such public health “precautions” kill people. Suicides, overdoses, domestic violence, senior citizens’ suffering the “failure to thrive,” and bankruptcies are among so many of the unconscionable “side effects” of the lockdown treatment for avoiding COVID-19. But because the political narrative’s fear is driving the politicians and their supportive public to embrace and reward the lockdowns, the truth about their disastrous societal consequences has become a lie of omission.
In one of many distressing historical parallels, as with prohibition in another time, lockdowns are turning otherwise law-abiding citizens into scofflaws. Worsening matters, akin to the East German Stasi, in their zeal to have their ludicrous, unenforceable edicts obeyed, these governors are encouraging citizens to inform upon their non-compliant neighbors.
Naturally, governors who flout their own lockdown rules aren’t as fond of being informed upon by their citizens. Thus do the lockdowns’ arbitrary and hypocritical diktats undermine respect for the rule of law; dissolve the bonds of communal comity; and further contribute to the disastrous societal consequences of basing public health decisions on political science rather than on medical science.
Yet public support exists for the lockdowns. These people have made the personal decision that a lockdown’s effects are less dangerous than the possibility that they might catch the virus without them. This is eminently fair; and nothing precludes those living with this fear from personally locking down to avoid catching the virus.
What is not fair is their demand that the government compel everyone else to be locked down, as well—especially given the overwhelming evidence that the societal costs of lockdowns are more immense and enduring than the pandemic itself will be. After all, if your neighbors have hunkered down in their basement, likely nothing you do will increase their chances of catching the virus unless you break into their bunker.
Nonetheless, the vicious lockdown cycle continues apace, as does the lockdown proponents’ anti-science sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Politicians want to look like they are doing “something.” Many in the public need to believe that “something” will work—and both the politicians and their supporters are demanding the obeisance of the rest of us. In their minds, all they need to do to claim the moral high ground and command compliance to their whimsical decrees is to gravely intone their magical mantra: “to save lives.”
This is bitterly ironic given the majority of the lockdown governors and their supporters are from the party that used to aver that “the greatest form of patriotism is dissent.” Now, these very same regressives smear those who dissent from their lockdowns as wanting to “kill grandma.”
But how many of these lockdown lemmings denounced the Democratic governors who put COVID-19 infected patients back in with non-infected senior citizens—the most vulnerable among us—and actually killed grandpa and grandma? More likely, they bought one of the homicidally negligent governor’s solipsistic fictional tomes and watched as he received an Emmy for his performance as the Big Brother of Oceania (and Fredo) in the Albany production of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Perchance somewhere, amidst the rapture of their self-professed moral superiority, these Leftist politicians and their enablers can discern the thunderous sound of their own hypocrisy regarding the lethal lockdowns—namely, that “one death is too many” to pay for their reelections and virtue signaling?