Imagine if, at the end of the Third Reich, the Nazis had pooh-poohed the need for the Nuremberg trials or de-Nazification. “We’re all good, then? Forgive and forget, eh?” Imagine if Apartheid ended, not with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but a blithe admonition to “Let’s not dwell on the past, eh?”
Hyperbole? Only somewhat, given the scale of the social, economic and medical damage wreaked by the idiotic, panicked Covid policies enforced by governments and health bureaucrats and cheered on by large slabs of the commentariat.
All of whom are in full, shamefaced retreat.
And now they want us to just forget it all ever happened.
I mean, cop a load of this bullying Karen:
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
I’m sure she was so proud of her little apparatchik — at the time. Now, she’s admitting that she was wrong.
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Yes, you did. Or you should have, if you’d bothered to listen. From the earliest months of the pandemic, there was ample scientific evidence of the uselessness of masks — especially Karen’s dinky little bits of cloth. It wasn’t The Science™ — it was science. Real science.
So, naturally, it was ignored by the politicians, bureaucratic troughers and media sheep.
There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
Yet, one side — those advocating schools open — was screamed at by Covid fanatics, in the same manner of Atlantic Karen’s precious little Covid-bully bellowing “SOCIAL DISTANCING!” at complete strangers.
At the same time, millions were forced to take an experimental vaccine, under threat of everything from losing their jobs to complete social ostracism. Those who did stand firm were sacked, bullied, outcast and vilified.
But, hey, that’s all just water under the bridge, right?
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.
Do you mean: denialism?
Some of us had to put up with having that screamed at us for three years — completely, wilfully and viciously in real denial of the fundamental premises of not just science but democracy and free speech. We’re not gloating now — we’re angry. Incandescent with righteous indignation.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.
The Atlantic
No — you need to be held responsible for what you did. Ignorance is no excuse, any more than “I vos only obeyink orders”.
Sorry, Atlantic Karen, we will never forgive nor forget. We don’t want an amnesty, we want an accounting in full.
