What’s occurring in China is brutal, but it’s not necessarily surprising. In many ways, the Chinese people have always been prisoners, regularly subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. Now, though, the people of Xi’an are literal prisoners, quite literally sealed off from society. When will they be freed? A week from now, a month, a year? Sadly, we don’t know.
We antisocialized ourselves, fully withdrew from random commingling, and in a way filtered ourselves from society. Life lost its luster when expected to test or inoculate oneself with something with no longitudinal safety assessments in order to live a life anything close to what we once took for granted.
Will we live with illogical fear and behaviors for years? Or will we use facts to take back the lives we value?
These seemingly scientific slogans – flatten the curve, slow the spread, socially distance, track-and-trace – mask deeply dangerous policy ideas that can ruin life for everyone, and utterly destroy health and human liberty itself. The film is right: pandemic controls are an existential threat.
This is a warning call. We have seen these conditions before, and we have seen where they lead. Turn back now – that way leads to darkness.
Whether groups like the US Freedom Flyers and Airline Employees for Health Freedom succeed likely will not come down to science, but, instead, a combination of legal technicalities and whether enough people will stand their ground and suffer the consequences while demonstrating their worth to their employers, and perhaps the rest of society, through their absence.
As we demarcate our own comfort zones, we could all use an extra dose of compassion for those who make different calibrations. Whichever strategy claims our allegiance—persisting with strict compliance or loosening the reins—it pays to remember that people on the other side want the pandemic to end as much as we do: they simply disagree on how it will happen.
What a stunning repudiation of state policy – the worst failing of public health and public policy perhaps in the history of the US if not the entire world. We are right now living in its last days. Remember these days, my friends. They are legion and mark what is likely the end of the great fiasco.
What they attempted in 2020-21 was without precedent in the modern world. It did not finally work, even to achieve the aim of keeping the professional classes disease free. This is perhaps the moment when it all finally comes to an end, not with repudiation but with resignation, acquiescence, and surrender.
Are you as a member of the well-educated Western elite class prepared to explore the possibility that members of the sociological cohort to which you belong are capable of highly organized evil and deception rooted in a deep disdain for the core humanity and inherent dignity of all people?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that living in the modern world has left most people, including journalists, politicians, physicians, and even many scientists, with little or no appreciation of how important their relationship with microbes is to their overall health. Not just bacteria and fungi, but also viruses, too.
In India, it is even more absurd that almost everything is normal for adults: restaurants, malls, movie theatres, crowded events, crowded buses and trains and flights, etc.; while at the same time schools are not open, and even where open, normal activities are not permitted for kids!
