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Misery Loves Company
The last six months have proved a few things: Americans are not as strong as we once were and our national past-time isn’t baseball, it’s complaining. I’ve been extremely disheartened to watch how we’ve responded to the COVID crisis; with little critical thinking and questioning of the narrative we’ve been fed on everything from masks (from they’re completely unnecessary all the way to you have to wear one outside alone in the woods) to the logic of a nationwide, indefinite lockdown.
Over at the Washington Examiner, my friend Tim Carney wrote about the inexplicable decision of our local parks system to cancel a holiday lights show this year. He wrote,
Why close it down? Sometimes, it seems like governments close down fun stuff because they think fun is inappropriate during the coronavirus. I’m not exaggerating. Consider closed playgrounds. California and many municipalities are closing playgrounds, despite a lack of scientific grounding for such a move. As Matt Welch writes at Reason magazine, “Children are being punished for California bureaucrats’ failure to keep up with the science.”
I argued in defense of trick-or-treating this week also for the Washington Examiner,
Our children have already had so much taken from them, and it is senseless from a scientific perspective to take trick-or-treating away from them, too. In its recommendations against trick-or-treating, Los Angeles explained, “Citing … the potential for gatherings beyond household members, county officials initially nixed trick-or-treating along with other Halloween traditions, including haunted houses and parades.” Let’s be clear about what we’ve been told: Children can’t partake in a safe night walking outside with friends because adults may gather indoors and party?
Once again, despite being the least at-risk population, children are facing the brunt of the impact, and for no good reason. Adults may, and likely will, spend the night doing whatever they’d like, including parties and other ill-advised gatherings. And children will, as they have been for the last six months, spend the night at home, trying to remember a time before the pandemic.
Both Tim and I have had folks ask us “Why do you care so much about Christmas lights or trick-or-treating? Aren’t there more important things in life?”
To which I want to affirmatively say no, there is nothing more important in life than living life. Yes, there is political discord and suffering, but what we are doing right now is living our lives just focusing on the negativity instead of all of the beauty and fun. That emphasis on the negative while we sit alone at home alone is perhaps a contributing factor in sky-rocketing overdoses and suicides we’re seeing in the last six months.
We need to be fighting to make joy essential because if we don’t, is this life really worth living? There is nothing more virtuous than pushing for the return to leisure activities, and we all need to pressure our local communities to prioritize their return.
Published in General
Bethany said:
“…there is nothing more important in life than living life. Yes, there is political discord and suffering, but what we are doing right now is living our lives just focusing on the negativity instead of all of the beauty and fun.”
YES! You are absolutely right! Living life is the single most important thing to do right now. I figured out early on (Thank God) (really…for the inspiration to know this) that each day was the ONLY day of my little children’s lives. They didn’t have a concept of “next month” or “next year”– each day was the only day that mattered.
I agree that the focus is so much on the political ramifications of everything that it seems that adults have completely forgotten the reality of a child’s life. It is very sad, and very destructive to our society.
Once there is a political, ideological and moral investment in a policy or belief, it is too emotionally costly for many people to permit change.
The undeniable statistical fact is that (a) lockdown and masks have had almost no effect in curbing COVID–comparing outcomes and policies across jurisdictions and countries makes that assertion more irrefutable every day; (b) kids are not at risk. Where I live in the Washington DC metro area, no one aged 0-9 has died of COVID. There have been two fatalities in MD in the age group 10-19. (c) the pandemic is over in the NE US and is declining in the south so there is no reason to continue to impose measures that do not work anyway.
If we were to act rationally and follow the actual science and the actual data we would circle the PPE wagons around the infirm and very elderly and encourage everyone else to back to normal and to make contact, get the bug and build herd immunity as quickly as possible to it can’t get to Granny.
Instead, the vested interest in pretending these policies work is enormous. Lives, careers and sanity are being lost, incalculable financial loss but the overriding policy objective is to pretend that our leaders and experts were right all along and that the immense moral satisfaction of the mask and distance enforcers was righteously obtained.
https://ricochet.com/791535/the-war-of-all-against-all/
I want a t-shirt with the slogan: I refuse to participate in the War of All Against All.
I call it “living la vida paranoia.”
It first came to me as we started to raise our children in the 90’s and I noticed how different everything had become since I was a kid. It seemed that everyone wanted to encase their children with bubble wrap and put them on a bookshelf or a mantle piece and were ready to call child services on you if you didn’t treat your children the same way. (I gave my oldest son a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys when it first came out. Of course, I also sent him away to summer camp… at Parris Island.)
Now nothing can go unsupervised. We virtually chip them and track them on our phones. And we feel we’re justified. After all, don’t we get Amber Alerts for everything that happens in a 50-mile radius? Doesn’t the local sheriff supply a list of registered sex offenders living within four blocks in every direction? Doesn’t everything come with a bright yellow warning sticker? This baseball glove is a known carcinogen to the State of California! And I live in Ohio!
Death is stalking us. It’s just around the corner! I swear! And if you just cower here in the corner and take your Ritalin® (a registered trade name of Novartis) like a good child I’ll let you watch TV. No, Johnny cannot come over for a playdate! Do you want the PLAGUE?!?
Which was the advice some of us were giving in MARCH.
Preach it, @bethanymandel!