This piece by Alex Pareene is right on the money. He describes his average day with his son, in January 2022 taking him to school, picking him up, playing, homework, the usual. And then writes this:
It all seems very normal. It seems a bit uncannily normal, really, happening against a backdrop of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of new Covid-19 infections across the nation, and months of Americans dying by the thousands. And yet! To hear some people, this is a country where panicky scolds refuse to allow children to go back to school, or, in some vague sense, let people have their normal lives back.
Of course, the normalcy is unequally distributed. “Normal” is still an impossible state of affairs for an untold number of people with immunodeficiency or hospital jobs or dead parents or lost homes. Our schools here are open (except when classes go remote, as they regularly do, because, again, so many people are catching Covid-19), but parents everywhere are understandably at the ends of their ropes in the current surge. We’re deeply relieved our kid just became vaccine-eligible; others might still wait a year or more.
But, with a couple exceptions, those sorts of people, with legitimate complaints about what the unchecked spread of the virus has done to their lives, aren’t really the ones you actually see complaining so goddamn much, because most of those sorts of people don’t have the sorts of platforms that would lead me to come across their complaints. It is very much mainly people in households very much like mine (or ones that have it even easier!) that are the primary sources of the most well-publicized opining on how This Has Gone On Long Enough and It’s Time For the Democrats to Say Enough Is Enough and Make It Stop.
If I wanted to be charitable I’d say I sort of understand it. We are obviously in a privileged position, but life is certainly not normal for us by our pre-pandemic standards (though it is all perfectly normal to my son, who cannot remember a pre-pandemic world). My wife is still at home on endless video calls each day. We’ve postponed the kid’s proper birthday party until he has full immunity from his second dose of the vaccine. We are traveling and going out less than we used to (though I also largely stopped “going out” a few years prior to the pandemic, for reasons you can probably deduce with context clues). I have lost precious time with my grandmother and other family members. But, honestly, I don’t want to be charitable! The people in the press and on social media complaining the loudest about Covid-19 restrictions are, at this point, people for whom Covid-19 is just a thing they are sick of hearing and thinking about.
What most of the restrictions on our behavior (and the behavior of most other Americans) have in common is that they are not being imposed on us by power-grabbing authority figures. They are largely decisions we made, or decisions made for us by other private actors, in response to the inescapable fact that a dangerous and highly transmissible virus is spreading rapidly throughout the city, and the state, and the country, and the world.
This is why I find the tenor of discussion around Covid-19 restrictions genuinely bewildering. There basically aren’t any. The United States is powering through the Omicron wave with its usual enforced individualism. The hard restrictions on our activities are, for the most part, not mandated or enforced by the state, acting at the behest of liberals who refuse to go back to normal because they are addicted to panic and quarantine; the limits are imposed by the virus that isn’t going away. My kid’s school class went remote for a while because people had Covid-19. He’s back in school now even though his principal has Covid-19.
As usual in the United States, the people who won the political argument are now complaining the loudest that they’re dissatisfied with the results, and, apparently, it’s all the fault of the losers.
“As usual in the United States, the people who won the political argument are now complaining the loudest that they’re dissatisfied with the results, and, apparently, it’s all the fault of the losers.”
Somebody put that on billboard. I’ve rarely read anything that is so true.