Lockdown Forever
We will never be free from COVID restrictions until we reject their logic utterly.
The lockdowns will continue until morale improves.
Ever since the CDC announced its judgment that vaccinated people can congregate indoors without masks, the letter of COVID law has been loosened. But the spirit remains. Many cities and counties no longer mandate businesses to require masks. Curfews have been lifted, capacity limits eased. But the mood has not been lifted or eased. Whether we say it or not, we know in our hearts that it could all come crashing back down upon our heads at any time. Like a perpetual threat, the principle of the thing remains.
The principle is this: for whatever reason, without warning and with only the most flimsy ghost of a rationale, people with power can make burdensome, demoralizing, and ruinous demands upon people without power. We are far past the point where the invocation of an “emergency situation” counts for anything more than a hollow gesture, a contemptuous formality. The pretense of explanation is now an empty ritual, as empty as when White House officials put on surgical masks backstage, walk to their lecterns, then take the masks off to speak. Both rulers and ruled are going through the motions now; neither really needs an explanation why. We know our roles. We are being taught our place.
If all this was not obvious already, LA County has re-instated its indoor mask mandate regardless of vaccine status amid concerns about rising cases due to the Delta variant. “Due to increased COVID-19 transmission,” the county press release stated, “masks will be required indoors regardless of vaccination status.” Elsewhere, on its Public Health website, the county claims, “the more people get vaccinated the less likely it is that COVID-19 will spread or that new variants of the virus will take hold.”
So for those keeping track at home: the logic is now, “unvaccinated people are to blame for new variants and rising cases, but also, your vaccine will not protect you from new variants or stop rising cases—so mask up.” A masterpiece of Dadaist absurdity. It’s futile at this point to rehearse all the well-known truths: vaccines do protect against the Delta variant, mask mandates are completely useless, what counts as a “surge” is hardly a blip, and so forth.
None of it matters: anyone who can be convinced by such observations is already convinced. It’s not as if we were short on evidence that lockdown measures are politically motivated, functionally useless, and recklessly destructive. The best description of our present situation remains that articulated by bodybuilder-turned-activist Chris Sky at the beginning of this whole debacle:
The mask is about compliance.... And then guess what kids? Once you take your vaccine...they’re gonna tell ya, sorry, the vaccine isn’t as effective as we thought it was gonna be, so now you still gotta wear your mask.... And now they’re gonna put you back on lockdown, and bring it all the way 'til July of next year so they can do the same thing again.... It’s a way to take your rights, your freedoms, close your business, take your wealth. Why? So you become dependent on the government.
Visiting Los Angeles a week ago—before the mask mandate officially came back—I had one of those moments in which what has become familiar suddenly seems strange, and you see it clearly for what it is. I was in line for coffee at a store where all the baristas had to wear masks. Standing among the maskless patrons and watching my fellow Americans shuffle about behind the counter, I realized that I was witnessing the spiritual formation of a permanent underclass before my very eyes. These kids were being forced into faceless servitude by a regime that makes it too risky for their employers even to let them smile.
This is not going to end if we just play nice enough. It will not let up once enough people are vaccinated, whatever the hell that means. The principle of the lockdown regime is not public health, and the people in charge will not “let us” be free once the public is healthy enough to satisfy them. The principle of it all is power. The instrument of that power is a ceaseless threat of arbitrary oppression, engineered to grind the hearts and souls of ordinary Americans down into a cringing servitude. It will all continue until we reject the premise of the thing outright—until we flatly deny in principle that these unconstitutional measures have any legitimate authority over our actions or our lives. If we want to be free again, we must simply refuse to comply.
I have been free the entire time, because I've utterly rejected the nonsense since 16 days after it started.
I gave 15 days to flatten the curve. When that magically wasn't enough. . . I knew what the scam was and ignored it.
3 trips halfway across the country, in my personal vehicle.
Don't own a mask.
Hug people & shake hands.
Pay cash.
Wash my hands when they're dirty - sometimes - but never before.
Mid-50s, health issues, no Wuhan flu.
We are experiencing the human and individual freedom equivalent of the well-known "capturing wild pigs" scenario, albeit with just a squinch more transparency. Instead of the Fence for the pigs, we get the legal mandates limiting our freedom camouflaged as "safety" precautions to meet a declared threat of death. To support this, EVERY death, from whatever source, is a COVID death. If you had terminal heart disease, were 350 pounds and failing organs, caught the seasonal flu, had severe pneumonia coupled with asthma, etc., you were listed as a death caused by COVID. and then some Governor's sent elderly who had the disease to nursing homes so the numbers could rise even more. This simply supported the fear factor and eliminated any rational questioning of the power grab by government. Now that so many have gone through this exercise in manipulation and suspension of individual rights (with, not incidentally, no proof of any actual improved health safety and a proven delay in any development of herd immunity) the (I used to say "our" but that no longer is true) government at all levels is now salivating to make their assertion of power over individual lives that violates not just the specifics but the very goal of our Constitution permanent at worst and at their every whim at best. The one and only way to fight this is what some states are already doing: limiting or removing the dictatorial powers of State Governors. It is not a perfect solution, but it does require unity of state legislatures in order to enslave the population. We have just experienced a country wide parallel to the Japanese internment camps with the exception that we were interned in place. And millions of our citizens even now seem blissfully unaware...