A recent article in the Atlantic has caused quite a kerfuffle on social media and made me think I’m not a very good Christian. We are called to forgive others as we would ourselves, yet my anger after reading Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, made me realize how far away I am from forgiving anybody that had anything to do with our disastrous Covid response.
The author’s stance is basically NOBODY KNEW enough about the virus to determine what the right choices were as far as school closures, business shutdowns, masks, etc…so we can’t blame folks who got it wrong and by gosh, can’t we just let bygones be bygones and move on? Well, no, because in fact many of us DID KNOW early on about a lot of this stuff.
For example by April of 2020, we knew that children did not face a serious threat from Covid, nor were they large spreaders of it. A cursory glance at data from other countries that didn’t keep kids home, or just at private schools here that remained open made this clear. Yet public schools in America beholden to the teachers’s unions stayed shut for almost 2 years in some areas.
The same could be said for masks, of which the science behind them NOT WORKING for mitigating viral spread had been well established for years, but which public health weaponized by implying you were a good and unselfish person if you believed in masks and a terrible granny killer if you didn’t.
On and on this went went, with a variety of things where an established narrative with no science to back it up was parroted ad nauseam as the good and virtuous position and anyone questioning it was bad; from natural immunity, to made up 6′ social distance rules, to business/school closures and then finally the grand daddy of virtue signal nonsense, the vaccines.
All of this caused much societal damage, as groups of people were pitted against one another, fracturing relationships which to this day remain broken. More infuriating is none of this did diddly to stop the virus doing what the virus was always going to do, but brought great collateral damage of which we are just now seeing the bill come due.
Massive global poverty, enormous childhood learning loss, particularly in low income groups, a mental health pandemic, sky high levels of addiction/suicide, supply chain issues, high inflation; all of this can be tied directly back to our insane pandemic response, which ended up killing more people than the actual virus did.
Who could have guessed that throwing out 20 + years of standard pandemic planning in favor of China style lockdowns would wreak such havoc and practically incinerate everything required for a healthy societies to thrive A lot of us actually, but we got shouted down, accused of being Covid deniers and kicked off social media.
The word that best sums up our entire pandemic response is is anti-human and to refresh the memory as to why, here is what government and public health officials did:
- Shamed younger people in to thinking they were dangerous viral vectors to be avoided.
- Closed business, schools, churches and divided us up as between essential or non essential people.
- Dehumanized people by mandating they cover their breathing holes and their uniquely identifying facial features, with useless face masks.
- Made people suffer alone in hospitals while their loved ones watched them die on iPads.
- Promoted and caused the enactment of vicious, anti-science vaccine mandates, which almost broke society by othering those that didn’t partake as selfish, evil and/or dumb. Many jobs were lost and families were permanently split apart by this dangerous and unprecedented mass psychological manipulation.
- Lied about the vaccines preventing infection and being safe/effective, while pushing them hard for all age groups. We now know, for example of the myocarditis risk in young males, yet the CDC is STILL recommending shots and boosters for everyone.
- Banned milestone events like funerals, weddings, proms, birthdays, graduations, baby showers; anything it seems that strengthened societal bonds.
- Prevented people from getting proper screening procedures, so diseases like cancer progressed unnecessarily to untreatable stages.
- Banned any non-government approved therapeutic from being used for Covid treatment, lied about their efficacy and fired doctors for prescribing them. This alone caused thousands of needless deaths.
I could go on, but you get the drift. With the casual flip of a switch, our civil liberties went out the window and in came a new dystopian era of medical tyranny, where incompetent, power hungry bureaucrats partnered with Big Pharma/Big Tech to govern the most intimate and personal details of our lives.
This created tremendous harm of which no apologies, nor even the slightest acknowledgment from those that caused it have come about.
So sorry, but not sorry, we are nowhere near the forgiveness stage. Someday, yes, but for now, we need at least an acknowledgment that mistakes were made. And I mean all of us, including those responsible and those who, while maybe not directly responsible, went along with the narrative and treated those that didn’t horribly.
Because you see, this is not just about those that were wronged needing accountability to happen. Those that did the wrongdoing need a chance to come to terms with it, apologize to whoever they need to and perhaps forgive themselves. If not, these unprocessed feelings will haunt them the rest of their lives and come out in unhealthy ways.
Vicious and cruel things happened because public health inexplicably decided to try and eradicate Covid at the cost of everything else. There must be a reckoning for this, society cannot truly heal without one.