You’ve heard the name before. I discussed his work “The Revolt of the Public”, which I’m still working through, in my multi-part piece describing how the democratization of information has helped spur the apocalypse that is romantic smut infiltrating science fiction, fantasy, and contemporary fiction as imposters; Part 2 is the fully free one.
Here is that if you’re a new subscriber; even the free parts still have some good tidbits in them (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
On April 8, Gurri wrote a piece in response to a recently published book detailing the collusion between mass media and government to stifle dissent regarding information presented to the public about Covid 19. It is a book that touches a delicate subject that many of us, five years later, and still in no small measure, are grappling with the effects of in our everyday lives. It is a piece about how Americans gave up their freedom, to big tech, to the government, to the hysteria of mass media and pundits, willingly, to be enslaved to blind trust in institutions and people that claimed to have American’s best interest at heart, but were flailing in their own panic, corruption, and pursuit of power. It was an eye-opening time to the enslavement of fear, paranoia, and anxiety, and the social enforcement of new social mores around that fear onto others.
It is an enslavement that none of us want to discuss. Many people want to avoid it and move on, probably on both sides of the aisle, and both sides of the “Covid Measures were good” and “Covid Measures were destructive” views, though I think it is heavier on the former than the latter.
My baby sleeps in the other room, while my husband takes care of work errands, and I have a little time to write this out. And I wonder, with a little trepidation, a tiny tremullation of fear as I reflect on that time, a dull, numbing sensation in my heart, how I will explain Covid and its fruits to my children.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I have time.
When Emily Oster called for Covid amnesty a few years ago, my response at the time was violent seething rage. How dare anyone call for forgiveness of those who gaslit, maligned, admonished, and publicly harassed those who defied the Covid mandates, the people who called into question that the “China flu” was really a government lab leak, that those with vaccine hesitancy weren’t loonies? As
has broken several times, it is now clear that vaccine mandates had truly deleterious impacts on children, as well as adults. Can’t hide an affair or a shopping addiction when people are actually home to pay attention to what’s going on in their own back yard. The people and scientists who were correct that it was a US government-funded research lab in China that strengthened the lethality of the virus have been vindicated, though no or few public apologies have been given at this time.The anger has cooled significantly and I will say this about it: for being a Christian, forgiveness is a necessary, but reconciliation is not, and sometimes, it should not be sought.
But that’s a thought for another essay.
My mother, in discussing this essay with me, made a very salient point: the experience of Covid really mattered where you were when it happened. For her, she lives in farm, flyover country in the midwest. Out there, people were concerned, but there was enough pushback that many people brushed it off, and by late summer of 2020, people near her weren’t really wearing masks and school had been brought back into session.
It was her observation, from my descriptions of life on the East Coast, where I live, that it was much, much worse, especially in urban areas. A friend who lives in a rural part of the state I live in confirmed that for most of Covid, her rural counterparts were skeptical, may have occasionally worn a mask, but mostly, just moved on with their day.
It is difficult to reconcile how to explain such variety of experience, especially when, both liberals and conservatives have vastly differing attitudes and viewpoints on the situation. Then there were people, on both sides and in the middle, like myself, who watched with quiet skepticism and growing concern at how tribal and vitriolic the discourse became over the months and years that followed.
I imagine the scenario will be an innocent one: my children see a reference in a film, or hear it in conversation. One of them will be quick and curious, like I was as a little girl, pick up on it, and ask us later what it meant. My husband and I will, perhaps, have already discussed ahead of time what we might say, but the inquiry will still catch us off guard.
Is this now the time for this conversation?
What will we tell them?
That the government declared a state of emergency for a virus it manufactured secretly with taxpayer dollars in another country that had a security breach, and sent the entire world into a panic?
Will we tell them of the initial dismissal, the shrugging of shoulders, as people in large cities, like Chicago, contracted the “new flu” during the winter of 2019, and it flew under the radar, until, President Donald J. Trump got on television and declared an immediate lockdown in March 2020?
Will I tell them how I went back to work for the rest of the day, after watching his declaration, feeling uneasy and a little afraid, in a somewhat surreal situation, not knowing what was to happen?
How the next morning I got up and went to my local grocery store at 7 am, and as I was leaving, my next door neighbors were getting out of their cars loaded up with groceries? How when I got to the store, there was a checkout line that ran the entire perimeter and took me 35 minutes to get through with my meager groceries, those that hadn’t been bought up in the panic? How I watched people moving with tightly controlled panic and anxiety move through the ailses, carts piled high like there was a sale at Costco?
Say, that I might tell them how we all became addicted to the cycle of the news, watching with dreaded anticipation the increasing death toll, release after release of information about masking and social distancing that changed as often as teenage girls change boyfriends?
How we watched real photos and fake video bleed into our feeds about a war half a world away between Russia and Ukraine, and watch as the liberals became hawks and the conservatives became staunch isolationists, some in favor of Putin, some not? Some of us, reeling from the political whiplash as we watched one party pundit defend our involvement, while we watched our groceries inflate and wonder why we were feeding others when we couldn’t feed our own?
Do we talk about the painful, unpleasant discussions I had with roommates about going out, wearing masks, and engaging clean procedures? The uncertainty, the palpable anxiety and tension? Perhaps, I discuss how four adult women shared a house to work at during work-from home. One roommate decided she was going to install herself in the kitchen table, complete with her work computer and take sales calls. How there was nowhere public to go because everything was closed, but there was nowhere private in our house because the common spaces were constantly filled with the low-level noise of dings of emails, television chatter, and two people who speak loudly without the ability to modulate their voices constantly going from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.—chainsmoking and drinking endless cups of coffee, which joined the already mountainous pile of dishes by two people who were allergic to cleaning—as well as the anxiety about needing to cook while they were taking meetings or making business calls in the middle of the kitchen (when they had private bedrooms they could have worked in, which is where myself and roommate number four hid out all day)?
I could tell them about joining the Million Mask Challenge and driving 45 minutes to pick up spare fabric and elastic cording in an effort to make personal protective equipment for nurses and emergency staff, to be donated at a drop-off location. I could tell them about how my sewing machine jammed, and despite it tearing up the fabric, I managed to make 25 masks in an effort toward doing my civic duty (despite also not knowing at the time that masks did virtually nothing—I was naive and trying to do a good deed). I could tell them about taking my machine to a sewing repair shop and being told the parts were worth more than the machine, and leaving it to the shop to dispose of. I could describe how there was a run on sewing machines, how their prices went up dramatically because so many men and women had taken up the hobby while stuck inside, and also due to the lockdowns, everything from nuts and bolts to housing and everyday supplies became stupendously expensive. I could tell them that I was barely employed and even if I could have found a sewing machine, I could not have afforded one, or justified the cost, like so many things came to be during those years. In case you’re wondering, I still don’t have a sewing machine, though I’d like one.
Do we talk about viral videos of men and women hysterically harassing and policing others for not wearing masks? For threatening to call the police? In once instance, shared by
, how she was subject to a petty dictator who was going to have her thrown out of a grocery line because she coughed due to allergies? How do I explain living in such a culture of fear that people would quite literally cross the street or walk six to 10 feet away from you, veering into empty road, just to avoid you, outside, for fear of catching the disease?How do I explain the exhilaration and joy of going down the highway during “high traffic hours” to find there was no one on the road, and that driving through a highway ghost town was enjoyable? Except for the jerks in the cars driving pursuit maneuvers and going 30 over the speed limit because there weren’t any cops out either. That part was not enjoyable.
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