high art as public health allegory
and what to make of what's about to happen
as an allegory for the last 18 months of health policy, you’re not going to do much better than this…
as the supply lines and production capacity of the world continue to sputter and everything from christmas gifts to food and energy supplies rises in price and drops in availability, do not lose sight of one simple fact:
it was not covid that did this.
the 1968 flu did not do this. not even the 1918 spanish flu did this.
this was done by governments as they recklessly pursued responses known not to work and so dire in their societal effects that the standing sets of international pandemic guidelines explicitly warned against using them.
this is true of lockdowns:
of travel bans:
of cancelling gatherings:
and of closing schools:
even the absurdity of community masking:
every bit of this was known and knowable.
the science was not followed, it was ignored.
these responses went against every bit of data driven pandemic learning from the last century.
this was not done for you, it was done to you.
breaking the world over covid was not inevitable, it was utterly avoidable and rigorously advised against.
and, as predicted, none of it did anything to mitigate spread or severity.
the ongoing and future economic and social dislocations disruptions are going to be blamed on covid and on your failure to comply to diktat.
leaders want to pass the buck. they want to be heroes not villains. they are 100% pot committed and cannot possibly fold now and take the blame.
the media that cheer led this will enable them in every way they can.
a barrage is coming as high prices, a lack of goods, and a seasonal surge in covid that vaccines could not attenuate all coincide in coming months.
do not fall for it.
this was the angel grabbing your hands and punching you in the face with them. over and over.
that would be bad enough.
but to ask that we then thank them for it and extol their bravery and vision while they scapegoat us for their own failures?
no way.
the response on that one is simple.
i’m not sure how you say it in human, but in “cat” it goes like this:
I lost a job early in the pandemic as a marketer because I, as a copywriter and editor, replaced every instance in marketing copy of "due to COVID" or "due to the COVID-19 pandemic" with "due to lockdowns" or "due to government enforced business/school closures" and refused to stop doing so.
I then lost a ton of money on my freelance sidelines as nobody had the resources or reason to invest in B2B services for businesses that weren't allowed to be open and might never (and often didn't) come back.
Those were tiny things. There was so much in the intervening 18+ months: death threats, suicidal ideation, loss of friends, loss of relationships, community crumbling, local crime exploding, being peeled off the kitchen floor by my husband one night because literally moving my legs seemed a pointless exercise in existence that had been stolen from me, cutting police padlocks off of playgrounds in the middle of the night, so much drinking, so much smoking and quitting and smoking,
to say nothing of the things that happened to people that suffered ten times worse than me or to their younger children, and me seeing it and being powerless to stop them.
I am the angriest, most cynical, most hateful, most violent-hearted, most mistrustful, most anarchic I have ever been in my life at this point- the peak? the downward curve?- of this global disaster borne of a respiratory virus with a 99%+ survival rate.
COVID didn't do it. They did.
Make them pay.
MAKE THEM HURT.
"they are 100% committed and cannot possibly fold now and take the blame."
That's the least-scary explanation. Part of me thinks their actual motives are much worse.