COVIDMANIA AND THE DESIRE FOR CRISIS AND MEANING

My late father-in-law, Charlie, grew up in a tiny, thatched roof, stacked stone farmhouse in County Mayo, in stark, cold northwest Ireland. He was the youngest of ten children, four of whom died in infancy. Charlie would rarely mention his childhood. When he did, he said food was starchy and scarce; hunger was common. Piecing the chronology together, I suppose his grandparents survived the Famine.

Ireland’s employment prospects were bleak. England needed construction laborers because so many of England’s young men had been conscripted for World War II. Thus, in his early twenties, Charlie emigrated to London. As Shane MacGowan sang of his Irish brethren, “Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that made us refugees.”

Charlie wasn’t a big storyteller and I didn’t know him to exaggerate. But during one Sunday afternoon dinner, he told a short story about life during The Blitz. He said that, when they heard sirens signaling German nighttime bombing raids, he and his London neighbors would run out of their “flats” into adjacent Hyde Park. They felt safer in the park because they knew the Germans wouldn’t waste bombs on unlit, building-less spaces.

He said that one night, the apartment building next door was flattened during an overnight Luftwaffe run. All of the building’s inhabitants were killed; I guess the bombers had flown under the radar and there had been no warning. Tired from working, Charlie slept through the blast. That’s a heavy sleeper. Maybe he had downed a few pints before turning in; he didn’t say.

I have continually wondered why so many people have reacted so irrationally and fearfully to the Coronavirus(es). I perceive several reasons. Sadly, many Americans have high baseline anxiety. Others were driven by political rooting interests; they knew that disrupting society over Covid would enable Trump’s ouster and facilitate continuing, encompassing social and electoral control. And many consume, and actually believe, alarmist mainstream media.

In addition to the foregoing reasons, I’m convinced that many people have wanted to replicate Charlie’s experience: they’ve wanted to live through an exciting, society-wide, anything-could-happen crisis, such as exists during wartime. They cast themselves as characters in a suspenseful, Apocalyptic movie that played in their own heads. Or they pictured themselves being interviewed for subsequent Covid documentaries about these ostensibly perilous times. They imagined telling stories to their kids and grandkids.

During the Lockdowns, I’ve talked to various adults who have said, with child-like amazement, things like, “Wow, I can’t believe we're living through this. It’s History!”

On the eve of the Lockdown, one sent me a titillated, allusive e-mail message, “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco!”

To which I responded, “Panic at the Disco!”

I knew lockdowns were a terrible idea from Day 1. The “History” that has happened has not been a viral wave, but the unprecedented, extreme, destructive overreaction to it. Since when do we lock down an entire society for a respiratory virus, especially when only unhealthy, old or obese people are at risk? BTW, well over 95% of the old, unhealthy, infected survived without treatment.

Related to feeling like they’re part of some grand historical event, the Corona fearful people suffer deficits of meaning in their lives. Coronamania enabled them to fill this void. The “Pandemic(!) has given them something to which to devote themselves. The “We’re all in this together” and the demonstrably false “my mask—and then my vaxx—protect you” propaganda was targeted very effectively at the meaning seekers.

Taking steps to “stop the spread” felt heroic to them. They could claim—and often did on the Net—that they cared more about their fellow Americans than did those who opposed lockdowns, masks and “vaxxes.” They saw— and incredibly, still see— themselves as occupying higher moral ground; though people who purport to care so deeply about the elderly dying with the virus did not, in my awareness, frequently visit nursing homes before the Scamdemic.

Being heroic has never been as easy as during Coronamania. Covid heroism has entailed staying home and watching Netflix or YouTube, ordering takeout meals and groceries, wearing political theater masks, taking a few injections and sending mean tweets about those who questioned the worth of any of that nonsense. The Corona “social distancing” measures weren’t hard for the misanthropic or introverted, or for those who got paid not to work, or received other “free” government money and could skip their commutes.

Upon leaving office, Bill Clinton expressed his unfulfilled wish to have been President during wartime because that’s when a President can show leadership, like a Lincoln or an FDR. Leave it to draft-dodging Clinton to wish for an opportunity to self-aggrandize at the expense of killed and maimed young men. Lockdown/mask/vaxx pushing politicians like Biden, Cuomo, Murphy, Newsom and DeBlasio have lived Clinton’s dream by packaging themselves as latter day King Davids. But instead of girding their loins and taking up arms, they protected the masses by displaying charts and feigning grief during TV press briefings. Time has proven that these LMV-ers aren’t heroes; they’re lying demagogues who conveniently ignore fear-dispelling facts.

Overall, the Corona fearful want to show that, by relying on their smarts and sacrifice, they’ll slay a formidable foe. This is ludicrous. The data show what has been obvious from Day 1: nearly everyone survives infection, and humans can’t crush respiratory viruses. Various politicians are hoping that many Americans will remain as gullible as they have been for the past 22 months, and that many voters will mistakenly credit government interventions for improving statistics. But many tens of millions have developed natural immunity, testing methods are changing and the virus is weakening naturally. Additionally, many people have found and used inexpensive, effective preventive measures and therapeutics, despite the government’s active, sinister efforts to suppress knowledge about self-care.

Ultimately, it’s been painful to see that normal life is so unsatisfying for many people that they’ve been willing to drop a nuclear bomb on society in order to live out a crisis fantasy. If he were still with us, Charlie, and multitudes of others who have lived—and daily live—through genuine, non-viral threats to their existence no matter what their ages or weight, would laugh disdainfully at those who have embraced the pseudo-war and extreme, theatrical overreaction of the past 22 months. Or they might cry.