DESPERATELY PRESERVING THE COVID MITIGATION MYTH

When I was 10, I had a 12 year-old sister, Denise, and two brothers. Lenny was 14 and Danny was 5. We boys slept in the same room in a small, single-story house in a modest, riverside neighborhood known as Pleasureland.

The neighborhood’s name derived from a decades-old nearby park with two swimming pools and many picnic tables. On weekends, people from all over North Jersey and New York City went there and to the adjacent, similar Muller’s Park, where I got my first job, at 15, as a garbageman. Both parks closed in 1985 after two people were killed and nine more were wounded in an AK-47 shootout at Muller’s during a late Sunday afternoon, late summer Brooklyn/Jamaican gang picnic. Two days prior, on Friday, I had swum and dove off the high board there into deep, shimmering, aqua-tinged water with twilight sun shining obliquely upon it. I didn’t know then that a hometown era was about to end.

In the week before our family’s last Pleasureland Christmas, in 1967, (we moved across town in 1968) my Mom expressed to me her concern that Danny no longer believed in Santa Claus. She suspected that one of the neighborhood kids had told him that Santa wasn’t real. The prospect of having no more Santa-believing kids saddened her. She made me promise not to tell Danny what I knew. I kept my word.

Our bedroom on the back side of the ranch-style house had only one longish, narrow window near the top of the wall. A streetlight cast faint light through that window and into our otherwise darkened room. I slept in the bed next to Danny’s.

At bedtime on that snowy Christmas Eve, just as we were trying to sleep, and at my mother’s urging, our Dad ran from the far side of the backyard toward our bedroom window, shouting “Ho, Ho, Ho!” As he passed beneath the window, my hidden father held aloft a Santa hat on a stick. The bouncing hat was all that could be seen from our beds.

Knowing the event was fake, I looked toward Danny’s bed to gauge his reaction. Having heard Santa’s voice, but not recognizing it as our father’s, Danny sat up and looked up just as the hat passed the window. He was awestruck. I can still see his glowing, wide-eyed face in my mind’s eye. I’ve never seen anyone so blissfully amazed.

No matter what other kids might have told him or what he might have suspected on his own, at that magical moment, my parents’ theater convinced Danny for one more Christmas that Santa was real and that we had a hoary, superhuman visitor from the North Pole to thank for the presents under the tree. It was an enchanting, worthy lie.

The government and media have spent the past 30 months disingenuously inciting Corona fear and implementing a range of talismanic measures like lockdowns, school closures, masks, tests and vaxxes to convince us that they were magically—yet always “Scientifically!—” protecting us all from death. Just as any thinking six-year-old figures out that Santa simply can’t put all of that toy freight into one sleigh, any thinking adult should have known that none of the hoary Corona crew’s—neither the elfin Fauci’s, nor scarfy Birx’s, nor bumbling Biden’s—rhetoric or theater ever made any sense, either in theory or in real-life outcomes; nor did the parallel alarmism or interventions by younger, hipper “liberal” governors, mayors and prime ministers.

But just as my parents’ efforts to preserve the Santa myth, governments won’t let go of the Corona theater. Simultaneously, the media continues to portray as “experts” those who conceived the theatrical “mitigation.” All of the empirical data have corroborated what was known on Day 1 of the lockdowns: this virus doesn’t threaten most people, none of these interventions works and each has caused, and will continue to cause, broad, deep, terrible damage.

Instead of admitting this, governments and media persist in their campaign of terror, lies, bogus zero-Covid measures and ineffective, injurious vaxx crusades. Because to stop lying now would be to admit that it’s all been a scam. And politically and morally, they can’t bring themselves to do that.

A five-year-old might not know a scam when he sees it. But a ten-year-old does. Or at least should. By continuing their lies, governments are counting on adults to be like five-year-olds. It just might work.

Pretending without end that Coronaviruses present grave peril that only the government can manage allows the Covid liars to convince themselves that others won’t see that they’ve lied for two and a half years. The merchants of fear believe that, as long as they can continue the charade, they’ll never have to admit they’ve lied or apologize for the scam.

They’ll be like my Mom in this way. For many Christmases following the hat prank, she left two fresh oatmeal cookies out for Santa. He always took a bite and left a Thank You note.

Many people will want to continue to believe that Covid threatened everyone, that the mitigation worked and was worth all of the damage it caused. The too-painful alternative is to admit that they naively bought a very big lie.