IF THIS HAD BEEN A REAL EMERGENCY...

When I was growing up, many people believed that nuclear war was imminent. Our school conducted air raid drills. Sometimes TV or radio stations would interrupt programming to test the Emergency Broadcast System. The first time or two that I heard these tests—maybe I was six or seven—I was alarmed. The announcer sounded serious and was accompanied by ominous, high-pitched electronic tones of various frequencies connoting crisis and perhaps some desperate US military reaction directed from some concrete-walled, underground war room.

I briefly imagined a salvo of atomic bombs, as they used to be called, raining down on the New York City Metro Area, where I lived. I figured, “If all these bombs and missiles explode, I and everyone I know will die and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

At first, that near-term prospect was frightening. But the resignation it brought ultimately made longer-term doomsday prospects less scary. Thereafter, hearing more Emergency Broadcast false alarms and learning that neither side in a nuclear exchange thought they’d survive, I began to think that a nuclear attack was unlikely. So instead of being scared, I just got annoyed by the interruption. My reaction became, “Hey, put Superman back on!”

In snowy black and white, Channel 11.

As the years passed, the media presented an endless series or non-nuclear, false or exaggerated alarms. Remember Y2K? These further desensitized me to mass crisis. Sure, bad things sometimes happened to people, including people I knew; and some people died. But the world never came close to ending. The Earth is unimaginably spacious and has a mind-boggling amount of people. It’s extremely unlikely, logistically or historically, that millions will perish, per Ryan Adams, in a flash of pure destruction.

Apocalypse via some infectious disease outbreak seemed even less likely. Though maybe I don’t watch enough TV or movies or read enough sci-fi.

Tornadoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and terrorists flying airplanes into office buildings are awful, but they’re unavoidable and in the scheme of things, rare and limited in scope. For nearly everyone else, life goes on. Overall, and despite the media’s failure to mention this over the past thirty months, population growth always outpaces disaster deaths. During Coronamania, the media has repeatedly, insincerely bemoaned the deaths of some very sick, very old people. But it never celebrates births, either individually or collectively.

The biggest challenges to humanity are creeping, already occurring phenomena not covered by the news, such as depletion of soil or drinking water; or dystopian surveillance and propaganda in/by a biosecurity state; or mass distraction, alienation or stupefaction effected via media, computers or numbing psychoactive drugs; or the use of reproductive technologies to commodify life and to turn humans into products, quality-controlled and disposable. The foregoing trends don’t entail the annihilation of humanity. They just attenuate life’s spontaneity, surprise, and blend of self-sovereignty and community until it becomes less worth living.

In the meanwhile, the media continues to make its money by selling the false notion that mass death always looms. If last week’s disaster or war didn’t kill legions, next week’s just might.

For these general reasons and more specifically, because human immune systems are undefeated on a population-wide, historical basis, I wasn’t the least bit scared when Coronamania began in early 2020. I wasn’t surprised to hear that some old, unhealthy people were dying; nor should anyone else have been. People, like plants in a garden are born, grow, thrive, fade and die. It’s how life is. Poor baseline health has always portended and hastened death against some statistical mean.

Given the foregoing, I was puzzled—really, dumbfounded—by all the Corona panic. I knew this virus posed near zero threat of killing people who weren’t already very old and/or very sick.

This whole mess started as a Trojan Horse/bait-and-switch operation. People were told to lock down for two weeks. Most freaked out and complied. With the logistical, psychological and political skids thusly greased, thirty months of man-made, broad spectrum social, economic disaster have ensued; with deep, long-term damage to follow.

Many who later became skeptics have admitted, “I was scared for the first month...”

I’ve never understood that frame of mind. I’m interested in why—especially given February, 2022 data from Italy or Spain— you thought this virus would kill you and/or millions of other basically healthy people and/or how you thought locking down, masking and testing would help, and why the negative effects of locking down were ignored.

And if you later changed your mind, when and why?

If you weren’t ever afraid, why not? And/or how did scared people explain to you why they were afraid?

I realize that I write for a self-selecting set of readers. Thus, I don’t expect a fully representative sample of responses explaining why people, in general, feared SARS-CoV-2, even for a short time. And some people are still afraid. I went to the supermarket this afternoon and saw masked madmen and women.

Note to commenters: I can’t validate the perspective of anyone who supported locking down, et al. because even if they weren’t afraid of dying, they were afraid of being sick. No one likes feeling ill, but sane people have never before asked others to stop living normally because they, themselves, fear a cold or the flu. And some people will say they were afraid on behalf of other people. If so, do you hold that fear irrespective of that person’s age or health status?

But other than the foregoing peremptory statement, I won’t write any comment disagreeing with, or criticizing, you. And if anyone criticizes a commenter, I’ll promptly delete the criticism; not because I like censorship or feel that people should never disagree, but because I want people to explain something that I don’t understand, without concern about anyone mocking them. And I won’t ever attribute to you, by name, any comment you make. If you ask me to, I’ll delete any explanation you give within 24 hours so it’s not out there for posterity. Or you can just e-mail me at forecheck32 at g mail.

Thanks, if you do explain your biological basis for fearing— or not fearing—this virus, or the reasons for fear that others expressed to you.