REPENTANCE AND REPARATIONS FOR CORONAMANIA

In April, 2010, I visited Nicaragua with one of my teen kids, Lena. I wanted to spend a chunk of memorable time with her before she left for college. We found $258 round-trip airfares, slept in places that averaged $15/night and ate good, albeit simple food for $10/day. We fulfilled our Spanish-only pact during the week and half stay.

Based on that trip and the two that followed with my wife, Ellen, I could say much about Nicaragua. Above all, being there brought clearly into focus what people needed to be happy and what they didn’t.

For now, I’ll say only that Lena and I met a mustachioed, wiry, loquacious and very welcoming 49 year-old nicknamed Chepe. Chepe operated a small, informal outdoor restaurant, known as a fritanga, on the sidewalk in front of his single story, cheek-to-jowl urban house across the street from the simply-constructed, two-story, deep yellow, lizard-intensive, half-open-air, hammocked, budget Managua hostel where Lena and I were staying. Each day, many fully ripe mangoes fell onto the sidewalks and we ate them. Many iguanas also scampered by. Chepe caught them and cooked them into soup, which he served me several times. Tasty.

We spent hours chatting with Chepe over three days and nights. He told me that one night when he was 15, he was conscripted into the Sandinista Army; grabbed by the shirt, along with some of his friends, by a team of recruiters in a dark discoteca. He spent the next 13 years with an AK-47 in Nicaragua’s northern mountain jungles until the Contra War ended. One-percent of Nicaragua’s people were killed during the war; by ratio, that would be like 3.3 million young Americans dying. I asked Chepe if he lost any friends in combat. He uncharacteristically answered in one word, “Hundreds.”

During the days and nights we shared, Chepe repeatedly gushed about how much Nicaragua had improved since the war ended. To begin with, there was no more war. Second, there was much less street crime, though I guess that’s relative; without trying, I saw stuff happen. Third, there were more public resources: e.g., much higher literacy rates, some land reform, paved roads, malaria control, rehabbed parks and even new, government-donated zinc roofs for many of the very modest, small cinderblock residences. As we moved about Managua, Chepe would point toward some new building or other improvement, and gleefully exclaim, “Nicaragua: Que bonito el pais!” (What a nice country!”) It made me happy to see Chepe so happy, especially after he had experienced so much hardship and seen so much death.

I admired Nicaraguans. They carried on con gusto under circumstances that would buckle most Americans.

Their apparent emotional resilience may have been rooted in their Christian faith. Chepe brought Lena and I to a Good Friday procession with tens of thousands of people who listened to bullhorned gospel passages followed by the declaration, “Viva el sangre de Cristo!” to which the crowd repeatedly responded “Viva!” Some marched several miles on Managua’s main, paved, traffic-blocked road.

Amazingly, some marched this entire distance on their knees. I guessed that those who did felt very sorry about stuff they had done and that self-inflicting such pain was a form of penance.

Most of us feel shame about some of our behavior. Guilt can be functional, either because it prevents us from misbehaving or because it causes us to try to make amends for prior, regrettable conduct. Fundamentally, guilt reflects a regard for other humans and an underlying sense of obligation to treat them decently.

Throughout history, people in many cultures have actively expressed contrition for the harm they have done. In the anthropology classic, Crime and Custom in Savage Societies, Bronislaw Malinowski describes Trobriand Islanders leaping to their deaths from tall trees to express remorse for their conduct. In Biblical times, people wore hairshirts. Since then, countless others have fasted, self-flagellated or otherwise injured or killed themselves out of guilt. Or at least picked up the phone and apologized.

Both criminal and civil courts require wrongdoers to pay restitution or to compensate victims with dollars and/or require community service. Many other people voluntarily “do service” based on feelings of relative privilege/noblesse oblige. People and corporations like to tell others about how they “give back to the community.” This phrase connotes that those who give back have taken something from others.

The past three years have felt very much like a top-down scam perpetrated by government, media and the medical industry. These orchestrators deserve to be Nuremberg-ed and imprisoned; they’ve done far more harm than do, for example, carjackers. But the Covid bureaucrats and politicians have the money and political connections to evade justice.

The hundreds of millions who enthusiastically supported the panic should, but largely don’t, feel a deep sense of shame about all of the harm they enabled. After three years of Coronamania, many still believe all of the Covid narrative lies and consider themselves smart and virtuous for supporting lockdowns/school closures, masks, tests and mRNA “vaxxes.” (“LMTVs”).

A second contemptible group knew these measures were a scam but saw, and exploited, a political and economic opportunity.

A third group has belatedly recognized what people like me have said since March, 2020, namely that all of the interventions were ineffective and destructive. Many in this group will absolve themselves of responsibility for the lockdown’s harm by falsely asserting that “We didn’t know!” that the vaunted virus threatened only a tiny, clearly identifiable demographic and that many of the vaunted treatments were lethal. In practical effect, the Didn’t-Knowers are as bad as the unrepentant, because they’ve enabled the same societal and economic harm as have the Fear Squad and the Opportunists. The Didn’t-Knowers lack the strength of character to admit what has always been obvious: the viral risk pattern was clear and unthreatening.

As time passes, all three groups will, like St. Peter, Bill Clinton and O.J. Simpson, conveniently experience amnesia and deny that they ever supported the LMTVs.

“Lock down? Close schools? Mask up? Test and trace? Inject or lose your job? I never supported any of that!”

It would be impossible to incarcerate all of these jersey-switching mania-deniers. But if their consciences appropriately haunt them, what should the LMTV-ers be willing to do to compensate for the harm they caused by supporting the Covid overreaction?

I’ve begun to fill out 2022 tax returns. These forms contain check-able boxes to allow people to donate to federal and state governments, either in a lump sum or earmarked to specific causes such as political campaign funding or wildlife preservation. There should be an earmark box on tax forms to help to defray the cost of the $6-10 trillion (I’ve seen both figures) of government-sponsored Covid spending. In the first two years of Coronamania, American governments spent more—even adjusted for inflation—on Covid measures than they did to win World War II. Government Covid spending has yielded a terrible return on investment.

Nonetheless, those who supported throwing trillions at a respiratory virus should now be willing to put their money where their mouth was. Instead of pledging a paltry dollar or two, Corona “mitigation” enthusiasts should kick in thousands for each family member, annually, for as many decades as it takes to service the multi-trillion-dollar Covid debt. Fear Squad members would reject such accountability for their lockdown support. They think “the government” can magically pay for everything. Besides, Fear Squadders have plenty more things they want to buy.

Analogously, some economists have proposed war taxes in order to reveal to the public the dollar costs of waging a given war. Initially, it seems wrong for individuals to care more about how much money they might be out-of-pocket to fund a war than they do about the young men they send to die or get maimed or to kill or maim other young men. But those who were so eager to wage war on a respiratory virus should now be happy to put their present and future money where their mouth was in 2020. Pay any cost and bear any burden if it saves just one life. Right?

Perhaps Covidmania-enriched Internet retailers, big box stores and franchise restaurants could establish a fund to enable the small businesses wiped out by lockdowns to reopen. The Corona-crazed could also stop patronizing these high-volume Corona profiteers, even though buying from smaller merchants will cost the save-just-one-life crowd a few more dollars.

Covid test-makers and labs should disgorge the profits from billions of wildly inaccurate tests that did far more harm than good.

Then there are the “vaccines” themselves. Given the many, varied, apparent and growing numbers of vaxx deaths and injuries, a massive compensation fund will likely need to be established. The companies that made the mRNA, their execs and stockholders who profited thereby, as well as the vaxx fanatics who demanded that jab decliners lose jobs, basic freedoms and medical insurance should pull out their checkbooks and write painfully large checks totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Ad agencies and TV stations that received billions from the governments to produce and air ads for the failed shots should give back that tainted, easy money.

Similarly, the social commentators and their employers/media outlets should forfeit the billions they made by terrorizing the masses by selling Covid lies.

Aside from these and other forms of dollar-based reparations/restitution, some non-monetary, in-kind compensatory measures are also fitting.

To begin with, legions justified the LMTVs by expressing their purportedly deep concern for Grandma and Grandpa. The millions who did so should commit to regularly visiting nursing homes for the rest of their lives. Those who professed to care so much about old people that they were willing to sacrifice, on Grandma’s behalf, the youth of tens of millions should welcome this opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to the elderly.

Further, just as Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, the teachers that refused to work and who held placards that said, “I can’t teach from my coffin!” and the newscasters who sold the sky-is-falling narrative should find other work or be discharged. What kind of a teacher is someone who can’t think critically? What kind of journalist is someone who vigorously promotes a false narrative?

Lockdown and vaxx supporters should also resign from public office and hand in their voter registrations. They’ve shown that they lack the discernment needed to make or weigh in on public policy. Additionally, vote by mail, the fraud and ballot-harvest-facilitating child of the “Pandemic,” should be repealed.

Needle, mask and test makers and their advocates should also regularly devote days to community service days on which they pick up enough litter to match the amounts of Covid “mitigation” medical waste that masks, tests and injections worthlessly generated.

Yes, I know that contrition won’t really compel the LMTV-ers to deprive or discipline themselves in the ways listed above. Fear, opportunism and groupthink nullify integrity and self-accountability. I’m just sketching what justice and decency would entail.

I welcome your suggestions regarding what else the Corona crazed would do if they properly accepted responsibility and wanted to make amends for the harm they caused. If you break it, you buy it.

Ultimately, even if adopted, all such ex post facto measures would fall far short of redressing the harm that the Coronamaniacs caused. It’s too late to give back to people—especially the young—all of the irreplaceable time and experiences stolen. There’s no way to compensate for the millions unborn because of the social disruption posed by preventing young men and women from meeting mates as during normal social life. There are no second chances for those who died alone to, instead, have been surrounded by their loved ones. Nor can those who were forbidden to gather with family and friends to pay tribute to those who died and to comfort each other share such time when it mattered most.

Yet, decency requires as much atonement as possible. Simply acting like the Covid overreaction train wreck never happened and that many didn’t stridently and self-righteously support it is dishonest and unacceptable.

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EPILOGUE

When Ellen and I went to Nicaragua in 2011, I was eager for her to meet Chepe. We arrived at the airport around 10 PM. I asked a taxi driver to take us to Chepe’s sketchy neighborhood. He asked where it was. I remembered that it was near the TicaBus station.

Unbelievable though it may seem, Managua, a vast, sprawling city of 1.5 million people, has almost no named streets. Nearly all the housing is very basic, single-story stuff that looks quite uniform. Many live in shanties that have been continually, unofficially slapped up after the 1972 earthquake.

After meandering in the cab through the silent, spooky barrio for about fifteen minutes, I recognized Chepe’s unmarked house. I asked the driver to stop and I excitedly got out. I was surprised to find the fritanga closed; Chepe normally stayed open until midnight.

Two houses to the left, I heard four adults talking in the dark behind the typical wrought iron, front porch cages that shield residents from street miscreants. I walked over and asked them where Chepe was. A disembodied voice told me that Chepe had died of a heart attack a few months prior. He was 51 and left behind a wife and two kids.