2025
Return with us to a time when politics and a pandemic joined hands to create chaos.
Gather around, and you shall hear of the COVID 19 pandemic in 2019 and 2020.
When the pandemic first came upon the scene in 2019, the world’s reaction was fear. As you know, fear of the unknown is a powerful boogyman. It was easy to embellish and weave hysteria and disinformation about it precisely because this virus was something new, something unknown, and deadly.
As people succumbed to the virus, an opportunity arose for many in positions with political power to channel their inner tyrant. And we can sadly report that far too many of them did not disappoint when it came to the depths of insanity they reached.
The virus proved to be contagious, and proper treatment was a crapshoot. Consequently, ignorance and fear became the driving force in those early days. The governor of a once-great state shipped off their COVID victims to nursing homes. A death sentence for them as well as the most vulnerable among us, the elderly.
In state after state, city after city, the rising despots imposed a shutdown on the land. They only allowed what they deemed essential personnel of their choosing to carry the workload. Essentially, the country was shutdown.
As we know, people chaffed under the overly restrictive control and sought to break the rules, even to the detriment of their well-being. Many suffered under the imposed isolation, and mental health issues multiplied. Being forced to live with only themselves for company was something many people could not endure.
When the medical community discovered various effective treatments for the virus, the country began to reopen. But the autocrats giddy with power refused to comply with the gradual and common sense reopening orders.
A local dictator (emphasis on the first syllable of the word) even put a woman in jail for a week. Her crime? She opened her beauty salon because she had to feed her family. She followed safety protocols, but the tyrant did not care.
The shutdown created an artificial sense of safety. Once the country lifted shutdown restrictions it was inevitable that more cases arose. The virus is a social parasite and needed to touch as many folks as possible.
People wearing masks in public became commonplace. The irony is that before the pandemic, businesses, especially banks, panicked if a person entered wearing a hoodie, which covered most of the wearer’s face. Suddenly, it was okay to walk into a bank wearing a mask. How did security distinguish between potential bank robbers and regular folks? Quite a conundrum back then.
The requirement to wear masks caused some to lose their minds and physically attacked folks sitting in restaurants eating. They expected the diners to remove their face covering, take a bite of food, and replace the mask while chewing.
Insanity and intolerance do not recognize the use of common sense. Consequently, the longer it took to develop a virus, one dictator or another restricted the freedoms formerly enjoyed by the general population.
By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, the spikes in COVID cases had increased, and naturally, the tyrants smelled another opportunity to shut down everything, including family gatherings for that holiday. Some states required people to wear masks in their homes.
Fortunately, the people seemed to exercise more common sense than the nutjobs. They took precautions to minimize the risk of infecting loved ones. Humans are social creatures. Depriving contact with other humans led to mental and physical health problems exacerbated or even caused by isolation.
Throughout history, forcing expected behavior on people has created more problems than it intended to solve.
One truth remains now as it did during that terrible COVID pandemic. Life is a finite gift.
If they allowed abortion because the female had a right to decisions regarding her body, then the controlling powers should have allowed people to live their lives as they wished.