I hope everyone realizes by this point that following the increasingly draconian edicts of petty tyrants will not get us back to normal. Even if this was hinted at in the beginning, the messaging has moved on to the “new normal” and building back better. The power hungry never let a crisis go to waste and they are using this one to enact every part of their agenda that they can.
And they take advantage of your desire to just be left alone. Maybe you were willing to stay home for 2 weeks to just get past this. Maybe you are willing to wear a mask if it will get Karen to stop screaming at you. Maybe you’ll get a vaccine if it means you can keep your job (or leave your house if you live in Austria).
More and more people are waking up that the only way to get your autonomy back is to say no. Noncompliance is the only way this ends.
What fewer have realized is that we aren’t getting back to the old normal. Nor should we want to. In the old normal, you didn’t care about regulatory capture in the FDA or mission creep at the CDC. In the old normal, the NIH was spending your money to fund the development of coronaviruses. In the old normal, inflation robbed you of your wealth slowly. That it is happening faster now is not a great endorsement of getting things back to the way they were.
In the old normal, every institution was infiltrated and corrupted and emboldened by people who hate you. How did this happen? Because we let it happen. We were content to live our lives. We went to our jobs, came home, entertained ourselves with TV and sports, and just wanted politicians to leave us alone. As long as comfortable lives weren’t disturbed too much, we didn’t really care.
I’ve heard it said that we can’t afford that kind of apathy anymore. The truth is, we never could. Our souls never could. We are made for so much more than creature comforts and a job that pays the bills. We are made to grow and know and experience the wonders of this life, and in abandoning that responsibility to ourselves, we abandoned our responsibility to society.
Returning to the old normal means going back to sleep. It means forgetting what we’ve learned in the last 2 years and pretending it won’t happen again.
Most pundits are predicting a Republican sweep in 2022 in the states which could likely be followed by a presidential win in 2024. People are fed up with this insanity, and they want to get back to the way things were.
I’m reminded of Warring Harding and a “return to normalcy.” The WWI years had fundamentally changed the role of government in the lives of citizens and how they lived in the day to day. Unprecedented expansion of government and curtailment of rights had become commonplace and the people were sick of it. They just wanted to go back to the way things were. The roaring 20’s allowed them to forget the lessons they should have learned, so when the next crisis came along, FDR just pointed to the way things had been just a decade earlier. The gains made by tyranny were never really reverted and became the norm.
My biggest fear is that we repeat those same mistakes. A Republican government gives us a return to normalcy, let’s people go back to being oblivious to how bad things are, and fixes nothing. Then, when the next crisis comes (Bill Gates is already promising another pandemic) in 2028 or 2030, the tyranny that never really left will be back in full force and will never really go away.
We owe ourselves better than to go back to the way things were. Remember the hard lessons you have learned these last 2 years. “Eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty.”
I agree. If we go back to the way things were, we’ll be back where we are now in short order. The world really needs one less Bill Gates.