Covid is our next Afghanistan.
It took twenty years to finally end the war on terror’s first and most costly engagement. How long will it take us to conquer our fears surrounding Covid?
Both the war on covid and the war on terror had justifiable starts. Two weeks to slow the spread sounded reasonable enough, didn’t it? And who didn’t want to punish those terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Towers and crashed into the Pentagon?
But as often happens when bureaucrats and experts get involved, the mission changed. For the war in Afghanistan, it wasn’t just about finding Osama Bin Laden. Indeed, he became the least of our worries. First, we had to get rid of the Taliban, those bad boys who wanted to transform that backwards country from a paragon of 19thcentury virtue into a paragon of 13th century virtue. It made sense to get rid of them. After all, they hated women, gays and Republicans. Who could possibly be opposed to replacing the Taliban with a thoroughly modern, Western-loving state?
Well, not the American people. We are the folks who bring good things to light. How could we not make Afghanistan a nice place to vacation?
America was also the place that got rid of polio and smallpox. Instead of just managing Covid, shouldn’t we just eliminate it? We are a can-do people. And we have smart experts who are really good at making vaccines (although there still isn’t an AIDS vaccine, Doctor Fauci). Instead of focusing on life-saving treatments, we shifted our focus and our resources to creating a vaccine that would get us to Zero-Covid.
But in the meantime, because it takes time to make vaccines, we had to mitigate. And to mitigate, we had to do things that we have never done before in our national history. We closed schools, we closed businesses, we forced people to isolate at home. This has never been tried before, but because a grade school student had once written a paper on the idea, and because George W. Bush liked the idea so much that he embraced it, it was now the national strategy of the United States, in the face of the pandemic, to completely shut down society. It wasn’t just two weeks to slow the curve. It was months and months of stopping people from living their lives.
And it was a complete disaster.
But because we live in a society that likes to believe a disaster is right around the corner, we largely complied. We sacrificed our freedom for a virus that kills about .04 of the people it infects.
Like with the war on terror, we fought the war on Covid to eliminate all possibilities that somebody somewhere would get sick. And the media, because it was good for clicks, played up every instance where somebody did die, focusing mostly on people who would scare the populace the most. It especially liked to focus on statistical anomalies, because that’s where the real terror lies.
Both the national security experts and the medical experts chose to ignore history. Afghanistan is notorious for killing empires and emperors who try to dominate it. And yet the American experts continued to double down on an endless war spending endless money that the American people don’t have.
The medical experts doubled down on a mask strategy, having to know that masks don’t really work to contain the spread. They haven’t work thus far, at least. Whether you wear masks or you don’t wear masks, it doesn’t matter. You have about the same chance to catch the virus. But history doesn’t matter to the experts. Because they are the experts and anybody who questions them should just keep their mouths shut.
Nothing pleases a bureaucrat more than to expand his bureaucracy. And nothing gives you more of an opportunity to get a bigger budget than a crisis. Never let a crisis go to waste, the Washington saying goes. The national security state became so big and so powerful that it was able to take down a President. The suburbs surrounding Washington DC are now the wealthiest in the country thanks to tremendous growth of the national security state.
Not to be outdone, the CDC has seen the Covid crisis as a way to expand its budget and its power. The CDC director, early on during the shutdown, called for a massive influx of new employees to help with the “contact-tracing”. Contact tracing was never a real thing. You can’t chase down a virus that has infected half the country. It’s ridiculous. But this was just the tip of the spear. The former President gave the CDC the authority to stop landlords from kicking out renters who refused to pay the rent. Can you imagine? How in God’s name does a health agency have that kind of power. But we are in a crisis and they took what power that they could. Next up for the CDC? Banning guns, stopping racism and fighting climate change (whatever that means). The CDC has not let this crisis go to waste. Not by a long shot. You have to admire their chutzpa.
Both the security state and the health care state use the power of the media to create panic porn. This is how they achieve their goals, which are largely financial, if you strip out all the self-serving nonsense. Well-placed stories that keep the American people on edge about the terrorists on one hand and the demon-virus on the other serve the purpose of keeping the government in the driver’s seat.
History shows that when the American people have a choice to pick either their personal safety or their personal freedom, that they will pick safety every time. That’s how you get the Palmer Raids, Salem witch trials, and Red scares.
Do terrorists pose some risk to the average American? Sure, about the same risk as Covid. Is it worth totally sacrificing our freedom and trampling our Constitution? I don’t think so.
Listen, I know I am in the minority on this. I think making kids wear masks in school is an abomination. Masks don’t work to protect anybody from anything. And yet we persist, because this serves the purposes of a government that expands under the auspices of protection.
I have been pretty consistent on Afghanistan. We should have been out of there a decade ago. How Biden pulled us out of there was messy and unprofessional. But what’s done is done. It’s time to move on.
Same with Covid. We are going to have to live with this virus. We should do all we can to protect ourselves. Get the vaccine. Get healthy. Take your vitamins. Lose weight. But we should never, ever close our society down again.
Let’s hope it doesn’t take two decades to come to our senses on Covid. Our democracy can’t survive that long with this kind of nonsense.