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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
On a personal level I can definitely admit that covid has broken me. I can't seem to let it go and I'm still hooked on lockdown and vaccine BS that a normal person would've long moved on from. I recognise that this is a problem and have actively been trying to spend less time and energy pursuing such material.
It's hard to move on though because the public response in general, and particularly that of my friends and family, to covid restrictions, was really shocking to me. How easily they rolled over and accepted the boot of tyranny in the name of safety. How quickly my friends turned on me for questioning the narrative and how even my own family turned against me and didn't want me around anymore. That stings and the trauma from that betrayal is at the root of my continued obsession.
And although they've moved on there's been no apology or acceptance that they were wrong. They still believe that they did the right thing. My friends ignore covid restrictions like everybody else now and my family invites me around again but the fact that they haven't acknowledged how easily they were manipulated and misled into evil, into pointless ostracisation, into supporting highly unethical and immoral policies, means that I can't trust them or wider society in the same way I did pre-covid.
So yes, covid has broken me. It broke my trust in my country, in my people and in my closest loved ones. Is it any wonder I can't let it go.
COVID measures were a tax on conscientiousness and I think corrosive to our society’s health in ways we are only beginning to understand. I think most westerners are so a-historical and complacent that they don’t think real oppression can happen to them. Most peoples response was “I support lockdowns” because that was the pro-social thing to say, while at the same time flouting all the rules personally. They lived as if there would not be personal consequences to their actions in defiance of the rules. And they were right, of course too bad about all the businesses that failed, but we needed to do it to save the marginal old person.
This is dangerous and the worst of both worlds. People don’t care about the loss of their de jure liberty and just assume the justice system won’t come for them. We eroded faith in law and order at the same time as we sent a strong signal to the state that we will accept state overreach. And the people who protested? In Canada we froze their bank accounts and declared martial law.
Say what you want about lax US gun laws, but they do deter the type of protest that we saw in Canada. Nobody would do that here, because homeowners would be outside brandishing
forearmsfirearms.Sure they would- California has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the early 90s race riots; $major_US_city metropolis has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the peaceful but fiery protests from consuming them. Rittenhouse was the end of it, but they certainly gave him hell for it and his friend was convicted anyway.
The problem is that you actually need a legal leg to stand on, and the Canadian right gave no reason beyond what is typical for protests for the citizens of Ottawa to start sniping from their expensive apartment balconies. Not that they even had any guns, given they're the ones begging the government to act aggressively against the people that do, but still.
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