Eight months after the initial lie of “15 days to slow the spread,” Thanksgiving is canceled. This is not hyperbole. Just five days after celebrating Joe Biden’s victory in the non-socially distanced streets of Chicago without a mask on, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that not only is the city under a stay-at-home advisory, but also that the city’s residents are forced to cancel their Thanksgiving plans. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has banned any indoor gatherings on private property with more than 10 people, regardless of the size of the residence. Private businesses such as restaurants and bars are also banned from operation after 10 p.m.
It really goes without saying, but this is entirely untenable. It was untenable the second “flatten the curve” morphed into the absurd notion that entire businesses, livelihoods, and lives lost at the hands of mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence were worth paying to save a single coronavirus case from occurring, and it became farcically so as Democrats happy to cripple the economy then cheered on superspreader protests and race riots that set cities ablaze.
If public health officials squandered their credibility by moving the goalposts on the goals of lockdowns and lying about the efficacy of masks early on, policymakers (primarily in the form of Democratic mayors and governors) laughed whatever shreds of credibility they had to begin with away. Lockdowns quickly became raw exercises of political favor, with ghouls such as Nancy Pelosi and Lightfoot granting themselves exemptions to get dolled up in hair salons while the rest of their cities’ salons remained forbidden from operation by law. While Cuomo sent in the guards to persecute New York’s Jews, he applauded packed protests and let rioters roam free.
Furthermore, the public has dared to believe their lying eyes as they have watched how lockdown measures have not remotely followed the much-vaunted science.
Countries across the world had proven that schools, at least for younger children, are not remotely primary or significant vectors of the coronavirus, and we now have ample evidence to show that while extended indoor contact renders the virus somewhat airborne, it rarely spreads through surface transmission or while socially distanced outdoors, especially under the sunlight that kills the disease. Yet again, for months, we saw blue states ban residents from beaches and outdoor churches, only to then bring back indoor dining while keeping schools shuttered. Furthermore, ultraliberal localities never really opened up in practice. Millions of people haven’t been allowed to eat inside, go to church, work out at the gym, or send their children to camp or school. What makes you think they’ll be happy to limit their limited radius of existence even further?
So, if we were recalcitrant to comply with the lockdowns when we thought they’d only be another week or so, why would we let Lucy yank the football from us again? It’s one thing to ask that people get tested for the coronavirus before attending a Thanksgiving event with more than a certain amount of people or to point out that given nationwide spikes of the coronavirus, we ought to limit our socialization for the next two weeks specifically so we can enjoy Thanksgiving. But at a certain point, the buck has to stop somewhere.
Telling sentient and social beings that they’re not supposed to see anyone who doesn’t reside in their households (as Lightfoot is) is akin to teaching teenagers abstinence as the sole form of sex education: One can only believe that such an approach will work if you ignore the entirety of human nature. Yet another season (over the holidays, no less) of instructing people not to see anyone is doomed to fail, as it already did when the weather was less bad. Some people adapted to “pods” of friends who only socialized with each other, likely the most realistic way to live. But without any guidance to do so, plenty of people fell off the wagon and gave up entirely.
This will happen again, absent a realistic approach to mitigating coronavirus transmission. But the true tragedy is that even if we put a perfect plan in place, much of the public is simply too mad to believe that any government guidance at this point isn’t just a Trojan horse to tank the economy and assault our rights.
