By now we’ve all gotten the message: you’re
selfish if you’d like to do the kinds of things that once gave your life
meaning.
For these people, life is about nothing but
the avoidance of death.
Virtually
everything you’ve looked forward to has been canceled, and nobody will tell you
when you can have those things back. “When we have a vaccine,” comes the raving
lunatic’s answer.
Nobody
was giving you that answer when they were pushing “15 days to flatten the
curve.” They didn’t dare.
Instead, they kept us in our
homes for those 15 days, and then 15 days after that, and 15 days after that.
Each time they pushed the date back we grew more demoralized, more resigned to
a barren life without “large gatherings” – i.e., everything that makes life fun
– and “virtual” events over Zoom.
Oh, and no hugs, no weddings, 10 people at your father’s funeral, and a long list of other grotesque demands.
What
metrics were they using to decide when we’d be allowed back out again, when our
businesses could open (and when they could operate at a level that made profit
even a remote possibility), and when those life-giving pleasures that bring us
meaning and fulfillment could be resumed? Who knows?
All
we heard was: everything is canceled.
Maybe
you can have it in 2021.
Maybe
you can have it when there’s a vaccine – as if there’s a guarantee of that.
Well, a terrifying statistic came out last
week showing the grim – if entirely predictable – effects all this inhuman
regimentation has been having on the young, particularly those between 18 and
24.
Here
are some figures from the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration. They are percentages of people who have
considered suicide within the previous 12 months, organized by age.
Note
that the 18 to 25 group fluctuates between 6.8 percent and 11 percent:
Now, from the Centers for Disease Control,
we find that percentage (for the 18-24 group) has leaped to 25.5 percent — and
this survey asks not about the previous 12 months, but whether they’ve
considered suicide just in the past 30 days:
(Note
also the huge jump in the numbers for people in their mid-20s through their
40s.)
We’ve
taken away everything they love, deprived them of the opportunity to socialize
and to experience those irreplaceable moments of youth, and demanded they
accept this dystopia as the “new normal.”
Now that’s selfish.
Part of the natural order is that
parents make sacrifices for their children, not the other way around. If
vulnerable people wish to isolate themselves – a perfectly sensible course of
action for some individuals – then they should isolate themselves, not demand
that young people sacrifice everything dear to them and live atomized
existences for a period of time that our overlords refuse to specify.
As I pass through middle age, the
thought would never occur to me to make these demands of younger people. Am I
prepared to tell them that while I enjoyed these pleasures when I was young,
for the sake of my comfort they cannot have them? Who thinks like that?
Some
of us – yes, even many of us in middle age and beyond – are prepared to say:
this is no way for anyone, young or old, to live.
We
want a life that includes weddings, family celebrations, hugs, live concerts,
drinks with friends, thriving businesses, the arts, school dances, theater, and
friendship from less than six feet away – and we’re willing to accept whatever
risk accompanies these things, because no other kind of life is worthy of a
human being.
And
it’s not just the deprivation of basic, non-negotiable joys that the lockdowns
cause. Even the New York Times
admitted that lockdowns will lead to 1.4 million excess TB deaths, 500,000
excess HIV deaths, and 385,000 excess malaria deaths.
That’s on top of the 1.2 million children
UNICEF expects to die as a result of the lockdowns.
Not
to mention how many people have been prevented – by deadly regulations driven
by irrational fear, or by irrational fear itself, drummed into them by a
grossly irresponsible news media – from receiving major medical care they need.
In the UK they’ve been predicting more avoidable cancer deaths than COVID deaths
because of this problem.
Meanwhile, Doomers have been
peddling a comic-book version of the virus. When Wisconsin courts said bars
could reopen, this was supposed to lead to a massive spike in deaths there. All
the social-media scolds said so. No such thing happened. Did this cause them to
rethink their comic-book approach? You can guess the answer.
They
practically cheered when spikes hit Arizona, Texas, and Florida, and they
blamed those states’ reopenings – even though those states had been open for
eight weeks before the spikes occurred.
Those
spikes are over now, and they were brought down without lockdowns. Yes, some
bars were closed, but what really happened, as Alex Berenson put it, is that
they simply pretended they were restaurants.
South Dakota never closed at all. They
had an outbreak at a meatpacking plant, but those are unrepresentative of
society at large when it comes to the virus. The state is doing great – just 17
deaths per 100,000. Oh, they have low population density, you say. Well, Rachel
Maddow insisted that disaster was bound to strike there, even mocking the
governor: “You realize it’s an infectious disease?”
In
fact, Governor Kristi Noem is now using her sensible approach as a selling
point to recruit new South Dakota residents.
Everybody wants to criticize Sweden for
not locking down – and no wonder: if a country can have good results without
locking down, it makes the lockdowners look like the crazed sociopaths they
are.
Oh,
Sweden had a high death rate! That’s what they say. Well, around three-quarters
of the deaths in Sweden occurred in some kind of long-term care facility, and
the Swedes admit their failure there.
But
that has nothing to do with the overall soundness of Sweden’s approach, since
those facilities are isolated from society. How did society at large do?
Extremely well. Number of people under 50 who died, out of a country of 10
million? Seventy.
These
days there are barely any deaths at all in Sweden.
The virus does what it will
do, despite the ad hoc destructionism of our control freaks with their white
coats and clipboards.
There’s a sickness out there, all
right, but I’m not talking about COVID-19.
I’m talking about the irrational,
fact-free response.
Demand your life back.
Take your life back.
That isn’t selfish. You get one life.
You want to live it. That’s normal.
What’s selfish and abnormal is the
presumption that other people are entitled to your life.
If they want to live as prisoners in
their own homes and experience life over Zoom, they can be our guest.
The rest of us intend to live.
For
more:
http://www.WrongAboutLockdown.com
Tom
Woods [send him mail;
visit his
website] is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 books and
host of the Tom Woods Show, which libertarians listen to
every weekday. Get a free copy of Your
Facebook Friends Are Wrong About the Lockdown: A Non-Hysteric's Guide to
COVID-19.
Copyright
© Tom Woods
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/08/thomas-woods/762915-2/