I am afraid. I'll admit it.
Depending on who you listen to, there is allegedly a lot to be afraid of these days. The country is fractured politically, new variants of Covid-19 pop up weekly, hateful acts and speech run rampant in our society, and nobody knows what to do about any of it.
That stuff doesn’t scare me, though. There’s always been political disagreement, always been sickness, always been hate, always been uncertainty. Humanity can weather all that.
No, my fear is different. It’s a fear that doesn’t get discussed as often as the predominant issues in our culture. It’s broader than them. More elusive.
I fear the irrational fear that has taken hold of our society and won’t let go.
I am blown away by how afraid people are today, and the lengths they are willing to go to and allow our government to go to in order to experience a minor and mostly false sense of security.
If Covid-19 and the media’s representation of it has taught me anything, it’s that people’s emotions can be absolutely and totally overwhelmed by media inundation, and it’s not even that hard to do it.
I’ve said before on this site that if it were 1980, Covid-19 and its influence on our society would have been completely different. Not nonexistent, mind you, but nothing like it has been. 24 hour news, social media, and cell phones have completely shaped the way our society has responded to the “pandemic.”
The wildfire of fear mongering by the media is raging out of control. That’s something to address in itself, but I’m far more concerned with people’s total and open-armed willingness to accept the media's “end of the world” narrative, despite how minor the actual felt effects of Covid-19 are in their lives.
You can hate me for saying it if you want, but there are a huge amount of local communities that STILL wouldn’t know Covid-19 even existed if the media hadn’t told them about it. And while I’m not suggesting that this is reason enough to ignore Covid on a wholesale level, it does give me pause when I consider the things these same communities have been willing to do in the name of “keeping people safe” from a disease that quite simply isn’t SERIOUSLY dangerous to the VAST majority of people who experience it.
There are thousands of perfectly healthy 20 through 40-year-olds who haven’t gone into work, at a building, since March of 2020. There are healthy 12-year-olds who haven’t consistently been in a school building since March of 2020.
Everything was canceled.
Little League was canceled. Carnivals were canceled. Girl Scout events were canceled. Businesses were forced to close. Supply lines shut down. Cities went dark. Churches turned people away.
The reason?
No. Not Covid-19.
Fear.
Many of the places that have submissively fallen in line with government mandated Covid-19 protocols couldn’t point to a single, SERIOUS, Covid-19 issue in their communities if they tried. And don’t give me the whole, “but people are sick everywhere!” argument. People have always been sick. And even if more are sick now, it's not nearly enough to justify the massive changes made to a generational way of life that have been implemented since March of 2020. The degree to which you alter society through mandate must correlate directly to the degree of danger you can prove through incontrovertible evidence.
That flat out can't be done. In most places, the amount of evidence for the tangible effects of Covid-19 isn’t even close to what would be needed to justify the amount of draconian changes that were implemented in response to them.
I'll say it again, until somebody finally hears me: 2-year-olds were forced into masks at daycare because primarily elderly people with preexisting health conditions were dying at a slightly higher rate than they were pre-Covid.
You can despise the previous statement if you’d like, but it’s the truth. That's how far we got with all this.
Covid-19 is not dangerous enough to justify the economic, mental, and social damage it has done to our country. But even if it somehow was, it still wouldn't be my greatest concern.
I fear the fear.
Do you remember what people were doing in March of 2020? They were literally sanitizing their groceries every time they went to the store. They wouldn’t eat food from restaurants because they were worried Covid-19 was dancing all over their Big Macs.
Even today, far too many people are still horrified to go outside of their homes. Far too many people still truly believe Covid-19 is waiting like the bogeyman outside their door and will kill them if they aren’t careful. The media has so many people riled about the clear and present danger of Covid that most of them are too scared to stop and question if what they are being told is even true or not.
And don’t get me wrong. Covid-19 IS waiting outside your door. It IS a near certainty that you are going to catch it, regardless of your vaccination status, and you may even develop symptoms from it. It’s here, it will stay, and unless you're willing to live in your basement forever there’s no way you can avoid it.
But it’s almost certainly not going to kill you.
It’s not even likely to make you seriously sick.
Statistically, by any metric you want to use, based on any situation we’ve seen, in regards to VIRTUALLY anyone you want to reference who catches it, Covid-19 will present as a common cold for a few days and have zero lasting effects.
But the fear remains, to a degree that is unjustifiable, based on media fear mongering that is unjustifiable.
Look, I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t be concerned with Covid-19 at all. It’s a real thing and under highly specific circumstances it is a serious thing. But our society has to stop letting the fear of something that has become a caricature of what it really is dictate our lives.
We must open schools. We must open jobs. We must unmask and "undistance" our children. We must let people congregate. We must let people live their lives. Not because the situation has improved or because wearing masks worked or because the vaccines have been some arbitrary level of "effective," but because the situation was never bad enough to shutter society like we did in the first place, and it still isn’t.
The greatest threat to our society isn’t Covid-19 at all. It’s the irrational fear of it.
That fear is guiding us toward a place I assure you we do not want to go. And perhaps the worst part of it all, is that it never had to be all or nothing.
It never had to be a choice between, "Covid isn't real" and, "shut down everything forever." It’s okay to say that we're going to allow a generational way of life to continue because we've acknowledged that the SERIOUS consequences of Covid-19 only apply to a miniscule number of people BUT still look for ways to help those people. It’s okay to tell the sick, the elderly, and the health compromised to take special caution, while still letting the healthy live life in a manner which is most conducive to an economically and mentally stable society. It's okay to state there may someday be a reason for which we need to massively alter society, but that Covid-19 isn't it.
But what’s not okay is to insist that healthy people living healthy lives in the same manner that generations have for centuries are somehow actively killing people. At any given moment, the vast majority of people don’t have Covid-19, and even those who do, don’t have it in a manner that seriously affects their own lives or the lives of 98% of people they will interact with in any lasting manner.
So why would we alter society in ways that will lead to irreparable political, social, and economic harm for generations to come in order to try to solve a problem that affects significantly fewer people than it doesn't affect?
There’s only one reason.
Fear.
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