Gone are the days of shepherds, but many would insist this is the era of sheep.
One such person: Harvard student Julie Hartman.
She so sure of it, she penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
In “Harvard Students Are COVID Sheep,” Julie laments the cancellation of a school tradition. “Housing Day” was 86’d due to pandemic concerns.
She labels the move “the latest in a long list of COVID-related excesses.”
The Ivy League institution’s attendees have bent over backward:
Harvard has required students to get vaccinated and boosted and test for Covid twice a week, hectored us to wear masks nearly everywhere, and banned students from several communal spaces, including dining halls at one point, and from having informal campus gatherings indoors with more than 10 people. Most of my classmates lost nearly a third of their time on campus. The aggregate burden of these measures over two years — combined with the discouraging realization that many of them do little to protect public health — has diminished our college experience.
It’s happened across the nation.
Two years ago, 18-year-olds excitedly went off to school. But instead of the most memory-making years of their lives, they encountered single-occupancy dorms, online classes, mandatory muzzling and — in some cases — the necessity of being needled.
As for a social life, it’s hard to have one shrouded and six feet apart.
Yet while the college experience was down, adolescents’ numbers looked up.
Per the CDC’s survivability report in December 2020 — before any vaccine was available:
- 0-19 years: 99.99997
- 20-49 years: 99.9998
- 50-69 years: 99.995
- 70+ years: 99.946
Nonetheless, education tightened the reigns:
Louisiana Governor Mandates Vaccines for Students
New Jersey’s Phil Murphy Will Issue Mask Mandate for Kids in K-12
University Will Punish Unvaccinated Students by Cutting Their Internet Service
Texas School District Issues Mask Mandate — for COVID, but Also ‘Flu’ and ‘Cold’
Students have jumped through hoops for several semesters, at the expense of a normal educational experience. Have the leaps benefited their health?
Some clearly believe so:
University Students Raise Their Fists Over COVID Restrictions — They Want Even More
Rebellion Ain’t What It Used to Be: College Students Protest Their Own Freedom to Unmask
It’s been said the ultimate control isn’t the power to imprison someone, but rather the ability to convince them to imprison themselves.
That could apply to a lot these past couple years.
The university psyche seems to have changed. Maybe the American one has, too.
Perhaps the unintended consequences of a pro-vaccine portrait said it best:
A shepherd in Germany really organized his sheep into the shape of a syringe in order to promote the Covid vaccine https://t.co/FgwEQ9l6lC
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) January 4, 2022
After all, many of those who’ve instituted mandates haven’t lived by their own rules.
Back to Julie, her description befits more than Harvard students:
There is a…group…that apparently [finds] pleasure in these restrictions. These students will chastise you for not wearing a mask correctly and called one of my brave peers who publicly denounced Harvard’s Covid restrictions a “eugenicist” because he supposedly showed insufficient sensitivity to immunocompromised people. They love COVID for the moral high ground it gives them to condescend to and control others.
She’s on the other side:
I ask my friends, “Why do young, fully vaccinated students continue to tolerate these irrational COVID restrictions?” While many of my peers acknowledge the excess, they shrug it off. The prevailing mood on campus is resignation, learned helplessness and reluctance to dissent.
“To get into this university,” she writes, “we chose to detach ourselves from normal human experiences, neglecting our interests, hobbies, robust social lives — anything that couldn’t appear on a college application or be touted in an interview. Almost everything in life was subordinate to whatever was necessary…”
Societally, we’ve done much of the same.
Julie and her peers, of course, will likely receive degrees for their troubles.
What will the rest of us have to show?
May America graduate to normalcy.
We might never gain herd immunity; but hopefully, we can lose herd mentality.
-ALEX
See more content from me:
Bill Gates Writes a Giant Check to Choke the Capitalism and Racism of Objective Math
Woke Fail: University Evicts a Slaveholder’s Statue, Still Puts His Name on Every T-Shirt
Find all my RedState work here.
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