It was approximately half a decade ago, depending on when you think it started—the scourge that became known as "The Pandemic.” Although the virus was terrible, the damage done by the response to it was equally devastating as it ruined lives, ripped apart families, forced the closures of untold busineses, and caused learning losses and social anxieties in our kids that are still being felt today.
I was a business owner at the time and had a full plate raising my kids when I saw reports of a possible dangerous bug that was starting to emerge overseas and then finally in Washington State. The truth? I didn’t think too much of it. Every day we’re bombarded with news of the latest bird flu, an Ebola outbreak, measles and more, and while those are all serious, they don’t usually shut the world down in modern times. Heck, not even smallpox could stop the Revolutionary War.
It was in March of 2020 when I was driving to Las Vegas to watch my son’s school playing in a basketball tournament. As we stopped at a famous humongous gas station, I noticed people were wearing masks. I had never really seen that in groups before, and my first thought was, “If this really does turn out to be a thing, those things aren’t going to do jack.”
As officials admitted many years later, after tremendous social damage had been done, it turned out I was right—most masks are close to useless to stop a determined bug.
We watched the basketball tourney, but on day two, masked workers suddenly appeared in plastic gloves to wipe down the rails of the hotel escalators. Ladies with bottles of disinfectant were politely waiting to offer you a spritz. This is getting damn weird, I thought.
Little did I know it was all about to hit the fan.
Within days, it did. My daughter was sent home from college. We weren’t even allowed to go get her or her things (but we did anyway) and suddenly she and her stranded roommate were back at home. When we went to pick her up in a small college town, the shelves were empty at the grocery store.
It was then I first started to feel like I was in an apocalypse movie.
The schools for my other kids were shut down. Ten or so boys on spring break couldn’t get home, and so, my residence became a boarding house. The living room floors were covered with sleeping bags, and feeding this sudden crowd became a serious challenge. The boys decided to go to the taping of a late-night comedy show—but just before they were getting ready to leave, they were notified it had been canceled. “Let's go to Disney Land!” they thought. Oops, that just closed too.
But it was actually fun for a minute there. My living room became a movie theater full of young people, and we watched the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. We became a team, a pack, and for a minute it felt like summer camp.
It was when the NBA canceled games that I really went, “Whoa. This is BAD.” Never in a million years did I think a pro sports league would turn away from so much cash.
And the rest is history. Low-level staffers at the few commercial locations you were allowed into became little dictators, gleefully shouting at people if they weren’t wearing their masks correctly. Public officials –mostly Democrats—reveled in their newfound powers and quickly began issuing idiotic edicts like banning seeds and arresting people for being alone in the ocean. As I wrote in April ’23:
A flimsy piece of cloth over your mouth is going to stop COVID. A man paddleboarding in the ocean by himself is a danger. Don’t buy seeds, but wipe your Amazon packages with disinfectant, wear a mask while riding alone in your car, walk on the wet sand but not the dry. It’s a “pandemic of the unvaccinated“—ignore the fact that many of your fully vaccinated friends are coming down with COVID…
Such idiocy led to a massive loss of public trust in our institutions, and it’s unclear if it can ever be recovered.
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Many in red states don’t understand how completely the autocrats took over in blue states like California and New York. My kids were relegated to our home for a full two years, not allowed to go to school. Even a solid home internet connection can’t handle three+ simultaneous Zoom classes, so they were frequently shut out from even that. They suffered tremendously and withdrew into themselves—as did so many others. As I mentioned, I witnessed friends become enemies, families refuse to speak to each other, and tens of thousands fired from their jobs for not wanting to take an experimental mRNA vaccine.
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Many industries have never recovered—restaurant chains, for instance, are closing left and right as their customer base never fully returned. Movie theaters have seen a rebound in ticket sales, but they're still not up to pre-pandemic levels.
My business did gangbusters at the start of the pandemic, as bored people shut in their bedrooms turned to online shopping for their entertainment, but eventually they tired of that, and when Joe Biden’s inflation set in, the numbers dropped dramatically. I turned to venting my frustrations at my keyboard, and eventually ended up doing it here at RedState for a living (for which I am extremely grateful).
And here I am today, still angry at what happened in this country—and around the world—and about how they lied to us about so many things: the origin of the virus, the use of masks, the real efficacy of the vaccines... The list goes on and on.
Five years later, I am more convinced than ever that we must continually remind ourselves of those dark days and make sure that such destructive government overreach is never allowed to happen again.
