The reason traces to the utterly preposterous pretense that by the mass violation of rights and freedoms, governments would somehow contain or control (or something) a common respiratory virus. Not one tactic they tried worked – one might suppose that at least one would show some effectiveness if only by accident, but no – yet the attempt alone imposed costs that we’ve never before experienced on this scale.
The population of most developed countries – Sweden excluded because they largely ignored the demands of the WHO – is now suffering ill-health, demoralization, educational loss, economic stagnation, population declines, and a mass loss of trust in everything.
Crime in the US has exploded in ways we never imagined. Whole cities imploding, including the greatest of all such as Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, and New York City. The commercial real estate crisis is around the corner. Whole business districts have been wrecked. Malls are closing up, which would be fine if this were a pure market at work deprecating a once-fashionable thing, but this comes three years following a period when nearly all were forced to become ghost towns by governments around the country.
Even in the face of all this evidence, there is only denial. There has been no serious coming to terms with what happened, not at any level in any way. Writers describe symptoms but rarely trace to the causation. The lockdown – completely without precedent in Western policy history – is the great unmentioned. The trauma is so deep, and the range of implicated institutions so broad that it has been deliberately vanished.
The only possible redemption that could follow such a disastrous period in human history would be abject apologies on a mass scale, followed by ironclad promises never to do this again. That should have included dramatic reforms in power, accountability, and personnel. There needed to be a reckoning.