> The lockdowns we had in Melbourne to keep covid down were utterly harrowing and I think a lot of us are still processing that experience. We gave up some free

> The lockdowns we had in Melbourne to keep covid down were utterly harrowing and I think a lot of us are still processing that experience. We gave up some freedoms temporarily to save lives. It was a temporary sacrifice of personal freedoms, because not making that sacrifice would have been worse. Letting covid out would have risked the lives of my parents, and I would have risked long covid - and who knows how many complications down the road. And it’s proof we as a nation can take collective action when we need to. I worry that the US might not have been able to do what we did to contain the virus, even if the fatality rate was 20x higher than it is. And that’s a tragedy from the country that invented the internet and landed people on the moon. I definitely agree with all of this. Yeah, sorry my fellow peers in America are being pricks, and are being so mean that they are not just inflicting pain—-but are retraumatizing Australians (usually strangers) on the internet. In the US, sadly, if somebody dies of coronavirus, then they are really nothing more than a statistic. It is sad but true. A lot of this existed before big tech, but big tech brought it to a totally different level. I agree that America probably would not come together in solidarity to stop a virus 20 times more fatal. I have been so worried about where America has been going for the past 6 years especially. Even if we do somehow get our act together, we will need profound structural change. We will need to flood our politics with ambitious positive plans in general in the future to stop this kind of stuff. Also, the first 5 years of life determines many outcomes in life. It can set up a child to have an authoritarian personality for life, for example. To stop this, our government needs to put extreme emphasis on young children’s development so this kind of stuff can never happen again. I mean like hardcore investments, projects, and human rights towards the best development of young children. The depths of how far low it can go are profoundly deep.