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Normal? Accepting? Did you forget about lockdowns, mask mandates, the unprecedented speed at which we developed and deployed the vaccine, that all news for the
by GuB-42 5y ago
Normal? Accepting?
Did you forget about lockdowns, mask mandates, the unprecedented speed at which we developed and deployed the vaccine, that all news for the last two years were almost all about covid (only recently displaced by the Ukraine war).
You call that normal?! Though it is a completely different thing, it almost makes 9/11 looks like a detail. With 9/11, we had a few days of cancelled flights, and more security checks, with covid, we had months when we couldn't fly at all, and the time we could, we had masks and tests, sometimes even quarantines. Covid is the most world-changing event since WW2.
And all that because we didn't want people to die. We could have let people die, humanity never was is danger of extinction or anything like that. In fact, it could have been a way to "help society get rid of the burden of the elderly" (a common theme among conspiracy theorists). But no, we wanted people to stay alive, as if we weren't monsters.
In fact, many people think we overdid it, a debatable position, but in any way, we are totally not considering it "normal".
- icedchai 5y agoI sometimes wonder if I’ll ever feel normal again. I’ve been operating in an exceptional, “emergency” state for too long. Two years ago this week is when everyone I know went remote. “Two weeks to slow the spread”, remember? Life has been forever altered.
- technobabbler 5y agoThe Atlantic is a left leaning mag. From that perspective, the "how could we let it happen like this" was, I believe, specifically about the culture wars: ie how could so many reds let their neighbors die because they valued mask freedom over lives. As a society we've normalized individual freedom over collective lives as a new value, something which wasn't true in, say, the WW2 era of collective rationing. Half the country was fine letting millions die because they believed some youtuber on masks and vax.