What was required from the outset was a sustainable response to allow people to reduce the danger of the virus while still living. And that has been the one thing that experts and politicians have been singularly unwilling to provide or even attempt. https://twitter.com/strnglft/status/1312090645507592194

We began with “15 days to slow the spread” and exhortations not to use masks, the first of which was a lie and the second of which was based on the idea that masks don’t work- now considered to be culpable misinformation which can get you banned from speaking in public.

From there we entered into a lockdown of unclear duration with opaque guidance, in which the poor and the desperate were asked to absorb the bulk of the risk of both the virus and the economic fallout while receiving little or no assistance other than threats and lectures.

Now we exist in a sort of ghostly half-life in which the manifest refusal of the people to abide by endless lockdown has made that untenable, but where the threat remains that 1) anything we build can be taken away by force at any time, and 2) this will never be allowed to end.

It is unsurprising then that “expertise” falls into the camps of either outright bootlicking for power and violence, or else one-weird-trickery designed to explain how everything is really fine. That’s what happens when science becomes the weapon of courtiers and bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, as the zoom class has abstract emotive debates, the “essential workers” who enable their social defection continue to pay the costs of this disaster on the frontline, some contracting the virus for those who order everything in, others wishing they were that lucky.

At no point in time has there been a coherent plan on how to live with present circumstances. Not from the Federal government, not from most state governments, not from “experts,” and not from the zoom class for whom all of this is just another political issue.

At best we veer drunkenly between demanding the impossible of people (never have any social contact again! Survive on sunlight!) and making increasingly ridiculous excuses for people on our team when they inevitably fail to meet standards which can only exist as moralizing fraud.

Until the people in charge and the people with the social standing to influence them are willing to take human needs seriously, this will continue to spiral out of control. That which cannot be complied with will not be, no matter how much you scream at people for failing you.