Something so momentous will be hard to forget. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.
Something so momentous will be hard to forget. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.
F ive years ago today, I was sure they were going to turn the plane around and take me back to New York City.
I had other things on my mind as the world began responding to Covid-19. Just a few weeks before, I had moved to NYC and started work at National Review. I was still adjusting to life in the Big Apple and to my new job. I also wasn’t sure what to make of it all, something that was true of many others, no doubt.
As nations started plunging into chaos and tyranny, global health authorities started signaling how seriously they were taking the disease. (The World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020.) America began to react, too (the NBA suspended its season on the day of the WHO declaration), and Covid couldn’t be ignored. Five years later, it shouldn’t be forgotten.
Initially, I thought Covid was just another one of those distant viral panics, like SARS, Ebola, Zika, etc., that would not affect my life. By the time the world began its large-scale reactions, I still wasn’t sure that it would amount to much. Looking overseas, I couldn’t make sense of whether the virus itself or the reaction to it was worse. But it was obvious to me that the most densely populated area of the United States was the last place I wanted to be while the U.S. dealt with its own outbreak.
Which is why I booked a flight back to Cincinnati, Ohio, the evening of March 12. I’ve mentioned before the apocryphal quote about my hometown: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times.” It was no guarantee of insulation from whatever panic or crisis might soon ensue. But I had good reason to suspect that I’d be better off there than in NYC. If I could get out: At the time, rumors were swirling wildly about a possible quarantine of the whole city (which had become a Covid hot spot), a shutdown of bridges, and other nightmarish scenarios. So a Last Crusade–style return of my plane to LaGuardia did not seem outlandish.
My plane was not turned around. But not because governments and other authorities were above outlandish reactions to Covid-19. Schools closed nationwide just a few days later; government-mandated closures of churches, gyms, restaurants, and other establishments soon followed. Even outdoor public spaces were not immune. Perhaps the most ridiculous instance in this country was the arrest of a solitary beachgoer. Governments also removed basketball hoops from parks and filled skate parks with sand. Upon arriving in my hometown, I saw that play sets were festooned with caution tape and marked with warnings (quickly proven unscientific) against using them because, they claimed, Covid-19 spread on surfaces.
Finding this absurd and objecting to the fact that some jurisdictions had closed churches but deemed such pillars of civil society as, uh, marijuana purveyors “essential” were two of the few contrarian views I can honestly credit myself with in those early weeks. My prevailing instincts were to seek stability in a world that seemed to be rapidly unraveling, to avoid excesses of sentiment in any direction, and to be grateful for what I had, such as my parents’ basement.
I am not ashamed of this initial reaction, even all these years later. There was much uncertainty and little I could do about it. Still, I wish I had been less stoically accepting of it all. Had I thought a bit more about the fact that even early on people were reacting to lockdown measures in a manner that defeated their purpose, I would have sooner arrived at a skepticism that others reached first. They deserve more credit than I do. “What wise men had promised has not happened,” Lord Melbourne said. “What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass.” That many of these “damned fools” were neither damned nor fools, and have in fact been vindicated and empowered since, is but one of the lingering effects of Covid-19.
An entire cohort of children was set back, perhaps irreparably, by extended forced absence from school. Hundreds of thousands of people succumbed to the disease, as well as to other maladies and pathologies exacerbated by it. Many elderly (including one of my own relatives) died without any family present. Countless businesses — such as one in my hometown whose sole purpose was to host public events — closed.
Our politics were hardly spared. Deprived of real-world interactions, we found that the digital and virtual were meager substitutes. The increasing time spent online surely helped drive our political life insane, especially in summer 2020. The associated insanity helped end Donald Trump’s first presidency and, in a backhanded way, helped end Joe Biden’s: Sold as a means to return America to normalcy, Biden interpreted some of the aberrant spawn of those Covid years as an aspirational template for governing, one that Americans rejected. And the institutions most deeply implicated in the Covid response — the public health establishment, governments at every level, teachers’ unions, and more — have not yet recovered in public esteem. They may never.
The Covid-19 experience was unique, and it can seem difficult to take broadly applicable lessons from it. But as I have argued before, there are plenty: Be wary of top-down, elite-driven solutions, be ever on the lookout for elite hypocrisy, defend the prerogatives of civil society, and take care of yourself. Yet the experience itself, as a totality, may prove its own most enduring legacy. There may be an attempt to forget, as happens after pandemics. In part because I never returned to live in NYC, I can’t help but think of my life in pre- and post-Covid terms. I doubt I’m alone. There’s no turning that plane around, no going back to what was. Something so momentous will be hard to forget. And it shouldn’t be forgotten.