Remember two years ago, when we were in the height of fighting the COVID pandemic? Remember the controls placed on us all, which today seem brutally restrictive? I mean, whoever thinks now that keeping me out of the wide-open spaces of the Korean countryside on my bike actually worked to control the spread of the disease? But then, I could see it. If everybody just said, “I’m just out riding my bike,” I’m sure we’d have plenty of people “just” out “riding my bike” (if you know what I mean).
But you know, hindsight really is 20/20. Here we sit, on the other side of all of that, and the anti-vax, anti-information, anti-just-about-anything to save people crowd are giving us their “I told you so’s.” How disingenuous – having experienced one of the greatest accomplishments in human history: the unbelievably rapid development and distribution of an effective vaccine for an illness that has killed over 6 million people in less than three years (to include over a million this year) – and they have the temerity to say “See? It was all just a huge conspiracy to take away our rights, when in fact it wasn’t nearly that bad.”
Except it could have been, no thanks to them. Thousands, if not tens-of-thousands more could have died if we’d really done it their way. They glom onto the tragic exceptions and ignore the hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions who have not had to face the pain and possible death of this illness, and now that things are settling down and we’re getting back to “normal,” they sit there acting like the last two and a half years didn’t happen. And most of the free world is now, indeed, free — thanks in large part to the way (no matter how awkward and messed up at times) that the people and our governments handled the whole thing. Yes, huge mistakes were made along the way — great leaps of overreach included. But we’re human. That’s what we do.
I get the frustration people have experienced. I myself hated the seemingly arbitrary restrictions that I had to follow out of USFK (US Forces, Korea) and Osan Air Base (who can forget the “bubble”?). But I sucked it up and followed the rules because I live overseas (and I complained like nobody’s business), and it was either that or get kicked out of the country (i.e. lose my job). I had to put up with not seeing my grandson until more than a year after his birth because I couldn’t risk getting caught in COVID limbo while I was traveling. And as hard as it was at times, I’m sitting here on the other side of it thinking that things are almost normal again, and I can’t help but think that was because, in the long run, we all generally did the best we could – the right thing, considering we’d never been through a pandemic of this scale in this age.
Of course, governments and organizations screwed things up. It’s included in their definition. Some of them were downright draconian, and some (most notably China) still are. But if you think about it, China did us a favor by showing us just how bad a government can be — just what life would be like under such a government, literally welded into your apartment complex, even quite recently.
But it was also governments that brought us out of this, even if they were rather ham-handed at times. Does this mean we can let them off the hook? Of course not. It’s absolutely crucial to remember that governments are run by people, and we should know from personal experience that people are generally self-interested. And government people – that is, “politicians” – take self-interest to entirely new levels regularly. I’m consistently reminded, especially lately, of the old joke, “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.” But my point here today is that we can’t sit here in a world protected by the umbrella of a government-sponsored vaccine development and distribution system, where most people now have at least some protection from the virus that is demonstrably deadly, and claim that the government screwed it all up. Having the hindsight of knowing the virus has lost some of its effectiveness, and that we’ve all learned to be more cautious and considerate as matter of our daily living, doesn’t give you the right to tell any of us “I told you so. You should have done it my way.” Not when you are benefitting from the bold (and yes, sometimes erroneous or misguided) actions of the people who actually had to make the tough calls while facing something no one had experienced before.
I personally know someone who died from the vaccine. But I also personally know someone who died from the virus. Both were tragic, but the COVID death even more so because it probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the callous and incautious actions of a family member who brought the disease into their home by refusing to heed the warnings and take the precautions that could have saved that life.
So let’s please stop with the posturing like you’re some kind of modern-day Nostradamus. We’re (hopefully) on the downside of a world disaster, and the Monday-morning quarterbacking is not at all helpful. Stay cautious and skeptical if you wish, but be thankful that we’ve made it this far and move on. And if you want to keep complaining, just know that it could’ve been far worse. You could be living in Shanghai…