Yascha Mounk, the guy who wrote “Cancel Everything” for the Atlantic back in March 2020, today writes, “Open Everything,” and judging by Twitter’s reaction, I assume we’re in for another tedious cycle of “the liberals are scared to go back to normal” like we got last summer.
Last week, we had governors whining to Biden that it’s time to “move away from the pandemic,” whatever the hell that’s even supposed to mean. Meanwhile, many of the states that still have mask mandates, including Oregon, are announcing plans to get rid of them.
As if a deadly disease is something you can just make go away by becoming bored of it.
Look. You want to get “back to normal”? Great. Me too. And good news! We know how to do that! It’s super easy:
- Everyone who can gets vaccinated. That’s most people, FYI.
- We fix indoor ventilation so that HVAC systems are filtering out viruses and exchanging air with the outdoors frequently enough.
- We make indoors masking with at least surgical masks a social norm and everyone just does it.
- Getting tested is fast, easy, frequent, and dirt cheap or free.
That’s it. Do that, and we can happy-ass our way right back to normal. It’s not even that hard. I mean, the HVAC thing’s gonna take some time, but we could be doing the rest right now.
We just aren’t. We just won’t. We decided it would just be easier if we ignored the whole thing and let several hundred thousand people die and who knows how many more become permanently disabled. We decided it would be easier if we just starved people back to work so we could get the economy churning again.
Because no one in charge of anything cares how many people die. They only care that they’re making money and going to dinner parties guilt free.
Notes & Thoughts 