At some point in the early days of the “Virus Era”—my term for the multi-year debacle that we endured from early 2020 through some point in 2023 or 2024—I decided to archive email exchanges with a few friends about this peculiar time in our country’s history.
Perhaps I thought at the time that a written record could help me understand the basis and outcomes of what might become an historic era, which turned out to be prescient as we went from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to what now amounts to an eternal-sounding four or five years depending on how one counts the passage of time.
Reviewing these archived email exchanges today reveals some of the major issues and differences of opinion that affected all of us. Some of these focus on the mere silliness of the Virus Era, some on the madness that affected many.
A college friend—native New Yorker who lives in midtown Manhattan—described how she considered it too risky to leave her small one-bedroom co-op apartment, so had her groceries delivered and washed everything down with bleach before storing in her kitchen. She did not venture out of that apartment for the duration, even for a breath of fresh air. Apparently she does not suffer from claustrophobia.
Another friend—living in northern California—told of getting her hair trimmed by a hair-cutter who had kept her salon open in defiance of state gubernatorial “lockdown” regulations, continuing to make a living when so many workers were forcibly unemployed as “non-essential.”
Yet another friend—who lives in Connecticut—resisted when I mentioned the liberties and freedoms that Americans lost from lockdowns. “What liberties and freedoms?” she asked, apparently unable to see the point. “Well,” I responded, “how about 1st Amendment freedom of speech, freedom to attend religious services of one’s choosing, and the right of peaceable assembly, and petitioning the government for a redress of grievances?” I never heard further from her.
By early 2021, when the first vaccines became available, I watched neighbors in southern California, where I live, struggling to obtain some of the first available appointments. Some drove as far as 100 miles to receive an experimental emergency-use injection that later proved not to stop virus transmission and even caused some harmful side effects among certain groups in the population, as well as apparent longer-term effects that may resemble chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia.
When questioned whether I myself had been vaccinated, I politely commented that it was a personal matter, but that I planned to rely on my own immune system, which had served me well my entire life into what was then my late 70s. I was correct to do so and managed to avoid any symptoms during the entire Virus Era, though numerous friends and neighbors hearing my explanation recoiled at my comments, some of them visibly backing away from me as though the 6-foot distance rule were not sufficient to prevent my infecting them.
During the remaining years of the Virus Era’s lockdown restrictions, I generally ignored the official edicts and orders, refused masking to the extent possible, and wondered how testy I might become if someone physically tried to lay a hand on me.
It was truly a time of simultaneous madness and silliness, when normal human behavior vanished. Trying to understand this, I concluded that almost everyone was thrown into “flight or fight” mode, which refers to a physiological response triggered by the body when it perceives a threat, causing a surge of hormones like adrenaline that prepare the body to either confront the danger (“fight”) or quickly escape it (“flight”)—essentially, a survival mechanism to react to perceived danger by either attacking or fleeing.
Fight-or-flight mode means that they were not using their cerebral cortex—their grey matter—instead being driven by some other “reptile brain” portion of their cranial capacity. Common sense and good judgment were simply impossible for so many people because they caused their own brains to shut down, defer to some sort of lower-level thinking and live their lives in constant fear. I imagined that this universal resignation to a state of fear may have been the most dysfunctional that any human beings have ever exhibited outside of war or natural disasters. Overcoming the fear required a determined effort by any individual.
Several months into this period, I began to express misgivings about school closures, accurately predicting set-backs for students of all levels to achieve and maintain academic achievement. This has proved to be the case, as National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test results have confirmed. I predicted throughout the Virus Era (and still do) that the US will observe in 10-15 years a severely unaccomplished generation of young adults who are illiterate or semi-literate. If reading skills aren’t taught at a key point in children’s lives when the human brain is receptive at this developmental stage, it becomes very difficult to make up for lost time later. Several neighbors, retired elementary school teachers, objected vigorously to my views, saying that children are resilient and can easily make up for instructional deficiencies, which has, of course, proven not to be the case.
I was startled that an entire economy could be suddenly and completely disabled out of fear of a respiratory virus, forcing so many Americans into unemployment, depending on the distinction made by government regulators between “essential” and “non-essential” work.
Anthony Fauci audaciously proclaimed that “attacks on me are attacks on science,” as though he were Mr. Science, the Science Guy himself. That Trump allowed Fauci to essentially run the country for months on end does not speak well for either man. Deborah Birx—also given an enabling platform by Trump—wasn’t much better. It appears, however, that no one will be held accountable for the mischief committed in the name of public health and “The Science.”
One can hope that our country is not subjected to a repeat of this unfortunate event and the ill-designed policies implemented in its wake. However, as they say, hope is not a plan. Once having succeeded in forcing it down Americans’ throats, power-hungry political players may succeed in repeating this when some other public health or natural disaster may arise in future.
