Lockdown | Jack Wilkie

During my college years my parents held two season tickets to Colorado Avalanche hockey games. I lost count of how many games I was lucky enough to attend in those years, but it had to be in the range of about 50.

On one particular occasion, after years of sitting in the exact same seats, a man came strolling down the stairs in the middle of the play and stopped at our row.

“You’re in my seat,” he said flatly.
“Um, I don’t think so,” I said as diplomatically as I could. “What seat number do you have?”
“Row 13, 1 and 2. That’s my seat.”
I produced my ticket and showed him where I, too, had one that showed row 13, seat 1.
“Are you sure that’s what yours says?”
We went back and forth a couple more times, me not moving and him insisting I was in the wrong place, seemingly at an impasse. The people around us grew annoyed as he stood in the aisle and blocked their view of the ongoing hockey game.

Eventually his wife sheepishly got his attention and pointed back to the signage at the top of the section. He was at the right row and seat number, alright, but he was in the wrong section. Problem solved.

It was at this point he turned to me and said, “You can stay there.”

Not “My bad, man, I had the wrong spot,” or “Oops, my mistake.” The assuredness with which he had told me I was in the wrong seat remained unwavering despite his mixup. In his mind, he somehow remained the authority in the situation and ever so graciously granted me the right to stay in my seat. The one that was mine all along.

It was such a weird interaction that I still vividly remember it, even though it was a decade ago. Who goes through life like that?

Then Covid came to town, and I realized that he’s not an anomaly. No, it’s how the majority of people operate.

After two years of nearly every single covid narrative being proven wrong – “lockdowns work,” “masks work,” “shots protect the people around you,” “if we act right we can make a coronavirus disappear,” “you’re a racist conspiracy theorist if you think it came from a lab,” “natural immunity must not be factored into response,” etc. etc. – the government and media carry on without a single mea culpa. People were banned from social media for saying things that were proven indisputably true, things that even government officials now acknowledge. No apologies are forthcoming.

Vaccine Passports are being retracted all over. Mask mandates are being repealed in some places and flaunted by the people who instituted them in others (hello, LA Super Bowl). Washington Post boldly floats a headline that “Mask mandates didn’t do much.” They have the gall to say the science changed. They have to, because to admit otherwise would be to admit it was all done in vain. It did not change, though.

With all the bravado of the man in the wrong section at a hockey game, they inform you you can take your mask off, aren’t required to get a shot to enter a building, can see people again, can go back to church, and so on. Stop trusting them. Stop letting them tell you what to care about, what to be afraid of, and who to hate.

Further, the religious leaders who lambasted their fellow Christians who have now been proven right in nearly every way have yet to acknowledge this. They called their brethren conspiracy theorists. Labeled us as unreasonable. Said they were embarrassed of those who kept going to church. Ironically, they threw around the accusation that we’re “anti-science.”

Now that the dust has settled, those who threw around such accusations are not acknowledging their missteps and taking those words back.

No, they will continue to carry themselves as authorities and lecture others. As my hockey-watching challenger said “You can stay in that seat,” they say “You can get back to the work of the church” and “You can take that mask off.”

I’m all for everybody getting on the side of truth together. But you don’t get to lead a horde of people in the wrong direction for 2 years, realize you’re wrong, and sprint back to be the head of the pack in the other direction. It’s time to take a step back and figure out what just happened and reflect on those mistakes so you don’t turn on the brethren again.

“Did you hear Governor Abbott just said they’re lifting the state’s mask mandate?” I asked the lady behind the counter at my neighborhood coffee stop last week, just minutes after the news broke.

“No, I didn’t. That’s interesting,” she replied.

“Leave it to Texas to be the first!” piped up the guy in line behind me.

“Well, actually Florida and some others have…” I started to say, before being interrupted by the lady at the back of the line –

“Yeah, and everybody in Florida is sick!”

As brief as this exchange was, it speaks volumes about our national COVID conversation.

The fact of the matter is, they were both wrong. Texas was not first, and Florida (and the states that opened long before it) is not overrun with sickness any more than moderate states like Texas or hard lockdown states such as California. In truth, they’re really not much different than anywhere else. And yet my fellow customers both confidently asserted these falsehoods with the implication that Texas is going on a suicide mission by throwing caution to the wind and lifting the mask mandate.

It’s been like this from the beginning. The mainstream opinion loudly shouts down any dissent, and here we are a year later having learned almost nothing. We ignore the fact that the effects of the virus are heavily scaled to age. We ignore any statistics that say areas with mask mandates have shown little difference in results from areas without them. We can’t have a conversation because the “moral” response was decided long before the facts had a chance to be debated.

Take, for instance, the early refrain that anyone who even mildly opposed state measures “Wanted to kill grandma.” The argument is presented as if they’re saying, “Such a position could be dangerous and potentially fatal to the elderly.” That’s not the same thing, though. “You’re going to kill grandma” does not leave room for discussion. It presents the discussion as settled, but by emotion rather than fact. Since emotion can’t be argued with, and since the conclusion has been assumed, the debate over the facts can’t happen. Rather than discussing ways to keep grandma safe, your business has to go under, your mental health has to plummet, and your children’s development has to be stunted. Period. Any objection makes you a grandma-killer.

Because emotion rules, facts won’t see the light. One can comfortably feel superior to scores of one’s fellow citizens just by accepting what is presented as fact, because to hold the majority, mainstream opinion, there is almost no research required whatsoever. We are all baptized in that viewpoint daily. It’s almost a feat to not know that side’s arguments. If you are going to believe something else, you have to go looking for it.

This does not mean that everyone who holds the majority opinion is uninformed. It also does not mean that the minority opinion is always correct, or that its adherents are all smarter, better people. Plenty of people far smarter than me disagree with me. It means nothing more than this: the minority opinion, by nature, will always be made up of a more informed collection of individuals. We who hold minority opinions already know what you in the majority think, because we’re shown that point of view (and pressured to believe it) every single day. We don’t even have to go looking for it. For you to know our opinions, however, you will have to have the willingness to look in places you have been told are morally unsavory. Because most don’t do that, most won’t be informed on both sides.

Why then, does the majority opinion hold such a superiority complex over the minority opinion? How did the two people in the coffee shop – who clearly had not done the research necessary to make their claims – have such boldness to proclaim their incorrect understandings as settled, unarguable fact? They were wrong and yet the discussion framed me as the backwards one for merely pointing it out. How does that happen? Because the majority does not fight fair. To the majority, might makes right. Again, emotion rules the day.

This L.A. Times story gives us yet another example of this bold confidence without any self-awareness or research.

High schools (and their foreign equivalents) have opened all around the world, many of them months ago. We don’t have to sit around and wonder if it’s safe. We have more data than we could ever need. And yet here they are presenting this as some kind of mystery. They’re so far behind the documented facts on this, it’s little different than saying “Guys, we just saw somebody drink milk that came from a cow. Maybe it’s safe for human consumption!” Further, the model they’re citing includes testing students for covid every single morning. “If you want to open your campus, you have to do this,” says the presumed exemplary principal. Except high schools have opened literally around the planet, safely, without such measures. You don’t have to do this.

What we’re dealing with in Texas is another case of the exact same problem. We don’t have to wonder what removing the mask mandate will do. We’ve already seen populous, elderly, unhealthy states take such measures. By the same token, we’ve had rather lax lockdown measures for many months with regard to things like restaurant capacity and gathering limits, and other states are looking at us as crazy or suicidal.

Can we please stop pretending we’re walking blindfolded on the edge of a canyon when there are people who have already crossed the bridge?

This has been the hallmark of this whole matter – readily available knowledge gets either treated with skepticism, ignored outright, or morally condemned. If it doesn’t line up with the morally right view, it isn’t permitted a spot at the table. As long as that remains the case, we remain hopeless. Until facts can win the day – honestly, until facts are even allowed to be discussed – we will continue to be vulnerable to very bad people and very bad ideas.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of the alternative view, start with Tom Woods’ free eBook that breaks down misleading Covid charts. Check out The Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown paper written by 3 Ph.D.s in the field and signed by over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals. And, scroll through Covid Clarity and other related Twitter accounts who have been digging up data since the beginning.

My Covid archives:

Can You Please Just Let Me Be Wrong?

Fear of Death is not a Christian Virtue

Fear is the Name of the Game. Stop Playing.

The Day the Lockdown Should’ve Ended

One Year into Covid, I was Horribly Wrong