Grandmas Against Lockdown

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The lockdowners — or civilization wreckers, as I tend to call them — sure are satisfied with themselves, aren’t they?

They’re willing to sacrifice everything you’ve worked your whole life for.

How magnanimous!

And if you disagree with shutting down society, why, you must want to kill people’s grandmothers.

What a pleasant bunch.

Sure, you might actually think we’d do a better job protecting grandmothers if we focused our energies on old folks specifically instead of fruitlessly shipping millions of “tests” all over the place, or if (unlike certain governors) we hadn’t forced still-contagious COVID patients back into nursing homes, but the lockdowners can’t hear you: they’re too busy predicting piles of corpses that never materialize.

I’ve been thinking: what the world needs now is an organization called Grandmas Against Lockdown.

Plenty of older folks are appalled at what’s going on, and are terrified to contemplate their grandchildren’s future if this goes on much longer.

They don’t like their grandkids wasting away in front of computer screens on “virtual playdates.” They don’t want every activity that once enriched their grandkids and gave them joy canceled indefinitely (and that’s no straw man: plenty of so-called respectable people are calling for precisely that). They want their grandkids to be kids — the same way they themselves once had the chance to be.

And for that matter, they don’t want to spend their final days locked in a sterile room watching their families over Zoom. That may seem normal and desirable to the lizard people who rule us, but not to actual human beings.

I just spoke to David Stockman, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan. He’s 73 and staying home. But he agrees with everything I’m saying here: younger people should resume their lives immediately, and he will take care of himself in the meantime until things improve.

The current strategy is: you can’t have anything back that gave your life meaning.

If you perform in front of an audience, forget it. Sorry, dancers, musicians, comedians, magicians, singers, actors, athletes, and many others. Other people were allowed to follow what gave them joy, but you cannot.

Maybe someday — in 18 months, after you’ve had to give up on that dream anyway. Or maybe never.

Not to mention, of course, the destroyed businesses, the ruined lives, the domestic violence, the depression, the suicide, and the confusion of mere biological life with truly human living.

When will someone prominent have the courage to say: we refuse to live like this?

Remember what Lord Sumption said in the UK:

What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared at less than two metres. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is.

That’s one of the best things I’ve read during this crisis.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for a musician to say this:

Nobody wants to see people suffer or die needlessly. No one.

But:

Lockdowns cause loss of life, too — an enormous amount of it.

What’s more: what is living, after all?

It can’t be mere biological survival, because then eating cans of navy beans inside a windowless room for 75 years would be just as good as a life full of human affection, meaningful relationships, and enriching experiences.

We should protect people who are vulnerable, and it will be easier to do that once we stop spreading ourselves so thin.

Once we do that, we need to return to living.

One thing we need, frankly, is music.

Yes, we can survive biologically without it. But would we want to?

The world is more dangerous now, but for most of us it’s only very marginally more dangerous.

You can stay home if you like, and we’ll support you in that decision.

But the rest of us need human contact — and not from six feet away.

We need the thrill of the shared experience that is music.

Stay home if you’d rather. But I hope you’ll respect our decisions as responsible adults to assess our own level of risk tolerance and act accordingly.

Wear a mask to our show if you like. As the singer, I’ll be the only one who can’t wear one, which means my risk (tiny as it is) will be the highest. I’m willing to take that risk because I want to live.

Deep down, I know you do, too.

Any musician saying that now would be pilloried.

But wait three more months. Even the most misanthropic will be dying to live like human beings again.

I spoke to a musician at dinner the other night, and he told me that the small venues he’d normally book for his band’s tour are saying they will never reopen. The lockdowns have destroyed them for good.

Are we sure this is the world we want?

The wild predictions did not come to pass. People have criticized Sweden, but if the lockdowners were correct Sweden should be a giant cemetery. There should be mountains of corpses everywhere. Their outcome should not be comparable to plenty of other European countries.

We are destroying every good thing, and tearing apart friendships and families in the process.

Let’s just stop.

It seems crazy, doesn’t it? All of this is so obvious, and yet you can’t get your neighbors to see it at all.

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Read the original article at TomWoods.com. https://tomwoods.com/grandmas-against-lockdown/