What Was Taken From Us

Reflections on five years of Covid

“I would have said three years.”

“Me too.”

So started the conversation yesterday with my pod partner Sarah Hepola, regarding the amount of time our internal clocks told us had passed since Covid came and spun us around. It would be nice to imagine those clocks as pretty gold timepieces spinning in the air, perhaps with the charming Timothee Chalamet as Willy Wonka dancing in the foreground.

190. The Warp of the True Believer: Ruby Franke, Trump, Covid

With the possible exception of some teachers’ union representatives, and we’ll get to those below, there was nothing charmed about experiencing of COVID, which we know because those of us lucky enough to have survived it had two years of our lives flushed away. That our gut tells us it was three years rather than the five may be a protective instinct. Matt Welch yesterday recorded “We Got Five Years of Covid Fury” and likened our memory loss to forgetting the pain of childbirth; that forgetting is necessary in order for us to go on.

There are others, and you may be one of them, who do not want to forget, who cannot forget because the evidence of what was robbed is in front of you every day. I am going to try to hold it together as I pull a long section from a piece Jeff Blehar published this week, “I Can Only Look Back in Anger”:

… I have a son. He has special needs — a genetic disorder so rare there are only 25 clinically documented cases — and in particular he suffers from severe speech delays and articulation issues. When lockdown went into effect back in March 2020, he was a year and three-quarters old. Our awareness of the magnitude of his challenge was only just dawning upon us at that point, and my wife and I made a sober calculation that since he would not be entering preschool until at least the fall of 2021, we could probably tough it out until then.

“Until then.”

What we hadn’t counted on was progressive-driven Covid insanity actively interfering with our son’s development, to the point where it felt like the entire city was perversely conspiring against us and all other parents who live here. My boy was enrolled in a slate of therapy services at the time — physical, speech, etc. — and I cannot properly articulate the agony I felt, as a father, at the way therapy providers here inevitably followed official city/state government policy (as “best practice”): I want you to imagine the value of “speech therapy” given while wearing a mask, to a child who desperately needs to be able to see lips move in order to learn to articulate sounds. I want you to ponder the quality of “remote” physical therapy for a child who cannot yet walk. (I ask you to do these things because it hurts too much for me to dwell upon them any longer.)

I want you to imagine a city with all of its public parks bolted or zip-tied shut for over a calendar year. My memory is that the spring and summer of 2020 were unusually gorgeous and temperate. That memory is tinged with fury — because my son never got to experience it. Only then just beginning to walk, and suddenly desperate to run around and experience the world, his near horizons were arbitrarily limited to the world of our own apartment. (We did not have a car yet.) The best we could do was take him to an open field and let him toddle around. The joylessness of those experiences — with two beautiful parks that he loved, complete with slides and swings and jungle gyms, bolted shut right nearby — has remained with me ever since.

Chicago instituted lockdown protocols along with most of the rest of the nation in mid-March 2020; Chicago exited lockdown completely only in the summer of 2021. And public schools remained in quasi-lockdown status for far longer: The implacably powerful Chicago Teachers’ Union staged a successful wildcat strike as late as January of 2022 to prevent the city from eliminating masking requirements for schoolchildren “without it being bargained for.” (Translation: “Give us more money and we’ll drop this gun.”)

This time Mayor Lightfoot ignored the union’s demands but granted them a delay (during Omicron season). When March 2022 — a full two years after the anniversary of the first lockdown — rolled around, I was so grateful that I could finally send my son back to school without a mask that I tweeted about it. Because my son could not wear a mask — you literally could not get him to keep one on, in any event. Sure, the teachers were still screaming about it (I remember hearing their side of the story every morning on NPR), but I was just thrilled that my little buddy was going to be able to get back to work on his speech handicap without being gratuitously supplied with the verbal equivalent of cement shoes.

A week later my son was returned home to me one day from school by his teachers, weeping disconsolately. A mask had been forcibly tied to his face, and he was clawing desperately at it to try to get it off. He did not stop crying for an hour.

I don’t know how you read this and not become filled with rage at the people who imposed these rules. I’m not saying I don’t know how it happened. As I have written dozens of times, the lather people worked themselves into, or unwittingly had sloshed over them, started around 2015 and grew monstrous, grew into entitlement, grew into fear of one’s fellow citizens, into “I will get mine before you get yours, you racist/lib-tard/insert your enemy’s designation here.” Courtesy and common sense were kicked to the curb, liabilities to the mission to appear to be the good people, or at least better than the other people, more compassionate and forward thinking, steal the toothpaste, burn the courthouse, nothing is solved except with violence and you made me do it anyway. That so much of this was about retribution and power-grabbing was talked about at your own peril. Some kept talking; some paid a price. Others retreated, fearful of being caught in the crossfire.

Those gaining power, meanwhile, put on their horse blinders and entered the field, which, what with most citizens under forced sequestration, was now wide open. Here, cruelties could be perpetrated and imposed, were codified and justified. For people sure of their rightness and greedy for as much cake as they could grab, children paying the price, and perhaps forever, was of little to no concern. Of note: this week Chicago teachers are again threatening to strike for “what they deserve.”

“I will never forgive the people who did this,” Blehar wrote in his essay. Me neither. That’s a bad kind of forgetting.