An article written by an Atlantic writer about the idea of a type of “pandemic amnesty” is making waves. The article, entitled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” was written by Emily Oster, who is a contributor to the Atlantic as well as a professor at Brown University.
The crux of the article is that the last couple of years have been a bit nuts, and therefore we should all forgive and forget about all the Covid-related nastiness for the sake of rebuilding relationships and trust.
Oster started the article with a story about how her then-four-year-old son yelled “SOCIAL DISTANCING!” at a passerby that got too close for comfort during a hike in April 2020. Now, without making any judgments on Oster or her small child, I will say that my children, ages 7, 6, 4, 3, and newborn do not even know the word “Covid.” Partly, this is because we had made the decision to homeschool before lockdowns began, and therefore our children were not in any institutionalized setting where they would be told about such a thing.
Also, my wife and I made the decision early on that we weren’t going to bother our children with a concept they could not understand. How do you explain to children a virus as complex as Communism, er, I mean “Covid” to little minds. Our children obviously new things had changed, but the extent of it was “people are worried about getting sick, and the government is being weird.”
We did have a close call one day at the park, however, when a little girl almost spilled the beans about the rona-monster. She was riding her bike through the park, and my one son, who was at the time four years old, walked up to say hello—you know, like a human being—and the girl yelled, “Stay back, don’t you know about coronavirus, you could die!”
I swiftly removed my children from the encounter with the little leftist and my son asked me—with his delightful little four-year-old pronunciation quirks—“Daddy, what is da bota mirus?”
I replied, “I think she was playing pretend.”
It was a close call.
In any case, the author of the piece then attempted to explain away the lunatic behavior she instilled in her child. “These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.”
It is that last line that bugs me. “We didn’t know.”
As the Irish say: malarkey!
Sure, there were unknowns about the propagandized Wuhan-flu, but that isn’t the point. There are unknowns about a lot of things in life, but none of those unknowns give you the right to act like a crazy person who advocates for vaccine segregation, unemployment for the refuseniks, or locking the elderly in cages like rabid beasts so they can die on Zoom calls while a masked attendant presses “end call” as family members watch grandma give up the ghost.
You see, it turns out that Mrs. Oster was one of those delightful people who waxed philosophical about how it would be for the good of all if the lives of unvaccinated citizens were made more difficult—the beatings will continue until morality improves.
She wrote in December 2021 that “family pressure” should be laid on unvaccinated people, and that jabs should be necessary to work, fly, and attend events. She even said, “We can have these without shame.”
Like a typical leftist, Oster found a way to not mention her inner totalitarian in her article. Instead, she tried to focus on the fact that she was called a “teacher killer” because she thought students could learn in class. While I am not happy that she was called a killer, I do find it a bit rich that she would write a piece asking for amnesty and then make herself out to be a victim, given the fact that she publicly advocated for the unjabbed to be pressured by their families and lose their jobs.
In her article, she also tried to make the conversation about the fact that some people just happened to be wrong and others happened to be right, and we need to just simply get over all those calls for the unvaxxed to lose their jobs, friendships, and place in society because, as she said, “We just didn’t know.”
Herein lies the fundamental problem: these people don’t understand that it is not about facts. It is about morality.
It is simply wrong for people to publicly advocate for segregation and unemployment of a group of people because they don’t want a medicine that is fifteen minutes old.
It is simply wrong to whip your children up into a frenzy about something you have only heard about on the mainstream news to the point where they are yelling at strangers less than two meters away.
It is simply wrong to uninvite family members from Christmas because they didn’t take the same medicine you did.
It is simply wrong to close churches—you know, those places you go to when death is near—because you think death is near!
It is simply wrong to close the borders for years on end and completely ruin businesses that rely on tourism.
It is simply wrong to demonize every dissenting opinion in the pursuit of scientific and medical answers. Something about the scientific method requiring dissenting opinions and contrary evidence to buttress claims comes to mind…
I could go on and on.
