Repentance and Reparations For Coronamania

In April, 2010, I visited Nicaragua with one of my teen kids, Lena. I wanted to spend a chunk of memorable time with her before she left for college. We found $258 round-trip airfares, slept in places that averaged $15/night and ate good, albeit simple food for $10/day. We fulfilled our Spanish-only pact during the week and half stay.

Based on that trip and the two that followed with my wife, Ellen, I could say much about Nicaragua. Above all, being there brought clearly into focus what people needed to be happy and what they didn’t.

For now, I’ll say only that Lena and I met a mustachioed, wiry, loquacious and very welcoming 49 year-old nicknamed Chepe. Chepe operated a small, informal outdoor restaurant, known as a fritanga, on the sidewalk in front of his single story, cheek-to-jowl urban house across the street from the simply-constructed, two-story, deep yellow, lizard-intensive, half-open-air, hammocked, budget Managua hostel where Lena and I were staying. Each day, many fully ripe mangoes fell onto the sidewalks and we ate them. Many iguanas also scampered by. Chepe caught them and cooked them into soup, which he served me several times. Tasty.

We spent hours chatting with Chepe over three days and nights. He told me that one night when he was 15, he was conscripted into the Sandinista Army; grabbed by the shirt, along with some of his friends, by a team of recruiters in a dark discoteca. He spent the next 13 years with an AK-47 in Nicaragua’s northern mountain jungles until the Contra War ended. One-percent of Nicaragua’s people were killed during the war; by ratio, that would be like 3.3 million young Americans dying. I asked Chepe if he lost any friends in combat. He uncharacteristically answered in one word, “Hundreds.”

During the days and nights we shared, Chepe repeatedly gushed about how much Nicaragua had improved since the war ended. To begin with, there was no more war. Second, there was much less street crime, though I guess that’s relative; without trying, I saw stuff happen. Third, there were more public resources: e.g., much higher literacy rates, some land reform, paved roads, malaria control, rehabbed parks and even new, government-donated zinc roofs for many of the very modest, small cinderblock residences. As we moved about Managua, Chepe would point toward some new building or other improvement, and gleefully exclaim, “Nicaragua: Que bonito el pais!” (What a nice country!”) It made me happy to see Chepe so happy, especially after he had experienced so much hardship and seen so much death.

I admired Nicaraguans. They carried on con gusto under circumstances that would buckle most Americans.

Their apparent emotional resilience may have been rooted in their Christian faith. Chepe brought Lena and I to a Good Friday procession with tens of thousands of people who listened to bullhorned gospel passages followed by the declaration, “Viva el sangre de Cristo!” to which the crowd repeatedly responded “Viva!” Some marched several miles on Managua’s main, paved, traffic-blocked road.

Amazingly, some marched this entire distance on their knees. I guessed that those who did felt very sorry about stuff they had done and that self-imposing such pain was a form of penance.

Most of us feel shame about some of our behavior. Guilt can be functional, either because it prevents us from misbehaving or because it causes us to try to make amends for prior, regrettable conduct. Fundamentally, guilt reflects a regard for other humans and an underlying sense of obligation to treat them decently.

Throughout history, people in many cultures have actively expressed contrition for the harm they have done. In the anthropology classic, Crime and Custom in Savage Societies, Bronislaw Malinowski describes Trobriand Islanders leaping to their deaths from tall trees to express remorse for their conduct. In Biblical times, people wore hairshirts. Since then, countless others have fasted, self-flagellated or otherwise injured or killed themselves out of guilt. Or at least picked up the phone and apologized.

Both criminal and civil courts require wrongdoers to pay restitution or to compensate victims with dollars and/or require community service. Many other people voluntarily “do service” based on feelings of relative privilege/noblesse oblige. People and corporations like to tell others about how they “give back to the community.” This phrase connotes that those who give back have taken something from others.

The past three years have felt very much like a top-down scam perpetrated by government, media and the medical industry. These orchestrators deserve to be Nuremberg-ed and imprisoned; they’ve done far more harm than do, for example, carjackers. But the Covid bureaucrats and politicians have the money and political connections to evade justice.

The hundreds of millions who enthusiastically supported the panic should, but largely don’t, feel a deep sense of shame about all of the harm they caused. After three years of Coronamania, many still believe all of the Covid narrative lies and consider themselves smart and virtuous for supporting lockdowns/school closures, masks, tests and mRNA “vaxxes.” (“LMTVs”).

A second contemptible group knew these measures were a scam but saw, and exploited, a political and economic opportunity.

A third group has belatedly recognized what people like me have said since March, 2020, namely that all of the interventions were ineffective and destructive. Many in this group will absolve themselves of responsibility for the lockdown’s harm by falsely asserting that “We didn’t know!” that the vaunted virus threatened only a tiny, clearly identifiable demographic and that many of the vaunted treatments were lethal. In practical effect, the Didn’t-Knowers are as bad as the unrepentant, because they’ve enabled the same societal and economic harm as have the Fear Squad and the Opportunists. The Didn’t-Knowers lack the strength of character to admit what has always been obvious: the viral risk pattern was clear and unthreatening.

As time passes, all three groups will, like St. Peter, Bill Clinton and O.J. Simpson, conveniently experience amnesia and deny that they ever supported the LMTVs.

“Lock down? Close schools? Mask up? Test and trace? Inject or lose your job? I never supported any of that!”

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