We are just at about the 5-year anniversary of lockdowns. In the Bay Area, where I lived at the time that Covid took over the hysterical media’s every utterance, lockdowns went into effect on March 16, 2020.
The official line now is that lockdowns in California and the Bay Area continued until mid-May.
The reality is they went on much longer.
Public schools were closed until September 2021.
Playgrounds in San Francisco were closed until October 2020. Let that sink in. Outdoor playgrounds were closed for 7 months. Once opened, they closed again, then reopened. While open (in the beginning) these were the rules: you could only stay for 1/2 hour, no eating, no drinking water (because 2-year-olds would need to remove their masks to do so), line up for the activities/climbing structures, kids (toddlers!) always 6 feet apart, if your child cries you have to leave (they might spew droplets and Covid). Sounds like fun, right?
Basketball hoops were boarded over and stayed that way for well over a year. Some longer because they were just forgotten about.
Skate ramps at skate parks were filled with sand.
Restaurants didn’t open until September 30.
They’d open, then close again, then open again, at the whim of the red/orange/green system implemented by the city’s public health bureaucrats.
Once the city’s parks opened, people were forced to sit in chalk circles to maintain distancing.
It was truly the dumbest time.
I could go on. But I won’t.
Along with all of these constantly changing ridiculous rules, the citizens of San Francisco were encouraged to rat out their neighbors through a special 311 hotline set up for precisely that purpose. See something say something 2020 version had all the virtue-signaling and intrigue of 2001’s launch campaign, but this time people were encouraged to turn in their friends and neighbors rather than suspected terrorists.
See someone entering a neighbor’s home that doesn’t live there? Text the number! See people from different households mixing outside at the park, text the number! See someone maskless or a child playing at a playground with yellow caution tape around the swings? Text the number! And sure enough, a police officer who couldn’t be bothered to help with the heroin addict vomiting on your doorstep would be happy to interrogate you about who was inside your apartment. And ticket you if you dared exercise beyond a one-mile radius outside your home.
And people did it! The citizenry of San Francisco took great pride in turning in their friends and neighbors for perceived violations. And I learned that the vast majority of people I’d considered “my people” for decades would have been snitches for the Stasi and pointed directly to where Anne Frank and her family hid in Amsterdam.
As I’ve written about extensively, my husband and I resisted and shouted and raged about all of this from day 1. And we paid a heavy price. We left San Francisco in February 2021, a city I’d lived in and loved for over 30 years. We lost friends and I lost my professional reputation as one of the best in the business — a reputation that I’d spent decades building. And despite my rightness about it all, my good standing has not been restored.
I won’t forgive these psychopaths/pathetic cowards/aggressive virtue-signaling conformists. Ever.
And now, on the eve of the 5-year anniversary of the lockdowns, there is a book about to come out about how wrong it all was. Sort of.
Remember that Salisbury Univeristy forced people to either get the vax or submit to weekly testing (where did all that data and DNA go- China?) Then, they mandated that people who had one shot MUST get a booster. Students who did not want to get vaxxed or to wear the mask were stuggle-sessioned (yelled at IN CLASS) and thier lives were made horrible.
Did anyone apologoze? Willl they ever?
Learn from history so you don’t repeat it. Did the best we could without knowing how to go forward. We should know better now.
Key point, let’s not have to do it again, ok?