Sometimes I like to share with you some of the correspondence I receive (names withheld, of course).
This time I'm sharing a story from someone who's completely ordinary -- in the sense that the lockdowns haven't destroyed their business or impoverished them or caused them to miss urgent surgery.
The point of sharing this is: there's plenty of suffering out there even for those not enduring outright catastrophe.
My correspondent writes:
Thanks for all you've been doing this past year to combat the narrative of fear surrounding covid. Count me among those who have found your podcast, emails and videos to be helpful in maintaining my sanity.
I have a wife and four young children and we live in Ohio. If you compare our experience this past year to those of people suffering under more brutal lockdown regimes, we probably got off fairly easy. We already home-schooled, my job was considered "essential" so I never missed work and Ohio's actual lockdown was relatively brief. Unfortunately there's more to the madness than just the hardcore lockdowns.
My wife is one of the people who have an actual medical condition that makes it very difficult for her to wear a mask. So every trip to the grocery, every outing that requires going indoors garners looks of derision and sometimes minor conflict with a mask "Karen." It has added such stress that she has been battling depression most of the year.
Additionally we've seen things our kids love get closed and cancelled. The dance studio they were part of last spring had to permanently close due to the lockdown. By chance, all of our kids have March birthdays, so we had a big birthday party planned for last March, but the week of the party Governor DeWine kicked off the lockdown. It was heartbreaking to them to have that taken away.
There's also been many other issues that have popped up all year: family conflicts over the virus, increased property taxes and school taxes (particularly infuriating since we home school, and the #$%^ schools were closed at the time!), we even lost our church since they closed down and have been very strict on mask enforcement after reopening.
Those things, plus the low-level, constant shame/humiliation I feel wearing a mask at work every day have led us to consider moving to Florida. While exchanging one political jurisdiction with another obviously isn't a panacea, I am at the point where I have to do something. To that end, we have a trip planned to the panhandle in early March to vacation and explore, with the intent of getting a feel for whether we want to make a permanent move. But now, it sounds like the Biden administration is threatening to cut off domestic travel to Florida to score a petty political point. It will devastate my kids if we are not able to make our trip next month.
So, I guess my point with all of this is to say that these mandates hurt people, even those who may seem to have it "easy." But more importantly to say, "thank you," and to add my voice to those who you've helped make it through the last year. Keep fighting the good fight!
Whatever the path forward is, it seems that it has to involve rational people identifying each other, interacting with each other, helping each other, and building normality again together.
To that end, I invited the gentleman who wrote me this note to join the Tom Woods Show Elite, the special group where normal people fraternize, conspire, and maintain each other's sanity. Entry is this way: