~2.8M people worldwide have died due to COVID-19. Because of stupidity around personal freedom (really for no reason other than “because I don’t want to participate” or “because it could eventually lead to bad things,” we were unprepared culturally, and many, many more of these people died because we were afraid to adjust our thinking to the realities of contagious, infectious disease in a world with mass, easy transportation to all parts of the globe.
Those people are never coming back. And our hubris and unwillingness to do even the most minor of things for the common good early on (like a culture of wearing a damn mask when you think you may be sick or exposed to the virus, or taking more action when we realized it was spreading) helped kill these people.
There is no going back. If we go back, we have admitted that the world is okay with these people dying as some sort of eugenics experiment - and many of them are marginalized individuals who, frankly, had no choice but to participate in our society to survive while we ignored their plight. We still are. This is still going on.
Boing Boing, to me, has been about promoting equality and fairness and finding the good, bad, and ugly in the margins. That does not include supporting discussions of why taking actions that might have helped save these people are a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Because this isn’t hypothetical, our inaction helped to kill these people.
If the idea of wearing a mask, proving you aren’t sick or showing you are protected as a means to save lives, to reduce infections, and to try and stop this train of deaths is something you feel you must protest against, do it on another forum. From my perspective, you ignore the realities on the ground because of the perception that bad things could happen. You get to make this statement because you are alive and ignoring the fact that 2.8M bad things have already happened.
From a mod perspective, these sorts of viewpoints will be treated exactly the same as COVID denialism. We are already not doing enough. If you want to push for us to continue to do less, do it elsewhere.
