We're still still still sorry, kids

Yet another update of my 2020 apology to young people for the harm my generation of Boomers did to their futures and the country with our oppressive, failed and harmful war on covid.

It’s been five years since Trump and the public-health officials he cluelessly put in charge of the government’s war on covid issued their edict to shut down the country for “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” The great John Stossel reminds us of how stupid and oppressive the people in charge were.

I was a part-time Uber driver in Pittsburgh at the time and the misguided, unscientific and authoritarian shutdown of so much of American society wiped out about 98 percent of the ride-sharing business and killed my career.

More important, obviously, was the harm done by federal, state and local governments to the economic and social health of places like the City of Pittsburgh.

Right up to St. Patrick’s Day 2020, Downtown Pittsburgh was more alive and vital than it had ever been since I came back to the area in 1990 to work downtown at the Post-Gazette.

As a weekend Uber driver since 2015, I had watched new restaurants popping up everywhere in the city. New apartment buildings and boutique hotels were going up too.

Young people and empty-nesters were moving to Downtown and the Strip District, and on weekend nights there were locals and weekend tourists from Ohio and West Virginia on city sidewalks.

That slow but steady upward trend in Pittsburgh economic and social life stopped almost overnight in March of 2020 and never came back.

Office workers stayed home. Nightlife evaporated. Restaurants started dying. At noon everyday Downtown looked like it had been abandoned — and it virtually had been.

Downtown Pittsburgh still has never recovered. It’s a deader, dirtier, more crime-ridden place that it was before 2020 and suburbanites and young people avoid it completely or spend as little time there as possible.

I said at the time that the covid lockdowns were a horrible mistake by the federal government — the domestic equivalent of the Iraq war. It’s still a shameful example of how my fellow Baby Boomers lost their brains and their balls and screwed up the futures of their children.

***

I don’t know who Erich Hartmann is, but in this tweet from last year at this time he nicely summarized my thoughts:

Erich Hartmann

@erichhartmann

“4 years ago today they did this to us —

#15DaysToSlowTheSpread was based on lies & fear. It violated our basic constitutional & human rights. It was the most destructive public health policy in human history… and ZERO of these assholes have acknowledged it or apologized.”

***

What I wrote early in the summer of 2020 is still true:

So sorry, kids

Sorry, young people.

As I first wrote in the spring of 2020, thanks to us old and soft Baby Boomers, you Millennials and Zoomers are now living in a world of trouble.

We — your parents and grandparents — have screwed up before. Big-time.

The Iraq War. The Great Recession of 2008. The creation of a gargantuan Surveillance/Security/Welfare/Warfare State that will never die, never shrink and can never be paid for.

And then, almost overnight and with little dissent, almost (five) years ago we Boomers in charge hit you with the Great American Shutdown — the domestic equivalent of the Iraq War.

In less than three months we blew up the world’s richest economy, threw millions of you younger people out of work, took 90 percent of the fun out of your daily lives and did your once bright futures unimaginable and irreparable harm.

Our medical experts, political leaders, government bureaucrats and elite media terribly mishandled the coronavirus pandemic from Day One.

At first we assured you Covid-19 was no threat to the people of the United States.

The coronavirus was just another new virus from China, hardly different from the seasonal flus that quietly and without media fanfare kill 40,000 or 50,000 of your parents and grandparents each year.

A month later we scared the hell out of you, declaring that Covid-19 was an existential threat that would kill tens of millions around the world and had to be fought and defeated at any social or economic cost.

The Boomers in charge of your lives — the president, his public health task force, Congress and most state governors — were scared stupid. So were the Boomer infuencers on the Web and in Hollywood.

With little if any political and scientific debate and no push-back from the expert-worshiping journalists of the major media, our elected leaders took quick, sweeping, unprecedented and often Constitutionally questionable action.

First they told you we had to shut down America for just 15 days to “flatten the curve” of the virus and slow its spread before it overwhelmed our woefully unprepared healthcare system.

They told everyone who was not an “essential worker” they had to “shelter in place” — the new Orwellian euphemism for being forced to stay in your homes alone like bad children.

We aging Boomers, we former challengers of arbitrary government authority and wrongdoing, dutifully put on our masks, stayed six feet from each other and acted like a herd of frightened sheep.

We ordered you young people — despite being at virtually zero-risk — to shut up and do the same.

We justified, rationalized and excused the most arbitrary edicts of power-mad governors in California, New York and Pennsylvania who closed schools, ocean beaches, nature parks and restaurants but kept liquor and gun stores open.

As we waited for the magical Covid vaccine that supposedly was going to save us from mass death and suffering, we shouted down, shamed or censored anyone — even other public health experts and frontline doctors — who questioned the federal government’s chosen experts.

We declared total war on a virus and locked down the country to protect a minuscule percentage of the population that was at serious risk.

Yet it was those most vulnerable Americans — our aged grandparents in nursing homes and those who were already very sick or unhealthy — who were not properly protected.

Meanwhile, the lockdowns were causing serious, irreversible economic and social harm to the entire society and driving up crime, drug ODs and suicides. As a bonus, the war on covid was politicized and used as yet another way to divide Americans.

Few of us Boomers even noticed the trashing of the Bill of Rights, much less worried or complained about it.

Now, four (five) years later, after vaccine mandates made a mockery of our founding values, we soft and spoiled children of the Greatest Generation should be ashamed of the harm we’ve done to you young people.

Because we failed so badly in our failed war on covid, your lives will be never be as good — or as easy, or as enjoyable, or as hopeful, or as free — as ours were.

It’s far too late to fix the damage we have done to your darkened futures. All we Boomers can do now is apologize and wish you good luck.