The destruction which Covid has wrought
On Sunday I was reading the Sunday Times (UK) when I came across this story. A referee with 25 years of experience, a former police officer, was coaching a Sunday pub league game when, after he gave a few yellow cards, he was assaulted and strangled by an assistant coach.
This is the quote which stood out for me:
Across his 25 years of refereeing, Williams has seen behaviour deteriorate — sharply in the post-Covid years.
(Emphasis mine.)
As a public servant, I, too, have seen the public deteriorate after Covid. People are more aggressive. They have less respect, less patience. They go from zero to sixty for the most minor of annoyances. I, myself, find that I am less patient. I have to take a breath and tell myself that it's not that important. I'm sure we've all experienced this to some degree.
Societies in the West have been fractured—purposefully—for decades. Our societies were already at breaking point, as citizens grew bored with peace and prosperity and felt that they had been lied to, cheated, and that nothing mattered. Foreign actors capitalized on this sense of ennui to further divide the West, which stood in the way of their own aims.
But the pandemic was the breaking point. Historians will look back on 2020 through 2022 as a fulcrum through which history can be seen. Declining societies were thrown into complete dissolution with the pandemic and the measures which preventing its spread necessitated. Rather than rallying together to combat an invisible enemy, populations in the West quickly went from solidarity—remember the nightly thanks to frontline workers in New York City and London?—to whining, resentment, and defiance. When you had "leaders" like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump flouting all the rules put in place to prevent Covid's spread, it's no shock that ordinary citizens grew embittered. And as they grew embittered, they blamed not those making things worse, but those trying to keep things from spiraling out of control. Mommy made you eat your vegetables, but Daddy promised rocky road ice-cream. Wearing a mask marked you out as a simp, as a sheep, as someone to be mocked. The mask and lockdowns were not necessary measures, but evidence of tyranny. People who had never been told "no" truly did not like it, and made everyone in power during that time pay. (One of Kamala Harris's feats was to limit the damage in the US, while governments in Europe and Asia were swept away on voter anger over Covid.) People who had lived through a catastrophe wished to assign blame and take vengeance on authorities which didn't center their wants and desires, rather imposing "heavy handed" strictures for a disease which they came to see less and less seriously. "It's just a bad flu" became the rallying cry of an annoyed population.
Of course, Covid isn't solely to blame for this. Our culture has been becoming coarser and less refined for decades. While some may find the dropping of f-bombs by politicians to be "bracing," I find it to be disgusting, a further descent into meanness and vulgarity. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and more conservative. But I don't think it is. Crassness is not authenticity. Rudeness is not genuineness. Their rampant nature in modern life is another signpost in cultural degradation. I don't want to have a coffee with my political leaders, neither do I want to hear them speak like louche car salesmen from Jamaica, Queens. Civilization is built on agreed-upon rules; with more regularity we are dispensing with those rules. Those days are gone and not likely to return.
The question is: What do we do now? How do we recapture a shared sense of civilization? How do we agree upon a set of minimum standards? Or are we too far gone?
I don't think we are. What is happening in the United States has been a wakeup call to the other constituent nations of the West, or at least some of them. In Canada, the Liberal Party is gaining in strength, as their lunatics scare the normies with talk about secession for Alberta and the admiration their Conservatives have for MAGA. And in the US, if all the haruspices are accurate, the GOP is heading for an extinction-level event this November, losing not only the House but the Senate as well. This is all well and good. But it will be for naught if voters come down with amnesia yet again and vote for fascism once it becomes obvious that the damage will not be undone in two or four or eight years. We have to adopt something which is hard for humans to adopt: patience. There is no magic. There will be no quick fixes. Will we finally accept this? Or will this cycle begin once again?