How Do We Get Back The Lockdown Time Stolen From Us?
Our sense of incarceration from the pandemic lockdowns was caused by more than being unable to live as freely as we had before the diktats were issued. Like inmates locked in a prison, we lost track of time. It was stolen from us by “leaders” who willingly traded our liberty for a perception of safety, and in too many cases in exchange for satisfying their authoritarian urges.
A study published late last month by Scottish researchers “found a large error for estimating the timing of events that occurred in 2021” when they questioned participants about the past events.
“The findings show that participants were less able to recall the timeline of very recent events coinciding with COVID lockdowns” and “are consistent with poor perception of event timeline reported previously in prison inmates.”
Though the authors, from the University of Aberdeen, acknowledged that “drawing a comparison between the prison environment and pandemic related restriction might be seen as an extreme case,” they were still confident “that there are similarities in the extent of social isolation in both situations.”
This isn’t the first research paper to reach this conclusion. A University of California, Irvine, study posted last August in an online science journal concluded that “the passage of time was altered for many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from difficulty in keeping track of days of the week to feeling that the hours themselves rushed by or slowed down.”
Previous studies had found that “these distortions have been associated with persistent negative mental outcomes such as depression and anxiety following trauma.”
Prisoners lose their perception of time. It is deeply distorted and under someone else’s control – they live lives lacking forward momentum. Consequently, the incarcerated feel as if they’ve lost time that they’ll never get back. In most instances it’s their own fault because they hurt someone or took what didn’t belong to them.
But the hundreds of millions of COVID lockdown victims who lost track of time committed no crimes. Instead, they were victims of the criminal behavior perpetrated by school boards, mayors, county commissioners and supervisors, governors, and an assortment of petty, power-hungry and manipulative public health officials.
Of course we’ll never get back the time we lost during the lockdowns, and some of us will even have our lives cut short because of confinement and isolation rules. A fresh meta-analysis of 22 studies on non-pharmaceutical interventions compiled by the Institute of Economic Affairs found that “harsher restrictions, like stay-at-home rules and school closures, generated very high costs but produced only negligible health benefits,” and were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions.”
While the authors determined that lockdowns saved an estimated 4,000 lives in the U.S., they also noted their “disastrous economic, social and political costs to society,” many of which, we might add, are still ahead. People died early because they weren’t treated or screened for serious health conditions during the pandemic, and the excess mortality from this is not over. Others will be taken by drug abuse that was exacerbated by the lockdowns. Mental health crises fueled by isolation and fear-mongering, already responsible for thousands of deaths of despair, will continue to take a grave toll. Education setbacks will cause decades of ongoing damage, as will the job losses, the latter killing tens of thousands just within the first year of the pandemic.
In more than 30 states, the wrongfully incarcerated are compensated financially for their losses. Those wrongfully locked down, numbering in the tens of millions at least, deserve no less. But who will pay them? Federal, state and local governments? The only money they have is that which they take from private citizens, so we would be paying ourselves, minus the usual government handling fee.
What we’d like to see is wealthy politicians, such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, stripped of their fortunes and the dollars distributed to those they hurt. That would be justice.
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