You Can’t Protest a Pandemic
Angry Americans are coming out in droves to vehemently protest the shelter-in-place orders. And they have guns. Lots of guns. The incensed are demanding an end to state-wide shutdowns and by extension, an end to their threatened liberty.
On the surface, the protesters’ motivations seem clear — they are sick and tired of mandates that they feel are unnecessary, oppressive, and even unconstitutional.
“This is a free country. Land of the free. Go to China if you want communism. You can go to work, why can’t I go to work?”, screamed the woman in the photo above.
“My body my choice”, one sign states.
“Heil Whitmer”, another sign posits, equating Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer to a tyrant for upholding stay-at-home orders.
“We demand haircuts”, yet another sign asserts.
But taking a deeper look, the reopen rhetoric seems to keep coming back to a central motivation — we want everything to go back to normal and we want it now! It’s a motivation that goes deeper than just liberty or restarting the economy.
It’s about a loss of control. The pandemic has changed everything for everyone. Never before have the currently-alive Americans been subjected to such a sudden and total loss of control. It’s scary. It’s frustrating. It’s uncertain. And it’s making a lot of people angry. So the obvious question in these people’s minds is — who can I blame for this rotten situation I’m in?
Life is different now — at least for the foreseeable future — and those who can’t accept this? They protest. Because they need someone or something to blame for everything that’s changed without their permission. They need to feel like they’re in control of something. They demand haircuts and golf seasons, as if these are their god-given rights, being willfully held from them.
But you can’t protest a pandemic for what it’s taken away from you, just like you can’t protest a hurricane or an earthquake. You can’t make a pandemic relent by protesting. So instead, these people find convenient villains in their local leadership. They grab their guns, don a snarl, and funnel all of their frustration toward whoever their pandemic-related struggles are personified in.
And if brandishing firearms while protesting the reopening of businesses sounds like overkill, it’s because it is. The guns are just another accessory in the misplaced lurch for control. It’s as if the gun-wielders are saying, I will not be controlled by some stupid pandemic and I have a gun to prove it!
But say governors and mayors do relent and reopen everything. Say Americans are allowed to return to their salons and movie theaters and restaurants. What then? Do these reopen protestors expect everything to just go right back to normal? Do they think that the mandated closures and social distancing orders are the only roadblocks to returning to normal life? If so, I’d like to poke some holes in that line of thinking.
There is no magic return-to-normal pill. There is no brave, fearless action that will promptly rescue us from this pandemic era. There is no sweeping the pandemic under the rug. Because the reality is, even if everything were to reopen right now, no one can force Americans to start living like “normal” again. No one can erase the (very logical) fear that many Americans still have around being infected. Or, if not fear for themselves, fear for their more vulnerable loved ones. Because it’s becoming increasingly rare for any American to maintain 6-degrees-of-separation from the virus — and this is ostensibly what is required to keep up the it-won’t-happen-to-me attitude that some reopen types are still proudly touting.
No one can mandate that Americans make a swift return to consumerism. No one can convince the whole population to resume travel, shopping at the mall, dining out, or any other activity that requires people to be close together in confined, indoor spaces.
So what happens when reopening fails to provide the return to normalcy that so many are desperately seeking? What happens when reopening doesn’t lead to the swift and hoped-for healing of the economy? What happens when reopening leads to inevitable and expected spikes in COVID-19 cases, and it becomes painfully obvious that no, the pandemic will not bend to our will?
The reopen types will search for a shiny new scapegoat. Because the reopen protests were never really about reopening. They are about control. Or rather, lack thereof.
So the protesters will keep searching for ways to just make this all go away right now. They will kick and scream about the injustices being committed against them. They will insist that public-safety measures are poorly veiled attempts at population control. They will stand in staunch opposition to anyone that suggests that this pandemic is a reality and it’s not going away any time soon. Because if the protesters accept that this is their new reality, they’ve accepted that they’re not in control, and that is a pill they’re not willing to swallow.
But the pandemic plow on. It will run its course agnostic to the bleating of Americans who hate feeling out of control. It will predictably follow the laws of science. It will spread among Americans who come too close to other infected Americans. It will infect without regard to beliefs. It will infect those with guns, and those without guns. The pandemic has no agenda — it is an equal opportunity virus.
The solution here is not to keep a white-knuckled grip on the old normal. It is not trying to stand up to the virus by pretending it’s not real. It is not protesting measures taken for public safety.
It’s in surrender. Not surrender as in giving up, but surrender as in accepting today’s reality and asking — okay, so right now it’s like this, how can we move forward?
Many Americans are already doing this. Vaccines are being developed at a record clip. Ingenuity is blossoming everywhere. People are remarkably adaptable and have found ways to keep moving forward, despite the overreaching difficulty of this time. Life finds a way.
The fastest way out of this pandemic is not protesting it. It is in accepting it.