A 14-Year Old's Wisdom
Out of the mouths of babes
Maybe the kids are alright. At least, some of them seem have absorbed an essential lesson from the pandemic and its handling: The people who purport to rule us are idiots, as well as crooks, liars, and generally a sorry lot.
Many sectors of the Internet were talking recently about an essay by 14 year old British school boy Jack Watson, who writes that the chief lesson he took from the pandemic was that the people who make the rules don’t follow them.
With admirable concision, Watson dissects the British response to the pandemic, which parallels our own, and that of most of the developed world. He notes that after a couple of months of lockdowns, cases were still rising, and yet the rulers didn’t change their approach. He writes: “This lockdown they put us in clearly didn’t work and I don’t know how they had the audacity to tell us where we could and couldn’t go. I couldn’t see family members for months. I used to help my mum do the weekly shop for my grandma and when I dropped it off for her I couldn’t even give her a hug. I had other family members who I didn’t see properly until early last year. . . . I honestly don’t know what they were thinking and I hope the authorities realise the many lives they have impacted and ruined.”
Online learning, he observes, was more online than about learning. “From a child’s point of view, this type of teaching is useless; most of the links I was sent didn’t work and I kept getting kicked out of the calls (we were using Teams).”
The social distancing rules were also a joke. And the biggest joke of all, he recounts, was that it turned out the people making the rules weren’t following them. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had secret parties in violation of the rules (which eventually cost him his position), and Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who formulated the lockdown and social-distancing rules, was cheating on them so that his could visit his girlfriend (he was married to someone else).
Watson concludes: “All of this will go down in history and be taught to generations to come. Thinking back on it all now, it was a whole load of nonsense, and a child would have done a better job of being in control. Many lives have been affected and two years of my learning has been disrupted. I hope the people in charge realise what they’ve done to us and I hope nothing like this will ever happen again.”
Watson has learned a lot, but not enough. The sad truth is that the people in charge realize what they’ve done to the populace, they just don’t really care. And, sadly, the odds are that they’ll do something equally stupid, selfish, and counterproductive the next time a “crisis” presents itself.
It’s not as if American rulers did any better. From California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s illicit dinner parties at the elite French Laundry restaurant, to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s illegal hair appointments, and dozens of other episodes, our rulers also demonstrated their contempt for the rules, and for the ruled.
And, almost everywhere except Sweden, the policies were the same: Lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, etc. The Swedes were pronounced crazy and suicidal, but when the dust cleared, Sweden had the lowest excess-death rate, besting all the nations that doubled down on policies that, as Watson notes, were pretty obvious failures early on.
The most charitable explanation is that the politicians felt that they had to do something, and the lockdowns, etc., at least made it clear that something was being done. But I can’t help but feel that the oppression of the masses wasn’t so much a bug as a feature to them.
Making the common people’s lives worse seems to be a steady theme in elite proposals for social change: Less policing making crime worse, less energy consumption for the hoi polloi – but never the jet-setting elites – demands to eat less meat, travel less, live in smaller homes, swap cars for public transit, submit to social media censorship, etc., etc. If it will worsen ordinary folks’ lot, it’s probably on the agenda.
Why the political class feels this way is a question for another column, but look at what they’ve done over the past few years and ask yourself: If they hated us, what would they do differently?