I’m still constantly receiving these little reports from across the US (and Canada!) detailing the petty indignities and absurdities to which people are subjected in the name of this-or-that overheated COVID concern. Does every last report amount to full-blown authoritarian tyranny? Not really — most probably wouldn’t even register as particularly attention-getting on their own. But the thing I keep coming back to is the cumulative pettiness — how corrosive the sheer quantity of snippets like ones I’ll list in this post, taken in aggregate, must be to the social order.
Which makes the “Omicron” subject, however tiresome, impossible to avoid — much as one might wish to focus on other things, and even as media outlets have begun to acknowledge that the “wave” has “crested.” Because the thing about waves is that they recede, and then they come back, and then the process repeats for eternity. Hence why the eternal-seeming quality of these measures is of particular note. I know this is a wearying and increasingly boring topic; yet there really is a de facto “gag order” in place at so many institutions still laboring under ridiculous protocols, even approaching the two year mark of this whole ordeal, and even with the most frantic segment of COVID-fixators increasingly confined to a somewhat marginal fringe.
Continue reading “Bureaucrats Riding the Omicron Wave”
