COVID changed the way I hear the word “temporary.”
Before 2020, ‘temporary’ was temporary. Something happened, you dealt with it, and eventually you went back to living your life.
Then came COVID.
Most of us remember the rest. The empty streets. The closed businesses. The masks. The six-foot circles on the floor. Schools closed, churches restricted, nursing homes became nearly impossible to visit, and governments suddenly had an extraordinary amount to say about what ordinary Americans could and could not do.
I don’t need to make a list of everything that happened. You lived through it.
So did I.
What interests me now isn’t relitigating every lockdown decision or deciding which governor got which decision right. It is what the whole experience taught us about government power.
We learned that “temporary” can become a remarkably elastic word.
We also learned how quickly people will surrender ordinary freedoms when the circumstances are frightening enough.
I understood the fear. I had elderly people in my family, and I wanted to protect them. That’s why I eventually took the COVID shot.
I don’t regret doing it for them.
But I remember watching government move from telling us to be careful to telling us what we could do. At one point, OSHA tried to impose a vaccine-or-test requirement on businesses with 100 or more employees, covering roughly 84 million workers. The Supreme Court stopped it.
That was the moment the issue became especially clear to me.
This wasn’t simply about where I could go anymore. Government was reaching into the relationship between an employee and an employer.
That’s a lot of power.
And once you’ve seen government exercise that kind of power, you don’t forget it.
The consequences weren’t confined to the moment, either. Children lost months of schooling. Businesses that had taken years to build disappeared. Families missed funerals and time with dying relatives. Some of those losses can’t be measured by a statistic because there isn’t a statistic for a grandmother who couldn’t hug her grandchild.
NWEA’s 2023-24 analysis found that students still needed the equivalent of 4.8 additional months of schooling in reading and 4.3 months in math to reach pre-COVID achievement levels.
Those are the numbers.
