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It occurs to me, reading Jack Butler’s reminiscences on the five-year anniversary of the Covid Era’s kickoff, that I’ve never written a single word here about my own experience with Covid. One reason for that is I’m not paid to write about my personal life. Another is that, in many ways, I already did so once — on Twitter/X, where I’ve been typing in an unceasing (and suicidally undeleted) whirlwind for over a decade now.
Day by day, event by event, my experience of lockdown has been captured there forever, frozen in the amber of the moment when it happened, recorded for posterity. Memory can often be a tricky thing — just ask any lawyer who has cross-examined an eyewitness — so it’s interesting for me to review, as I just now have, my thoughts from that era when news of the pandemic spiraled into utter chaos, as lockdowns went into effect, Trump went out to give daily briefings alongside Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, and our world irrevocably changed. (For one thing, I am reminded that I watched a lot of movies during lockdown — both the entire Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises start to finish.)
I well remember reading news about an ominous new infection out of China from the internet back in December of 2019, but near as I can tell I only officially lowered the boom on February 25, 2020, half a month before U.S. authorities did:
This is the real reason I haven’t written about Covid. I cannot summon memories of that era without becoming furious at what I suffered through, without reliving the sense of utter betrayal from all authority we experienced during that period. I have never felt more despairingly abandoned, and in fact actively oppressed, by every level of government than in those dark years. For some people — say, those lucky enough to live in Florida — this matter is largely one of political principle. For me it is deeply personal.
Understand that I live in Chicago. (Moving is not an option.) Life here during the pandemic years — and the closely related Floyd riots, which unmoored my city into a free-floating existential despair it has yet to recover from — left deep psychological scars on me and my family alike. Most of the time my wife and I treat it as a dark, black cloud of madness and sorrow whose details we no longer wish to remember. It’s in the distant past now. It’s over. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t need to talk about it.
But I must talk about it, at least once, if only to exorcise it. I have a son. He has special needs — a genetic disorder so rare there are only 25 clinically documented cases — and in particular he suffers from severe speech delays and articulation issues. When lockdown went into effect back in March 2020, he was a year and three-quarters old. Our awareness of the magnitude of his challenge was only just dawning upon us at that point, and my wife and I made a sober calculation that since he would not be entering preschool until at least the fall of 2021, we could probably tough it out until then.
“Until then.”
What we hadn’t counted on was progressive-driven Covid insanity actively interfering with our son’s development, to the point where it felt like the entire city was perversely conspiring against us and all other parents who live here. My boy was enrolled in a slate of therapy services at the time — physical, speech, etc. — and I cannot properly articulate the agony I felt, as a father, at the way therapy providers here inevitably followed official city/state government policy (as “best practice”): I want you to imagine the value of “speech therapy” given while wearing a mask, to a child who desperately needs to be able to see lips move in order to learn to articulate sounds. I want you to ponder the quality of “remote” physical therapy for a child who cannot yet walk. (I ask you to do these things because it hurts too much for me to dwell upon them any longer.)
I want you to imagine a city with all of its public parks bolted or zip-tied shut for over a calendar year. My memory is that the spring and summer of 2020 were unusually gorgeous and temperate. That memory is tinged with fury — because my son never got to experience it. Only then just beginning to walk, and suddenly desperate to run around and experience the world, his near horizons were arbitrarily limited to the world of our own apartment. (We did not have a car yet.) The best we could do was take him to an open field and let him toddle around. The joylessness of those experiences — with two beautiful parks that he loved, complete with slides and swings and jungle gyms, bolted shut right nearby — has remained with me ever since.
Chicago instituted lockdown protocols along with most of the rest of the nation in mid-March 2020; Chicago exited lockdown completely only in the summer of 2021. And public schools remained in quasi-lockdown status for far longer: The implacably powerful Chicago Teachers’ Union staged a successful wildcat strike as late as January of 2022 to prevent the city from eliminating masking requirements for schoolchildren “without it being bargained for.” (Translation: “Give us more money and we’ll drop this gun.”)
This time Mayor Lightfoot ignored the union’s demands but granted them a delay (during Omicron season). When March 2022 — a full two years after the anniversary of the first lockdown — rolled around, I was so grateful that I could finally send my son back to school without a mask that I tweeted about it. Because my son could not wear a mask — you literally could not get him to keep one on, in any event. Sure, the teachers were still screaming about it (I remember hearing their side of the story every morning on NPR), but I was just thrilled that my little buddy was going to be able to get back to work on his speech handicap without being gratuitously supplied with the verbal equivalent of cement shoes.
A week later my son was returned home to me one day from school by his teachers, weeping disconsolately. A mask had been forcibly tied to his face, and he was clawing desperately at it to try to get it off. He did not stop crying for an hour.
There is a line in Hamlet that, although I had read it countless times before, I never properly understood until that exact moment: “Now could I drink hot blood.” I hope to God that none of you ever feel the sort of spasm of rage that actually makes a man briefly contemplate Shakespearean violence, because when it comes in the context of people who have harmed your helpless special needs son, you begin to think mad thoughts. Needless to say, my son no longer attends that school. But this was also the part of my Twitter history I least enjoyed revisiting; it’s no fun reliving the victimization of your child.
People without children quite reasonably think of the Covid Era in terms of personally lost time and opportunity — bad for most people, but surprisingly tolerable for a minority. Parents understand the world differently. I rage over the Covid Era as time stolen not from me but from my son — arbitrarily and with no scientific reason, for the sake of mere blue-state politics — when he needed it the most. He can never get that back. The pain of it will haunt me until the day I die.
n anecdote to conclude. During an unseasonably pleasant stretch of weather in the fall of 2020, I finally had enough, and started hopping the fence with my son at my local (still-locked) park, just so I could get him on the swing set for a few minutes. The next day a fellow dad joined me with his small child. The day after that, a cop walked by us outside the gates as I was swinging my boy, and I knew I was dead-to-rights, expecting a citation.
Instead, he asked me how my day was going, and laughingly dismissed my being inside the park. “This is total bulls***,” is all he said, as he walked along. Everybody knew it was a joke. And yet most of us played along. (I didn’t, but I’m a Republican in Chicago.)
I will never forgive the people who did this. I will never know all of their names — I do know the names of Chicago city politicians, Randi Weingarten, the Chicago Teachers’ Union, and the CTU’s handpicked mayor Brandon Johnson, however. (I treat them accordingly.) I will not let go of my hatred for these people. I could do it if only my own vanity or interest were at stake — I actually have a very difficult time holding a grudge — but never on behalf of my son, who has no voice to speak in his own defense. I want only to remember who caused this, who allowed this, and to insist these people be blotted out of public life and civic responsibility for all eternity. I have said my piece on the Covid Era, and it will be the last time I speak of it.
It occurs to me, reading Jack Butler’s reminiscences on the five-year anniversary of the Covid Era’s kickoff, that I’ve never written a single word here about my own experience with Covid. One reason for that is I’m not paid to write about my personal life. Another is that, in many ways, I already did so once — on Twitter/X, where I’ve been typing in an unceasing (and suicidally undeleted) whirlwind for over a decade now.
Day by day, event by event, my experience of lockdown has been captured there forever, frozen in the amber of the moment when it happened, recorded for posterity. Memory can often be a tricky thing — just ask any lawyer who has cross-examined an eyewitness — so it’s interesting for me to review, as I just now have, my thoughts from that era when news of the pandemic spiraled into utter chaos, as lockdowns went into effect, Trump went out to give daily briefings alongside Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, and our world irrevocably changed. (For one thing, I am reminded that I watched a lot of movies during lockdown — both the entire Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises start to finish.)
I well remember reading news about an ominous new infection out of China from the internet back in December of 2019, but near as I can tell I only officially lowered the boom on February 25, 2020, half a month before U.S. authorities did:
Well said, earlier me! (This is why you preserve your tweets, incidentally; it obviates the need for a diary or daybook.) Reading further, I am reminded that my initial attitude was bemusedly and mulishly obedient, a grudging “whatever, let’s just try to make the best of a bad situation.” But this is when I start to feel an acute twinge of pain, and it becomes hard to go beyond that without pausing for a deep breath. Because I remember what happened next. I remember what was taken from me. I remember what they took from my son. And I am once again painfully overwhelmed by the lone true emotion that dominates my memories of the Covid Era: rage.There is every reason to think this will become a truly global pandemic. And the idiots comparing it to seasonal flu will look stupid when the reality that it’s 20x more fatal than typical flu becomes apparent. It’s also a huge black eye for China, deservedly so.
This is the real reason I haven’t written about Covid. I cannot summon memories of that era without becoming furious at what I suffered through, without reliving the sense of utter betrayal from all authority we experienced during that period. I have never felt more despairingly abandoned, and in fact actively oppressed, by every level of government than in those dark years. For some people — say, those lucky enough to live in Florida — this matter is largely one of political principle. For me it is deeply personal.
Understand that I live in Chicago. (Moving is not an option.) Life here during the pandemic years — and the closely related Floyd riots, which unmoored my city into a free-floating existential despair it has yet to recover from — left deep psychological scars on me and my family alike. Most of the time my wife and I treat it as a dark, black cloud of madness and sorrow whose details we no longer wish to remember. It’s in the distant past now. It’s over. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t need to talk about it.
But I must talk about it, at least once, if only to exorcise it. I have a son. He has special needs — a genetic disorder so rare there are only 25 clinically documented cases — and in particular he suffers from severe speech delays and articulation issues. When lockdown went into effect back in March 2020, he was a year and three-quarters old. Our awareness of the magnitude of his challenge was only just dawning upon us at that point, and my wife and I made a sober calculation that since he would not be entering preschool until at least the fall of 2021, we could probably tough it out until then.
“Until then.”
What we hadn’t counted on was progressive-driven Covid insanity actively interfering with our son’s development, to the point where it felt like the entire city was perversely conspiring against us and all other parents who live here. My boy was enrolled in a slate of therapy services at the time — physical, speech, etc. — and I cannot properly articulate the agony I felt, as a father, at the way therapy providers here inevitably followed official city/state government policy (as “best practice”): I want you to imagine the value of “speech therapy” given while wearing a mask, to a child who desperately needs to be able to see lips move in order to learn to articulate sounds. I want you to ponder the quality of “remote” physical therapy for a child who cannot yet walk. (I ask you to do these things because it hurts too much for me to dwell upon them any longer.)
I want you to imagine a city with all of its public parks bolted or zip-tied shut for over a calendar year. My memory is that the spring and summer of 2020 were unusually gorgeous and temperate. That memory is tinged with fury — because my son never got to experience it. Only then just beginning to walk, and suddenly desperate to run around and experience the world, his near horizons were arbitrarily limited to the world of our own apartment. (We did not have a car yet.) The best we could do was take him to an open field and let him toddle around. The joylessness of those experiences — with two beautiful parks that he loved, complete with slides and swings and jungle gyms, bolted shut right nearby — has remained with me ever since.
Chicago instituted lockdown protocols along with most of the rest of the nation in mid-March 2020; Chicago exited lockdown completely only in the summer of 2021. And public schools remained in quasi-lockdown status for far longer: The implacably powerful Chicago Teachers’ Union staged a successful wildcat strike as late as January of 2022 to prevent the city from eliminating masking requirements for schoolchildren “without it being bargained for.” (Translation: “Give us more money and we’ll drop this gun.”)
This time Mayor Lightfoot ignored the union’s demands but granted them a delay (during Omicron season). When March 2022 — a full two years after the anniversary of the first lockdown — rolled around, I was so grateful that I could finally send my son back to school without a mask that I tweeted about it. Because my son could not wear a mask — you literally could not get him to keep one on, in any event. Sure, the teachers were still screaming about it (I remember hearing their side of the story every morning on NPR), but I was just thrilled that my little buddy was going to be able to get back to work on his speech handicap without being gratuitously supplied with the verbal equivalent of cement shoes.
A week later my son was returned home to me one day from school by his teachers, weeping disconsolately. A mask had been forcibly tied to his face, and he was clawing desperately at it to try to get it off. He did not stop crying for an hour.
There is a line in Hamlet that, although I had read it countless times before, I never properly understood until that exact moment: “Now could I drink hot blood.” I hope to God that none of you ever feel the sort of spasm of rage that actually makes a man briefly contemplate Shakespearean violence, because when it comes in the context of people who have harmed your helpless special needs son, you begin to think mad thoughts. Needless to say, my son no longer attends that school. But this was also the part of my Twitter history I least enjoyed revisiting; it’s no fun reliving the victimization of your child.
People without children quite reasonably think of the Covid Era in terms of personally lost time and opportunity — bad for most people, but surprisingly tolerable for a minority. Parents understand the world differently. I rage over the Covid Era as time stolen not from me but from my son — arbitrarily and with no scientific reason, for the sake of mere blue-state politics — when he needed it the most. He can never get that back. The pain of it will haunt me until the day I die.
n anecdote to conclude. During an unseasonably pleasant stretch of weather in the fall of 2020, I finally had enough, and started hopping the fence with my son at my local (still-locked) park, just so I could get him on the swing set for a few minutes. The next day a fellow dad joined me with his small child. The day after that, a cop walked by us outside the gates as I was swinging my boy, and I knew I was dead-to-rights, expecting a citation.
Instead, he asked me how my day was going, and laughingly dismissed my being inside the park. “This is total bulls***,” is all he said, as he walked along. Everybody knew it was a joke. And yet most of us played along. (I didn’t, but I’m a Republican in Chicago.)
I will never forgive the people who did this. I will never know all of their names — I do know the names of Chicago city politicians, Randi Weingarten, the Chicago Teachers’ Union, and the CTU’s handpicked mayor Brandon Johnson, however. (I treat them accordingly.) I will not let go of my hatred for these people. I could do it if only my own vanity or interest were at stake — I actually have a very difficult time holding a grudge — but never on behalf of my son, who has no voice to speak in his own defense. I want only to remember who caused this, who allowed this, and to insist these people be blotted out of public life and civic responsibility for all eternity. I have said my piece on the Covid Era, and it will be the last time I speak of it.
