This post is a little different. I am posting a thread, not of hidden knowledge, but of all too common experiences that people 10 years from now will not believe if they had not lived through it themselves.
Further, while you may think the main thread is “too perfect” to be real, the quantity of replies in agreement indicate this was not a fabricated, one-off case.
NYC Angry Mom, 18 May 2021
I have to make some confessions.
Last year, I was absolutely insane and I was one of those people who yelled at people outside for not wearing a mask. It wasn't actually the virus that I was afraid of, but the lockdowns. I was so deeply psychologically damaged from the NYC lockdown in the spring that I lived in perpetual terror of it happening again. Cuomo spent the entire summer & fall threatening and browbeating us for our "bad behavior" and I deeply internalized this message.
I remember screaming at my neighbors and telling them that if they didn't put on a mask, they were going to face my wrath if my kids' school was closed.
At one point, he put us into an arbitrary microcluster and we escaped closed schools by only a few blocks. I spent the entire school year watching every stupid metric and desperately trying to get three steps ahead of Cuomo.
I was very lucky that my children's (Catholic) school was never closed. One child had 2 quarantines (and one was over a break). We got incedibly lucky.
To be clear, I never supported the lockdowns. I thought they were an abomination. Pure psychological torture.
Masks felt like the compromise to keep us out of lockdown, & I got angry when everyone wouldn't "comply", to keep us out of lockdown.
If you go back and watch Cuomo's briefings, the threat of closures (dependent on our behavior!) were a daily phenomenon. And when they happened, they were metric-free, indefinite in nature, arbitrary and capricious.
Completely at the whim of one man, and one man only.
Replies:
My husband yelled at a group of elderly neighbors last April after they gathered by the mailboxes for a socially distanced wine night. This was in Florida, we are Republicans, and we were out of our minds terrified. The neighbors still don’t talk to us.
I washed my groceries, door knobs, and light switches.
Jenin Younes (Leftylockdownskeptic ) May 18
In solidarity, I will also confess that I want people to like me, and all my friends were super pro lockdown/ masky, and a couple times in March/ April I joined in their complaining about people breaking the rules. I’m ashamed to this day.
I wouldn’t let my kids hang out with friends for the first 4 months and slowly became more relaxed after I saw that the COVID patients I was taking care of were recovering and I knew there was hope.
I was very strict about it for months. We stopped when local protests and a riot were defended- while playgrounds were still closed. & when school organized an online/at home field day for the kids, but then the organizers had large, in-person events for their neighborhoods.
I yelled at kids not socially distancing on the trail outside. I was very judge-y about the Hasidic funeral held for rabbis (who died of COVID) in April 2020. I didn’t feel comfortable pushing back when I noticed after 4-6 weeks there was no plan to get back to normal.