I'm not pessimistic yet, but frustrated. It feels as if there's no end in sight to all the goalpost-moving, and it feels as if it will continue indefinitely until somebody somewhere eventually decides that people have had enough of the ongoing restrictions. I have the most feels for those whose financial situations will be in flux next year given the uncertainty of their jobs or livelihoods if COVID is deemed to still be a enough of a threat that requires continued restrictions through 2021.
It's been a fantastic example as to why you never surrender any amount of freedom to your government, because you won't get it back. Sure, they keep saying that we're just about to reach the crest of the hill, it's just about over, we can get there if we just buckle down and try
extra hard, but we're on day 245 of 15 days to slow the spread.
That was eight months ago.
They say the lockdowns are just temporary, just a measure that we have to deal with for the moment until things "level out", but this country is full of things that were supposed to be temporary; things that we were only supposed to live with for a
little while and then they'd get scrubbed off the books and we'd go back to business as usual. It's been a long time now, but do you know what other measures were "temporary" in the past?
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were only meant to be active until we were "victorious in the war on terror." The Patriot Act was also supposed to be a temporary measure, but that wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, until Trump slapped it off the table back in May, to
absolutely no fanfare. It's been about 20 years now and I can't help but notice that I still have to take off my shoes to get on an airplane, because some dude failed to blow his feet up in
December of 2001.
In France.
Sales Tax, which began in Wyoming as a temporary, emergency measure to help the state recover from the Great Depression. By 1933, eleven more states had imposed a sales tax, and then eighteen more, and then thirty, and by 1969 (Yes, that recently), every single state had imposed a sales tax, save for the N.O.M.A.D. states. (New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska and Delaware.)
Highway Tolls, which, in their modern form, began as recently as the 1950s and were a temporary measure to help fund the construction of the highway, after which all of the toll booths were meant to be removed, once the highway had been "paid off." This has only happened a single time in U.S. history. The
Dallas-Fort Worth turnpike or I-30 was paid off in 1977 and the booths were removed. So far as I know, no other road in the country has done this before or since. It began as a construction fee, then it became a maintenance fee, and now it's just flat-out "give us money."
Income Tax, which began in 1861 and was only used to pay for the war efforts during the Civil War. The U.S. imposed and repealed income taxes several times throughout its history, exclusively for war efforts, until 1894, when Congress passed the
Wilson-Gorman tariff, the first peace-time income tax in this country's history. It was repealed by the Supreme Court in 1895 after it was deemed unconstitutional, but thanks to Theodore Roosevelt's Sixth Message to Congress, we're now living underneath a permanent income tax.
You might think it's a little crazy that they could perpetuate COVID ad-infinitum, because surely at some point people would start to question a lockdown that's extended well beyond the reasonable duration for a novel virus, and you'd probably be right. That's when we start shutting down because there's too many carbon emissions in an area, because there's been an outbreak of the latest H1V1/COVID/SARS, because it's flu season and we want to "minimize the impact", there's been another riot in an area so we need to lock down. The circumstances would change, but the framework to enact it would already be built.
If you impose a "temporary measure" for long enough, the next generation won't even know it's temporary.
