American Thinker

by Luis Gonzalez

    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.

    The memories are something else.

    And here’s where my politics enters the picture.

    I’m voting Republican this year.

    I’m not doing it because Republicans are perfect. They aren’t.

    I’m not doing it because Donald Trump is going to fix Washington in two years. He won’t. Washington didn’t become what it is overnight, and nobody is going to straighten it out with a magic wand.

    I’m voting Republican because I remember what happened when government was given extraordinary authority over ordinary American life.

    That’s it.

    I don’t need to pretend every Republican is a saint. I don’t need to pretend every Democrat is a socialist. I don’t need to believe Trump can fix everything.

    I simply don’t want to go back.

    That matters to me more than it apparently does to some people who have already forgotten everything that happened, or decided it’s ancient history.

    It isn’t ancient history.

    It’s four or five years ago.

    And the next emergency is always waiting somewhere around the corner. Maybe it will be another pandemic. Maybe it will be war, terrorism, an economic crisis, or something nobody has thought of yet.

    Maybe AI.

    Whatever it is, there will be a reason.

    There will be experts.

    There will be charts.

    There will be somebody standing at a microphone telling us that this time is different, that the threat is unprecedented, and that the measures being proposed are temporary.

    Maybe they will be.

    But I’ve heard that word before.

    That’s why I care about the direction of government.

    I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for restraint.

    I’m looking for a government that remembers that Americans are citizens, not subjects, and that extraordinary powers should make us nervous precisely because they are extraordinary.

    The Supreme Court eventually pushed back on some of the excesses. Citizens pushed back, too. The country survived.

    But surviving something isn’t the same as learning from it.

    I hope we learned.

    Because freedom is easy to appreciate once you’ve got it back. The harder thing is remembering how quickly it can become conditional.

    That’s what COVID taught me.

    And that’s what I’m taking with me into the voting booth.

    I don’t want to go back.

    I was a child in Cuba when I first learned what it meant to bend the knee. The government made the choice for me.

    During COVID, I bent it again. I took the shot because I wanted to protect the elderly people in my family.

    I don’t regret doing it for them.

    But I’m not going to bend my knee again.

    Because the next time I do, I don’t think I’ll be allowed to stand without a fight.