Five Years Ago, We Unjustly Condemned a Pangolin – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Exactly five years ago, the world was about to end. Normal-looking people were turning door knobs with the help of tissues, greeting family members by bumping elbows instead of shaking hands, and politicians spent the days screaming at us, “Run home, you bastards!” as if the monstrous toxic cloud from Chernobyl was looming over the city. Everything happened so quickly. Suddenly, we started baking bread at home as if bakeries had never been invented, we drank whiskey with friends over Skype every night, and the streets were left for cats to roam freely, as they took the opportunity to devour a large portion of the birds.

Exactly five years ago, governments demonstrated exactly why they are always ineffective, international organizations confirmed that they only exist to hand out Band-aids and subsidize dictatorial regimes, and, suddenly, we all added a charming word to our vocabularies: pangolin. I had friends who spoke to me on the phone with such familiarity and erudition about the pangolin that I began to think it might be a relative of theirs.

Exactly five years ago, everything fell apart. Modern welfare societies were not prepared for bad news, public opinion didn’t know how to handle fear and uncertainty, and politicians were terrified of losing power: In Europe, where they locked us down most cruelly, politicians were scared of the death toll — not because of the dead, but because of the protests that might surround parliaments the next day, demanding accountability. That’s why they overdid the repression: because an immature society, unable to handle uncertainty, seemed to be screaming for Daddy State to save us all, even if it meant turning the West into a massive, brutal dictatorship.

Exactly five years ago, some people showed their best sides. In Italy, there was a beautiful aerial procession, with the Holy Sacrament blessing the most affected populations from a helicopter, and thousands of faithful kneeling in the street outside their homes. And some doctors set an example of dedication, generosity, and common sense.

Exactly five years ago, a sense of humor helped us cope with the incompetence of our leaders. Like when, in Spain, my idiot president banned going outside, except to walk pets (pets, yes, children, no), many people learned the noble art of borrowing the neighbor’s dog. In my building, there was only one dog: It lost six kilos from going out to pee 23 times a day. If it had a fluid retention problem, it was solved. I remember a guy in Madrid who was arrested by the police for walking his daughter’s teddy bear dog as a pet. He even had it on a leash. The police fined him. And a friend of mine who traveled every week from one end of Spain to the other to see his kids and attend to his work was fined a dozen times for his refusal to get vaccinated, despite having a work travel permit (it was also forbidden to leave our respective regions). Fortunately, after the pandemic, the Constitutional Court overturned all those fines, as happened in other European countries. They were unconstitutional garbage.

Exactly five years ago, Dr. Fauci became a guru, and his word was, for the agnostics who populate the world’s elites, the word of God. But Fauci pretty much only spoke nonsense, he improvised a lot, he was scared out of his wits, and we don’t really know who he was working for, but it certainly wasn’t the United States. Every country had its own mini-Fauci. In Spain, there was a thin guy with a raspy voice and Einstein-like hair who, during the most crucial and widely attended press conference on the pandemic, choked on an almond, started coughing breathlessly like a damn Harley Davidson, turned red as a tomato, and caused all the journalists to huddle at the back of the room, and cowering behind sheets of paper and coats, protect themselves from what they called contaminated “droplets.” After 50 long seconds of coughing, our pandemic expert said, in a thin, strained voice: “DON’T WORRY, I CHOKED ON AN ALMOND!”

Exactly five years ago, thanks to the Coronavirus Diaries, we began laughing so as not to cry. I was given the chance to write in this blessed and legendary magazine, and thanks to that, not all my memories of the pandemic are a horror.

I know there are those who prefer not to remember the pandemic, especially those who lost loved ones. But that’s a mistake. We must remember it. We must remember every single freedom that was taken from us, how the wave of totalitarianism swept through both leaders and citizens, how the WHO and governments prohibited us from investigating the virus, how China did not cooperate at all, and how no one has taken responsibility — not for the economic damage, nor the psychological damage, nor the social damage the pandemic left us with. At least now you can say on Twitter that the Chinese communists were entirely to blame for the coronavirus without getting your account suspended. At least we got that much.

It still seems unbelievable that all this happened. Happy survival, my friends!

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