It was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights
We'd hide from the lights.
Ervin Drake, "It Was a Very Good Year"
Frank Sinatra's soulful rendition of this timeless classic reminds anyone with a pulse of what it was like to experience the special moments of young romance "when we were seventeen." Dates, sports events, parties, proms, and just socializing after school (or during school for that matter) were all part of those vibrant, exhilarating teenage years that can never be duplicated. Once it's passed, you can never fully recapture it, "like time in a bottle."
But sadly, 2020 has not been "a very good year" for today's 17-year-olds -- or for any of our young people for that matter. Instead, it has been utterly awful. And they will never get it back.
Thanks, grown-ups. Thanks, governors. Creeps.
Overnight, and by the arbitrary decree of insipid, soulless governors who cannot see beyond a distorted corona virus projection chart, the Springtime of their young lives has been simply cancelled.
Whether in high school or college, today's gals and guys have been summarily -- and irrevocably -- deprived of that special spring semester of the year, and all the irreplaceable experiences that come with it.
Instead of throwing frisbees or holding hands on the quad, they are crouching in front of a computer screen, at home alone, trying gamely to stay awake as they absorb the tedium of sterile on-line education.
As for holding hands: What only yesterday was a timeless rite of springtime romance is now a criminal misdemeanor under the "social distancing" rules imposed by the pretentious governors. The mind boggles at what punishments these same governors would like to inflict upon those wayward youths with the audacity to engage in more adventurous sexual contact, like latter-day Woodstock Aquarians. The rack comes to mind.
Social Distance Violators in the Orwellian Age of Covid-19
Instead of dressing up to join their best gal or guy for the Senior or Junior Prom, today's youngsters are drowning in the insufferable boredom of day-to-day domestic confinement with their equally bored parents and siblings. Even a small dancing party with friends is now verboten, on at least three counts. It would violate (1) social-distancing rules; (2) the ban against any gatherings of over 10 people; and (3) the grimly Draconian stay-at-home rules against merely visiting friends.
Courtship has been effectively declared illegal under the stay-at-home and social distancing rules. These rules adamantly prohibit visiting anyone other than family or someone in need of special help or support. That does not include a romantic partner, or even a fiance. It was easier for Romeo to reach Juliet by fighting off the Capulets and climbing over her balcony than for a suitor of the Covid Age even to get near his sweetheart.
Young love and romance have thus been relegated to the barren wasteland of "non-essential activities" that remain prohibited unless and until the governors decide that the risk of COVID-19 has been nullified to their complete satisfaction. Which could be next year, or beyond. Until then, lads and lassies must keep their dismal distance and romance remains on a hard hold.
If this sounds like some dystopian nightmare out of Orwell or Huxley, it should. Because it is.
The Covid-19 virus has not been demonstrated to inflict harms exceeding those of a bad seasonal flu by any orders of magnitude. Although it appears likely to equal or modestly exceed the 61,000 U.S. deaths attributed to the 2017-18 seasonal flu, there was essentially no political, governmental, media, or societal reaction or mass response to that flu or its spread.
Yet the comparable Covid-19 has generated a degree of mass, lunatic hysteria and irrational overreaction that is utterly unprecedented in American history. Not even the fleetingly crazed response to Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1938 approximates the insanely disproportionate societal and governmental reaction to the corona virus threat.
As Jefferson Airplane foretold in the oddly prophetic White Rabbit, we have reached the point "when logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead."
Should an entire generation of millions of young people be deprived of the most precious, irretrievable experiences of their lives so that clueless political poltroons can claim they went "all out" to minimize the risk (not the probability!) that aged, infirm retirees, already "playing with house money" (including yours truly, except for the "infirm" part) might contract Covid-19 and possibly succumb?
The answer is plainly "No!" Any reasonable elderly person with a grain of decency and proportion will recognize that an entire generation of youngsters should not be deprived of the best years of their lives so that the oldsters can stretch a few more months out of the worst of theirs. After all, we are "playing with house money." The kids aren't.
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