Regulation Fatigue
I have a decent amount of empathy for the lockdown rioters here in Amsterdam. We’re over a year into the pandemic. None of the local measures have had much of an impact in stopping the spread. Not when you compare them to the impact closing the borders had back in May. When the Netherlands re-opened, I was one of the foreigners that took the opportunity to hop across the border. Spending a few free months in what felt like the blossoming of new normal. As far as I know, I didn’t bring COVID with me. But it’s almost impossible to think that no one on my fairly full flight was carrying the virus with them.
I stopped going out long before the government declared we should. Amsterdam re-entered lockdown in October, almost a full month later than it should have. The borders, however, remained open. Unsurprisingly, the second wave has not subsided. Yet, here we sit, being asked to restrict ourselves even more, with little to no evidence that it will even help.
Imposing a curfew doesn’t even make sense. The fewer hours people have to be out and about, the more likely they are to be out and about during those hours. What the fuck happened to outside the box thinking? In a city with the world’s first night mayor, they haven’t considered pandemic shifts? The literal best way to prevent the spread of a virus is to minimize crowds and prolonged exposure to each other. Yes, masks help especially in reducing the spray of spread. But a mask does jack shit if suddenly everyone is crowding on the metro at the last minute to beat curfew.
I’ll comply with the regulations because I’m a foreigner with the financial security to not need to be out most of the time. But that doesn’t mean I agree with them. It’s 2021, we could be leveraging all 24 hours in the day. We could live life in shifts, making use of our spaces a third at a time. We have so much technology, and ability to communicate, but our governments only really seem interested in telling us what not to do. We’re already living more globally, more remotely, more segmented, it’s about time our governing caught up.
White society is so riddled with paternalism that the only way out government can see is more rules, more restrictions. You can’t be a pluralistic democracy and still declare there is only one way to survive a pandemic. Especially, when your preferred method of governing is “individual responsibility”. Stopping someone to berate them for not wearing a mask is as risky as the person not wearing the mask in the first place. Even more heinous are the “mask quality inspectors”. Your individual responsibility is to stay the fuck away from other people. It’s the government’s responsibility to make it possible for us to stay the fuck away from each other. That is pandemic survival 101.
