For these people, it wasn’t enough to control their own environment and what they do within their own homes but to take pleasure in watching others squirm when the government fermented our civil liberties into an intoxicating substance that could only satisfy the thirst of the tyrants amongst us.
But now that the hysteria has subsided and the tyrannical drunkards are beginning to sober up, they have a new demand for us to adhere to: a demand for forgiveness.
Live on Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher”, NYU professor Scott Galloway proposed that now that we are in the aftermath of the pandemic response and harsh lockdowns, that we should have more “grace and forgiveness” for people like Galloway, who wanted even harsher restrictions on daily American life.
"I was on the board of my kids' school during COVID. I wanted a harsher lockdown policy. In retrospect: I was wrong.” Galloway reflected.
Galloway continued, “The damage to kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risk. But here's the bottom line: We were doing our best. But let's give a little grace and forgiveness for the shit show that was COVID."
Galloway is not alone in his wishful thinking to grant our tyrants of yesteryear an emotional amnesty but it’s hard for us to accept that it’s now water under the bridge when their advocacy pushed people one step closer to living underneath one.
It’s hard for me to reconcile that people like Galloway were cheering when employers looked at their loyal employees like my wife and coerced her into getting injected with a vaccine that she didn’t want or else lose her income.
See, when we objected to being subjected to having our livelihoods dangled over our heads like an economic carrot, the gleeful tyrannical sociopaths grinned with pleasure as they gaslighted us with claims of how we were still making a choice amid coercion.
They were drunk with power. Yet now that they’ve sobered up, they want us to forget how they threw up all over our civil liberties. They want me to put aside the anxiety I had as the Supreme Court was deciding if my employer had to comply with the government’s demands to either vaccinate their employees or inconvenience them with constant testing, even against the company's desires.
I’m not one to hold a grudge and I believe that forgiveness is essential to the growth of human beings. However, forgiveness should not be asked of or demanded by the person or people who committed the atrocity because forgiveness is not for the aggressor but for the victimized.
Practicing forgiveness is an internal choice because constantly harnessing anger and anguish eventually eats away at you and can change who you are. But I do not forgive people who aren’t apologetic for their actions.
Our sobered tyrants don’t appear to be apologetic to me, they are just hungover and feel embarrassed for how carried away they became.
They’re unable to look people like me in the eyes and apologize for the damage they caused my family, the people they canceled for rightfully questioning their intoxicated demands, or the handicap they inflicted on the next generation of Americans.
Galloway wishes for us to have 'grace' now yet when it mattered in those dire times, that word never entered his vocabulary. They don’t deserve forgiveness, because they’re not ready to be accountable for the years of social abuse they put us through. The pandemic showed me that many in our society are in dire need of an intervention, so the people who were constantly ignored as they were actively being discarded can finally be heard by the ones who created the circumstances.
They may be sober today but if they continue down the path of avoiding accountability, I do not believe for one moment that they'll have the willpower to not drink from the bottle of tyranny again.
The shame they feel today won't prevent them from going bottoms up into another bender that will further erode our rights when the opportunity presents itself.
Forgiving the unaccountable tyrannical addicts of our society is tentative to enabling them to continue their destruction: I refuse to be an enabler.
