Happy anniversary, America. It was two years ago today that we surrendered our civil liberties due to hysteria over a virus.

Yep, it was March 16, 2020 that we were told to stay home for 15 days to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

Health officials demonstrated how this would work using an illustration of a series of matches igniting until one match went missing and the fires went out. By staying home we could “flatten the curve” they assured us.

We believed them. We did our part. What worked for burning matches didn’t work for a virus.

But once government officials and bureaucratic health officials realized that Americans would merrily give up their rights if they were terrified enough, the goalposts moved and a Covid hysteria industry was born.

Next it was 30 days to slow the spread. You know the rest of this sordid story.

Early on, governors and mayors became intoxicated with power they hadn’t known they possessed. They declared indefinite states of emergency and hastily closed schools, “non-essential” businesses (even though they were essential to the folks who owned them), beaches, parks, benches, fitness centers, pools and finally, churches. Gatherings were limited to an ever-changing and capricious number of people, curfews were imposed. Hospitals and nursing homes put patients in solitary confinement where patients suffered and died alone and were buried without funerals.

Some of us were horrified from the start. Where was the virus exception to the U.S. Constitution, we asked? 

What happens to kids who are alone all day? What about the children who depend on free and reduced lunches at school?

Shouldn’t people be outside, exercising and getting fresh air, we timidly suggested.

How dare our governors tell us we don’t need to go to church to worship God, we cried.

In response, we were shouted down and called selfish grandma killers. The laptop lockdowners said we wanted to get our nails done so badly we were willing to deal death to our neighbors. They mocked us for being worried about civil liberties.

When The Washington Post published a piece from a cruise ship passenger recovering  from Covid-19 who said it was really just a mild flu, readers revolted and threatened to cancel their subscriptions.

How dare a news outlet suggest that not everyone suffered and died from Covid! How dare a newspaper print anything that didn’t gin up the hysteria.

That was just the beginning of the culture of censorship. Anyone who tried to calm the national hysterics by pointing out that most of those seriously ill from Covid were fat or had multiple co-morbidities was ridiculed. When it was noted that kids were at little risk of serious illness, Team Covid declared them virus vectors. Two-year-olds were forced to wear masks. 

Those who asked if the virus had escaped from a Wuhan laboratory were banned from social media. Those who questioned the efficacy of the vaccines were kicked off, too. So were commentators who pointed out that cloth masks were never designed to stop a virus.

On the flip side, Anthony Fauci became an overnight celebrity, hitting the Sunday news shows week after week and posing for magazine covers.

Even though his advice seemed to change daily, Fauci was regarded as a Covid god.

Still is, in some circles.

Many of us waited in vain for the courts to strike down the tyrannical government mandates. But the cases never materialized. The ACLU hibernated. Lawyers chased ambulances instead of civil rights.

What we didn’t realize then was that the most important election in recent years had happened in Florida in 2018 when Ron DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum by about 30,000 votes to become governor. When Gillum was later discovered, naked and inebriated in a hotel room littered with drugs, he claimed the defeat sent him into a spiral of drugs and other bad behavior.

Whatever.

Fact was, the voters of Florida gave us DeSantis who boldly stood apart from most other quaking governors. In the summer of 2020 he declared that youth sports would be open in the Sunshine State. Keep your kids home if you’re worried, he said, but children need exercise and socialization.

I nearly wept when I read that. DeSantis gets it, I thought. Why didn’t Virginia’s governor, who at the time had banned sunbathing and all sports, even beach volleyball.

There were other pockets of sanity around the country. Charts now show that on the whole these areas did no better or worse than the lockdown states and counties.

This week - finally - The Washington Post published a story, “These Schools Did Less to Contain Covid. Their Students Flourished,” focusing on Colorado school districts that reopened quickly after the initial lockdowns without masks or other mitigations. They had few cases of Covid.

Best of all, their students remain on track academically.

This story may be a sign that America is finally waking up.

We seem to be reaching a national consensus that closing schools did more harm than good. Many American students are hopelessly behind in reading, math and science. They may never catch up. Worse, there seems to be an epidemic of depression and suicide among the young who were isolated.

Humans are social animals. Common sense told some of us that ordering folks - young or old - to stay in their homes for months on end was never going to end well.

A multitude of grave mistakes were made during the pandemic. Yet there still are no mea culpas from governors, CDC officials and others whose hasty, heavy-handed decisions harmed our kids and our nation.

Frankly, it’s not enough to simply shelve the mandates, burn the masks and move on.

We need safeguards to guarantee nothing like this virus-driven despotism ever happens here again. Apparently a Constitution isn’t enough.

And there needs to be a reckoning for the officials who did this to America.

Happy anniversary.