i’m also going to be using the words “national security” copiously from now on when talking about the plague because the restrictions on personal freedom we accepted for plane travel and public protest (anyone else remember the carefully caged protest zones?) were wild, not to mention the ongoing data harvesting/domestic surveillance fustercluck. If you can give up traveling with liquids, have your suitcase contents examined and be patted down by some scary rent a cop who you have to be super nice to or they can make your trip horrible, have your phone and emails tapped and put in storage, get on a watch list for using arabic or donating to pakistani or indonesian earthquake relief... you can go to online services, concerts and mask up. If they had all that money to turn iraq and afganistan from beautiful countries to bombed out dustbowls, they can pay for you to stay at home, incentivise online grocery shopping. If the secret service under GWB can interrogate a teenager over her angry emo blog when she was mad her soldier brother died, they can send out hazmat suited men in black to have a formal chat with antivaxxers about national security concerns. They can censor fake news the way they censored the soldier coffins and make your vaccine into a patriotic act. We turned countries upside down over the imagined contagion of Bin Laden’s ideas, we can do the bare minimum for a virus.











