Welcome to the Age of Unreality
by Ed West, UnHerd:
It’s hard to believe but June 2020 is still not over yet. To me, it’s felt like the first time in my adult life that I’m living through history; strangely, even 9/11 and its aftermath didn’t feel quite so portentous, nor the whole Brexit saga.
But the major emotion I feel is one of unreality, not helped by the fact that I’ve met a total of about five adults over the past three months. It feels unreal, and rather like I’m living in one of these medieval periods of crisis when everyone started whipping themselves or spontaneously dancing.
Although I’m a pessimist, I never would have expected the institutional response to the Black Lives Matters protest as it happened; on the one side, support, on the other, cowered silence. It felt, again, unreal, a black pill moment.
After weeks of being careful and avoiding social contact, and very soon after the outrage about Dominic Cummings because he wanted his child looked after by relatives if he got sick, thousands were allowed and even encouraged to congregate in our major cities. Almost no one objected. I’m sure some Left-of-centre commentators criticised the protests on health grounds; on my Twitter feed I could see only Sunny Hundal taking the principled and authentically liberal stand that, even if the cause was worthy, it was a risk. Maybe there are others, and I just didn’t notice them.
Even among medical professionals, hundreds in the US publicly stated that racism was a public health issue even more dangerous than the coronavirus. Only a few weeks earlier lockdown sceptics were mocked for their failure to conceptualise how a virus was a different sort of threat.
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