On a mid-April 2025 Saturday afternoon, I went to see a Princeton University baseball game. My brother’s son pitched for Princeton’s visitor, Brown. The weather was beautiful: clear, dry, sunny and in the low-70s.
I wore my black “I SURVIVED CORONAMANIA: UNMASKED, UNINJECTED, UNFRAID” t-shirt. Some Princeton fans in the 250-person crowd crinkled their noses at the shirt, though none made eye contact or said anything to me, even as I cheered conspicuously in their midst as my nephew struck out a bunch of Princeton guys.
He also did well this summer in Cape Cod’s College Baseball League. He throws hard and accurately, changes speeds and makes the ball move unpredictably. There’s talk that a Major League team will draft him next year.
In today’s hyper-specialized world, my nephew hasn’t batted in a game since his freshman year in high school. I liked to swing the bat. There’s nothing like it. The thrown ball comes in fast. There’s a fine line and a split-second between success and failure. If you succeed, you feel a pleasingly heavy sensation in your hands, hear a loud crack, and see a small, white sphere rapidly rise and move away from you. Human motion and verbal commotion follow immediately thereafter. A baseball hit delivers a serious dopamine hit. I wish pitchers would get a chance to swing the bat every once in a while. But I wish in vain for many things far more important than that.
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On that April day, my wife, Ellen, and I sat, five rows behind the first-base dugout, alongside my brother and two of his erstwhile fraternity brothers from Virginia Commonwealth University. Over the decades, I had hung out several times with these amiable guys.
After the game, my brother’s wife, who was sitting with one of her New Jersey-based college friends, joined us after having spectated from lawn chairs along the right-field line. Being too close to the action can make a pitcher’s mother nervous.
My sister-in-law agrees with me about Coronamania. But when her friend saw my shirt, her friend read it aloud and asked what it meant. I answered, “It means the past five years were a complete overreaction.”
She immediately became agitated and said, “I disagree with you about everything. I was taking care of my 95-year-old mother.”
She didn’t claim that her mother died of, or even got, The Virus.
Not seeing her point, I asked, calmly, “Does that mean kids should have been kept out of school for 18 months?”
Before she could answer, my SIL de-escalated the exchange by stepping into the ten feet between us, waving her arms and saying, “OK, that’s enough! This is over!”
Though I’m willing to discuss the Scamdemic, at length, with anyone, I didn’t want to make this spontaneous debate the most memorable part of an otherwise enjoyable afternoon. So I didn’t press the issue. By suggesting the absence of a connection between the health of her 95-year-old mother and schoolkids living normal lives, I had already made my point to anyone within earshot who might have had an open mind.
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The oft-heard, latter-day Scamdemic notions that “we know better now” and that “we won’t repeat this mistake” are deeply unsatisfying. These phrases confer no consolation. Vast, permanent, easily avoidable damage has been done.
Worse, many still think, as my SIL’s friend seemed to, that the theatrical overreaction and shots saved humanity. They display a distinct lack of knowledge and logic about what happened. And they’ve never considered the Scamdemic’s impact on the larger society, not only while the lockdowns, etc. were happening but also in the future.
They have tunnel vision because their TV and internet news sources repeated too many slogans and displayed too many death tickers and graphs presenting fake data. They repeatedly saw and believed videos of morgue trucks, people hooked to ventilators and Chinese guys collapsing in the street. They had also been well-propagandized in advance. They had seen sci-fi movies about contagions and knew the words “Ebola” and “Spanish Flu,” though they couldn’t tell you much about either of these. Besides, in Spring 2020, their work colleague’s wife’s grandmother’s 94-year-old’s friend with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home was killed by The Virus. Or so they had heard.
As during the truncated post-game exchange above, the Coronamanic never had to defend their support for the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots by answering a few basic questions that would have exposed the illogic of it all.
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This misinformed group includes many Princeton grads and graduates of many other colleges, including the private college where my SIL met her friend. During 2020-21, Princeton displayed Styrofoam placards on the main quad with the names of a few dozen—out of over 100,000 living—alumni who purportedly died of Covid. As Ivy colleges like to add the class year after alums’ names—it’s another old-school-tie signifier—I couldn’t help but notice that the ostensible viral victims had graduated many decades earlier; more “with, not from” deaths. But the privileged progressives who run that institution couldn’t pass up an opportunity to simultaneously claim victimhood and exhibit demagoguery. As throughout the Scamdemic, the subtext was, “Last month it was them. Next month, it might be you.”
Uh, maybe…if you were over 80, diabetic and on statins. But even then, highly unlikely.
When I saw these placards, I suspected that Princeton had never similarly memorialized the far more numerous alums who had died of either pneumonia, dementia or alcoholism or had committed suicide. Somehow, those deaths didn’t have the same cachet.
Princeton also barred unvaxxed, unmasked people like me from attending a hockey game from 2021-2023 and has welcomed speakers like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, both of whom put the Scam in Scamdemic, aggressively sought to marginalize anti-lockdown truth-tellers and inaccurately assured the public that the vaxxes “would stop infection and spread.” I suspect it has paid these individuals big honoraria for their blather. But the internet and the University are conspicuously coy about such indelicate details.
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One of my brother’s two game-attending friends creates colorful paintings for a living. I very much like the ones I’ve seen. When he saw my shirt, he politely asked me why I hadn’t taken the shots. I said that the virus never frightened me, the shots had no long-term safety record and I didn’t want to contribute to the phony narrative that some injection had saved the human race from the worst Plague since the 1300s.
When I asked if he’d taken the shot, I thought that, as an artist, he might have had an independent streak and declined it. Instead, he said he had injected. He shrugged and explained, casually, “I just thought it was something we were supposed to do.”
I found his explanation interesting. I wondered what the term “supposed to do” meant and about the nonchalant way he said it.
The dictionary defines “suppose” as “presuming something is true without certain knowledge.” The phrase, “what we were supposed to do,” adds a second layer of passivity. It connotes that one isn’t just making his own presumption, he’s fulfilling others’ expectations by implicitly adopting the presumptions that underlie those expectations.
When I heard the artist’s jab justification, it felt as if he was lumping the inoculations in with such innocuous behaviors as showing up on-time, saying “Thank you” when someone does you a favor, spending holidays with your in-laws or bussing your table at Chipotle. People do these things because that’s what’s expected of them.
Most who fulfill others’ expectations may not think much about why they do so. Those who do think about what they’re supposed to do might take a broader, practical view of their conduct. Upon reflection, they may have concluded that consensus and conformity make for a more harmonious, better society. Though, depending on what conduct is expected, going along to get along can facilitate profound damage. See, e.g., the past five-and-a-half years.
Doing what one is “supposed to do” connotes undue deference or obedience. It’s like being back in grade school, standing in a line and doing what your linemates do. It’s behaviorally tautological: I do it because I’m supposed to do it. It was like drinking Kool-Aid.
Injecting because that’s what one was “supposed to do” also implies that those who jabbed served the public. From the Scamdemic’s beginning, governments cynically exploited naive, misplaced altruism.
Taking shots because one thinks that one is supposed to do so also reflects the dubious bias that medical interventions are generally worthwhile, rather than a profit opportunity for the physician or the corporation that employs them or makes a given drug or device. It turned out that medical systems gave bonuses to doctors who convinced enough people to inject.
