Is Anybody Ever Going to Say, ‘I’m Sorry’?

Commentary

This week, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before Congress and, on the advice of his attorney, repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answering many of the senators’ questions.

Everyone is talking about what he did or didn’t know, whether he misled Congress, whether he should have answered the questions, and whether he should be held accountable.

But that wasn’t the moment from this week that I can’t stop thinking about.

My husband called me as he was driving home from picking up grain for the hogs. He had stopped at Restaurant Depot to grab pizza boxes and a few supplies for the ranch. Rarely does he pay attention to American politics. Rarely is he interested in the stories that consume me.

He simply asked, “What’s going on with Fauci?”

I explained that he had spent much of the hearing invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than answering senators’ questions.

There was a long pause.

Then he asked me something that caught me completely off guard.

“Is anybody ever going to say, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. It cost you and your family everything?”

I had to choke back tears because no—nobody has ever said that to us.

My husband and I worked hard. We built businesses. We lived what most people would call the American dream. We weren’t looking for a bailout. We weren’t failing. In fact, when COVID-19 hit, we were just weeks away from selling our restaurant company under a $31 million contract.

Then came “two weeks to slow the spread.”

Two weeks became months. Months became years.

Government policies, not the virus itself, destroyed everything we had spent decades building.

This hearing didn’t make me feel any better. If anything, it ripped open wounds that had finally started to scar over.

Americans are still carrying losses that will never appear on a government balance sheet. They exist instead as tears in the fabric of lives that once felt secure. Businesses built over decades disappeared. Retirement accounts were drained. Marriages came under tremendous financial pressure. Ours was one of them. Homes were lost. Careers ended. Dreams were abandoned. Six years later, many of those wounds have not healed.

It would be easy to make this article about Fauci, but the truth is he is just one bureaucrat.

He may be the most recognizable face of the pandemic response and one of its highest-paid officials, but he was never acting alone. Governors issued orders. County health departments enforced them. School boards complied. Corporate executives complied. Church leaders complied. Republicans complied. Democrats complied.

And so did we, the people.

That may be the hardest part for me to admit. Yes, I am angry at Fauci, but, to be honest, I am just as angry at us.

When I say “us,” I don’t mean that I personally embraced those policies. I questioned them from the beginning.

I have never been vaccinated. That wasn’t a decision I made because of COVID-19. It was how I had lived my entire life. My mother raised me to question pharmaceuticals and to be cautious about trusting the government. That foundation shaped how I viewed the pandemic from the very beginning.

I don’t think that made me special. I think it made me less susceptible to what I believe was the greatest psychological operation of my lifetime.

But we, the people, largely complied.

We accepted the closure of our churches.

We accepted the destruction of small businesses.

We accepted keeping children out of school.

We accepted that bureaucrats knew better than families, business owners, pastors, physicians, and neighbors.

I believe we knew remarkably early that COVID-19 posed overwhelmingly different levels of risk depending on age and overall health. I believe we knew that respiratory viruses are ultimately resolved through herd immunity. We knew children and healthy adults were at extraordinarily low risk compared with the elderly and those with serious underlying health conditions.

Yet instead of allowing the conversation to evolve as the evidence accumulated, fear became the dominant force. Questioning the policies often became more unacceptable than questioning whether the policies were actually working.

This wasn’t simply one man’s failure.

It was a national failure.

Bureaucrats at every level implemented policies that devastated ordinary Americans. Republicans and Democrats alike largely fell in line. Many citizens did as well, whether out of fear, trust, social pressure, or the belief that someone else surely knew better.

Those of us who resisted often paid dearly. My family certainly did.

I thought that chapter of my life was over. I thought I had graduated from wondering how I was going to pay the bills. I had lived that life in my 20s and early 30s. I had spent decades working eighty-hour weeks to build something that finally gave my family financial stability.

Then pandemic policies tore it all down, forcing me to start over.

Today, at 48, I find myself greeting every customer who walks through the door, hoping they’ll come back and tell a friend. I write every day, hoping my words ripple outward and bring people who believe in what we’re building.

I am grateful to still have the opportunity to build.

But this is not where I imagined I would be after decades of working to finally get ahead.

A virus did not destroy everything I built.

Government policies did.

That doesn’t mean every decision was made with bad intentions. It does mean that good intentions can still produce devastating consequences, and when those consequences permanently alter millions of lives, accountability matters. Humility matters. The willingness to simply say, “We were wrong,” matters.

This week, my husband asked me a question I still don’t know how to answer.

“Is anybody ever going to say, ‘I’m sorry. I was wrong. It cost you and your family everything?”

I don’t know if that day will ever come.

But I do know this.

This week, in that congressional hearing, was not that day.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.