There is no way to completely chronicle or calculate the losses of destructive events like COVID-19 or the current war in Gaza.
I ran into a friend the other day, and he said that my business must not be going very well. I asked how he figured that out. “You’re doing a lot of writing, which means that you are not spending a lot of time on your company.” I wish that he was wrong but the numbers bear him out. From 2013 to literally the 6th of October, 2023, I had filed 100 opinion pieces. From the 8th of October last year through last week, 122. I am grateful to Townhall and its professional editorial staff for allowing me to print my ideas, and I think that we should all be thankful that websites like Townhall and its sister publications exist. Before I started writing here, I would send my work to the most well-known news sites and they would never publish a word of it. I am grateful we can find honest news and insightful opinions at Townhall.
The main reason that my company is neutral is that my co-founder, friend, and company CEO has been in the army since the day of the Hamas attack. While he has been out here and there to be with his family, we have not met and our company is kind of frozen in glass. I am trying to put on an ill-fitting CEO hat to look for opportunities to move our water quality sensors. I grew up in a lab, first at my father’s and later at various universities. Trying to run a company is still beyond my skill set.
When I look past my own company and its unrecorded damage from the war in Gaza, I try to think of how many others have losses or challenges that never reach the official statistics. I first started thinking about this subject during Covid. While there were numbers of dead, hospitalized, vaccinated, and the like, there could be no way that a total accounting could be made for the damage made by the reckless behavior of the Chinese virus researchers apparently with financial and moral support from Tony Fauci and the NIH. If one were to go house to house and learn about children whose learning went downhill when classes were needlessly canceled those who lost jobs or whose companies went under due to the draconian rules preventing normal life from continuing in the face of a virus that was not a major threat to the vast majority of the population, maybe we would start getting an honest assessment of the damage wrought by Covid. Even the official numbers are useless, as a guy killed in a car accident who tested Covid-positive at the hospital might be listed as having died from the virus. We for a long time were not allowed to discuss the damage and death associated with the vaccines. Just mentioning that the VAERS database had hundreds of thousands of recorded adverse effects from the novel vaccines or mentioning the names of healthy people who died after getting the shot would lead to a ban on YouTube and social media.
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I remember my wife lying in bed for two days after getting each of the first two shots. We got the shots because we wanted to travel. We usually visited my father, who at the time was in his nineties and living alone, every six months or so from Israel to Las Vegas. During Covid, we had been away for 19 months. So to travel, we got the shots. And my wife had a significant reaction to the injections: temperature, pains, and even Covid-like symptoms. Yet, she toughed it out at home, and there is no record of her severe reaction to the shots as she never went to a hospital or clinic. And I am sure that millions of others suffered quietly, being told that getting the shot meant that they had reached the Covid off-ramp; but it was a lie, as many, if not most, got some form of Covid once, twice, or thrice after multiple shots. There was one point towards the end of the official pandemic at which the majority of those who died from Covid were recorded as vaccinated. How much damage was done by the irresponsible actions of faceless bureaucrats and ill-informed politicians? Dr. Fauci, now the highest paid public pensioner in the land, returned to Congress to say that there was no basis to the six-foot distancing rule that crushed society, that he was really never against the “it came out of the virus institute” line of reasoning, though he fought it tooth and nail, and essentially claimed that the unvaccinated caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Memo to the good doctor: Europe is considering that excess deaths post-pandemic may way be related to the vaccines.
About a decade ago, Israel decided to include terror victims in the official Remembrance Day events. My wife was shocked the first time she heard of American “Memorial Day Sales”, picnics, and baseball games. In Israel, the day is extremely staid: many stores are closed, all radio music is somber, and most people attend remembrance events at the various military cemeteries throughout the country. The inclusion of civilian terror victims was a major step for the state, but as living terror victims—thank God—we realized that the focus was on those who had been killed in the bombings, shootings, stabbings, and the like. Like the guy who lost his job because his boss could not afford to keep the store open during COVID-19, living terror victims also found themselves forgotten by the keepers of the official statistics.
Maybe worse than our inability to truly make an accounting of these disasters is the lack of responsibility shown by those who failed. Nobody in the US quit or was fired for the failed response to the COVID-19 virus. While in Israel, a few intelligence generals have chosen to retire, I have yet to hear of one giving up his fat retirement salary as a form of contrition. There is plenty of blame to go around for the failures of 10/7, from the prime minister down to officers who refused to listen to (women) soldiers who said that they could see significant movement on the Gaza side of the border fence. Our supposed leaders have forgotten that Eisenhower had a letter of responsibility for the failure of the Normandy landings if things had gone sideways. Because of that leadership, the landings and the campaigns to follow were not perfect but were good enough to help end the war. We need leaders and accountability. Maybe if we hold people responsible now, we will not have such disasters in the future.
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