From noted comedy zine The Washington Post:Great news! The zombie war is over! You can come out of your bunkers now!
Did we win? No. We did something even better than winning: We suddenly became aware of the passage of time! Wars can end lots of ways -- by winning, by surrendering, by a negotiated settlement, by simply deciding in our minds that they are over with or without consulting the facts on the ground.
Why are there new guidelines if nothing has changed?
Look, it is hard, and everyone's trying! That's the takeaway here! We've all learned and grown, and it's time to move on!
But is the zombie war over?
Well, the fighting-zombies phase of the zombie war is over!
The way you phrased that made it sounds like the zombies are not ... gone.
Yes, technically, in the most literal sense, the zombies are still among us, but much as we would like to be living in a totally zombie-free world, that was never the goal, except for a brief time when we were way too optimistic about what people were capable of.
Look, some people decided that the effort of eradicating the zombies wasn't worth the inconvenience. Imagine having to bring a heavy, metal bat with you every time you go out! Imagine living like that! Well, because some people couldn't do that for a limited time, now other people will have the opportunity to do that forever.
The quotes you have above are the most I could get through on the WP's (semi-)paywalled site. I see the "Liberal Jon Snow" vibe the above is going for, I just lost patience with the website also highlighting an article calling student loan debt "an expensive mistake" - the very sort of quote one expects from the publication owned by Bezos.
In other news, this has nothing specifically to do with COVID, but the logic on display is very "COVID-adjacent":
And here we thought only the CDC had such spotless logic.
'Cause what's a few measly murders and fires in the midst of a cartel war? We got concert tix to sell!
If you haven't yet learned to install Bypass Paywalls, I don't know how to help you.
I'm partial to looking on Internet Archive or just doing Read-Only; neither of which makes paywalls any less annoying (or morally dubious).
Based on what I've learned during this so-called "pandemic", I'm ignoring stop signs from now on. I refuse to live in fear!
If my car gets smashed up, I guess that just means I didn't have enough faith and need to try harder next time.
...'other people'? What's that even mean? Oh, well if I smash into someone who had the right-of-way, that's their fault because if they'd had enough faith then they wouldn't have been there for me to run into. This is called 'taking personal responsibility'.
Non-paywalled version here https://archive.ph/VNSXc
That part right there is 100% serious.
The reason Alexandra Petri has a job is because the world is run with so little wisdom as it is. And "But Japan!" is not an answer to that.(1) If Americans were more like Japanese, America might be run more like Japan. But unless you have a program for making Americans more like Japanese, you might consider giving up on the lament that America is not like Japan. It's the moral equivalent of bitching about the weather.
(1) Also, Japan did not do better than the West because Japan is a more enlightened place ruled by philosophers. Japan has its own fucked-up maddening societal shit-wittery, it's just different than ours. Consider the decisive effectiveness of Japan's response to the Fukushima accident: you'd think something as serious as that would merit a cleaning-up, wouldn't you?
You have two (1)s and are racist in a way which suggests satire.
Alexandra Petri is not, but maybe ought to be, a national treasure.
I was first made aware of her pieces with Keep Scott Pruitt Moist (archive-ish link adapted from Hylyx's post above).