Lockdown killed my free time

This is what corona did to me.

Until March I lived my live and spent my after-work / free time analyzing history, Napoleon, uniforms, reading and evaluating rules, thinking about dice statistics and painting. And gaming, at the club, every two weeks.

Then we lockdowned.

I couldn’t believe it. At first I mostly wondered what happened, I naively downplayed the risk somewhat, I tried to convince my friends that the risk was fairly small. I hoped for a quick return to normal and I studied the real extent of this threat. Very much in the academic way that I study history, campaigns, battles, uniforms and rules. What are the causes? What are the arguments? What would be the best strategy? What are the rules? What are the stats?

I’n neither a virologist or an epidemiologist. I’m a lawyer. My passion is evidence. Truth. Reason. I don’t fear. I only fear the concept of fear, because it overwhelms our rationality. Laws must be balanced and proportionate and protect the weak and the poor and the powerless.

I acknowledge the risk, in particular for older people. I acknowledge that younger patients, too, can develop complications and can even die. However, I still don’t see the evidence that COVID-19-virus is as dangerous for our society as our leaders thought in March. I believe in civil liberties and I care the ordinary citizen who unlike the multinationals pay for the costs of this crisis.

‘The Virus’ is treated as a Red Scare, an Invisible Menace that will kill us all. Our societies are fighting a Vietnam War against a ‘terror virus’ and we fight it in the wrong way. To protect and to defend ‘everybody’, we surrender our civil liberties and fight this virus in a way that will cripple our economy, and thus will cripple our ability to fight, and to protect, and to defend.

So I spend my free time differently, now. I wrote 41 corona blogs in 90 days, I organized a very civil protest, the first in my whole life, I wrote letters to newspapers and I will join a committee against our national corona emergency laws. Because bad laws can be used against good people. I’m a good man. I don’t want bad laws.

I’m more a citizen than a wargamer these days. I started painting Black Brunswickers last month, see above. But it’s difficult to finish them. Head is full. Gaming is trivial. Corona is everywhere.

Napoleon is history. This is now.

I hope to return more often to my sacred painting table.  But only when the fearful trip is done and the ship has weathered every rack. Fight. Fight the fear. Having fun is despite fear, not without it.