(Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Two years ago this week, elected government officials across our country began locking down American citizens in their homes.
In many cases, these elected representatives chose to allow unelected government health bureaucrats to make their decisions for them.
The results have been devastating to our society, our freedoms,our economy, and the next generation of Americans.
American kids who have spent two years of their educational lives in the world of lockdowns have seen test scores drop and forced remote learning has negatively impacted juvenile mental both health in the short term and in ways we may not know about for years to come. Studies early on in the pandemic showed students losing the equivalent of months of learning with the achievement gap between wealthy families and lower income families exacerbated even more.
“The result of locking down has been increased suicide rates, increased drug rates, increased domestic violence rates – all of the social ills that we predicted before have happened.”
Congressman ken Buck
Campfire Colorado recently had the chance to speak with Colorado Congressman Ken Buck on a variety of issues including the coronavirus lockdowns.
Congressman Buck was one of the few leaders in Washington at the time who had the courage to urge caution on these extreme policies and he remains one of the few leaders willing to speak out today.
In our conversation, Congressman Buck emphasized that we needed to focus on protecting vulnerable members of our population but that “locking down was a mistake.”
“The result of locking down has been increased suicide rates, increased drug rates, increased domestic violence rates – all of the social ills that we predicted before have happened,” said Congressman Buck.
He cautioned that elected officials and citizens needed to balance the advice given at the time by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci with the unintended consequences of dramatic policies like lockdowns.
“It’s terribly unfortunate and I don’t blame Dr. Fauci,” said Buck. “If your doctor tells you, you need to lose weight; you need to decide ‘do I wanna give this up or not?‘ You are ultimately the decision maker. Dr. Fauci told us this is what we need to do to address this pandemic but he’s not a mental health professional and he’s not an expert in domestic violence; so the policymakers need to take experts like Dr. Fauci and put his advice into the larger context. Now, there are other reasons why I think Dr. Fauci went too far, but in terms of his advice on the lockdown, I think that it should have been tempered and it wasn’t. And that’s largely the problem of governors in the United States.”