SALENA ZITO: COVID-19 allowed too many to pervert their power.

It is still hard to fathom the number of freedoms, information, and liberty we have willingly given away for the past two years during the pandemic to the influential cultural curators within government and institutions such as unions, academia, media, and corporations.

It is still hard to fathom that we have collectively allowed the questioning power to get shunned from polite society and shamed into submission.

According to those curators, you should lose your job, have stricken your ability to express concerns in a public forum, and have your life turned upside down.

The leap from the containment at the beginning of the pandemic to the normalization of government overreach has been nothing short of breathtaking. Unfortunately, the same goes for our institutions — academia, unions, media, and Big Tech.

We’ve normalized all kinds of genuinely destructive actions in the name of stopping the spread, such as shutting down schools on a dime, giving unchecked power to teachers unions, and firing people for not getting vaccinated. We’ve upended our children’s mental health, expanded our opioid crisis, mandated things we have no business mandating, and cratered our economy.

Many at the start lost parents and grandparents in nursing homes where they were alone and isolated with no one who loved them to hold their hand as they took their last breath.

Power is a wretched force when in the wrong hands.

Our institutions are almost all run by the wrong hands, and it shows.