Remember when the fear of dying in a pandemic drove America to prepare? No, of course you don’t. If you were old enough to remember the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, then called the “Spanish Flu” even though it started at a military base in Kansas and long before anyone was traumatized by the use an ethnic word, you would likely be quite dead today.

We regulate at the moment because we have a reason at the moment. It’s a priority. It touches our concerns and the syllogism kicks in, so we regulate because how else can we stop or control this thing that absolutely must be addressed?

Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won’t the planes blow up?

The TSA can declare this rule change because the limit was always arbitrary, just one of the countless rituals of security theater to which air passengers are subjected every day. Flights are no more dangerous today, with the hand sanitizer, than yesterday, and if the TSA allowed you to bring 12 ounces of shampoo on a flight tomorrow, flights would be no more dangerous then. The limit was bullshit. The ease with which the TSA can toss it aside makes that clear.

Today’s young people didn’t live through 9/11. They hear about it, maybe learn about it in history class, but they didn’t fear the underpants bomber or the shoe bomber. Some of us challenged these regulations at the time as being theater, ineffective and overbearing, but most people were more than happy to take their shoes off, buy airplane-sized bottles of Dippity-Doo, if it meant they were safer.

All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest.

This is right, but so woefully misses the point as to be laughable. Rules arise at times when problems garner public belief that something needs to be done. Once something is done, the problems abate and we forget why they happened, why we cared, why we demanded that something be done, in the first place. Years later, the rules remain and the rationale is forgotten. This isn’t about the TSA, even though they are a good example, but about our desire to control behaviors that we loathe, fear or find offensive in general.

Each day of this public health crisis brings a new example. People thrown in jail for minor offenses? San Antonio is one of many jurisdictions to announce that, to keep jails from being crowded with sick citizens, they’ll stop doing that. Why were they doing it in the first place?

The federal government charging interest on loans to attend college? Well, Donald Trump has  instructed government agencies who administer loans to waive interest accrual for the duration of the crisis. But why on earth is our government charging its own citizens interest anyway?

Broadband data caps and throttled internet? Those have been eliminated by AT&T and other internet service providers, because of the coronavirus. But data caps and throttling were really just veiled price hikes that served no real technical purpose. Why did we put up with them?

There is a reason for each of these very disparate examples. Each has a different reason, but each reason is fairly obvious. But now, in an emergent crisis, when the concern has either abated or feels secondary to the burdens caused, we start to reduce the burdens, we’re constrained to wonder why they were ever needed at all, why they were so important that we were willing to put people in jail, in debt, in inconvenience, over such petty needs and concerns.

In every single one of these cases, it’s not just that most of these practices are accepted as “standard.” It’s that they are a way to punish people, to make lives more difficult, or to make sure that money keeps flowing upward. Up until now, activists and customers have been meant to believe that the powers that be could never change these policies—it would be too expensive, or too unwieldy, or would simply upset the way things are done. But now, faced suddenly with an environment in which we’re all supposed to at least appear to be focused on the common good, the rule-makers have decided it’s OK to suspend them. It’s a crisis, after all. Everyone’s got to do their part.

So hate speech is no longer a problem? People with guns should be left alone? Calling coronavirus the Chinese flu isn’t racist? These rules and regulations weren’t a product of “rule-makers” sitting in a smoke-filled room coming up with random ways to make life miserable for people. Well, not all of them, anyway.

These were the rules demanded by the passionate, the concerned and the fearful. Just not today’s passionate, concerned and fearful, so the young person presumes that some invisible mean Rule Czar invented them and imposed them on him to make him miserable and create “power structures” that he despises, even if his mother demanded them when she was younger and played the role of the passionate person.

I want to say that once a policy is revealed as bullshit, it gets a lot harder to convince smart, engaged citizens to capitulate to it. That’s one reason why activists are agitating to end cash bail in the coronavirus crisis, or fighting to ensure that coronavirus tests and any eventual vaccine are available to all.

Ah, the irony of the children, having basked in a world where problems were eliminated such that they can’t imagine any reason why anyone wanted, demanded, solutions, and the solutions worked so well that they ended the problems. The reason it’s hard (not “a lot harder,” but they would need a basis of comparison to understand) to convince “smart, engaged citizens” isn’t that people capitulate to rules (though they do), but that people remember why rules came about, why solutions were demanded and what the world looked like before. Children do not, so as passionate as they may be, their simplistic grasp of problems limits their understanding to power structures and “bullshit” rules.

The worst part is that he’s not entirely wrong that most rules are “bullshit,” despite his child-like grasp of how and why rules happen. But his issue is that he hates the rules demanded by the last generation and wants to replace them with his rules, which are no less “bullshit” but reflect his passionate demand that something must be done. And so the cycle continues.