Curfews are stupid

The stupidest rule San Francisco enacted in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic was a curfew. Many rules enacted then are silly in retrospect which at least made sense at the time based the available knowledge. But a curfew was idiotic. Like, what, do viruses wait until it's dark out to spread? The justification was something like, well, at night people go out to party and socialize, but in the same articles discussing that they'd be like, so you can have last call in bars at 9pm so people can make it home before 10pm^[1] for the curfew, implying that a virus, which as it was already obvious at the time is spread between people, somehow takes a lil' break during working hours, with maybe a little bonus time for happy hour. How polite of it!^[2]

Now, Los Angeles has a curfew because I guess it's offensive to to the authoritarian impulse that people express themselves after dark. Only, man, it's summer, and sunset is a little after 8 in LA with a bit of light after. Are people not allowed to go out and enjoy the sunset on the beach in fucking Los Angeles? Is this what we have come to? What's this all about? Do they really think a protest can't turn rowdy in the daylight? Or is it just more inconvenient for police and, oh my god, fucking military mobilized against civilians, to thrash people with sticks and blind them with rubber bullets after dark? Is it because it's harder for LAPD to aim rubber bullets at journalists in the dark? Is that why Los Angeles needs a curfew?

It's tempting to joke here, are we children with an 8pm bedtime? As if it's OK for children to have curfews. Yeah, I know, there are lots of curfews for teenagers and children in many places. But no, nobody should have a curfew. Not even 6 year olds. Sure, you can have an agreement with your housemates or your parents to come home at a certain time. You can have a bedtime. You can have a time by which you must feed the cat or else she'll be sad and so it's as good as an iron law. But a curfew is just an excuse for the naked exercise of power. It gives authority a sense of doing something, even though it accomplishes nothing useful.

A curfew is pretty great if you want to terrorize people, though. I lived through a period of martial law in Poland in the 80s, and while I was a toddler and too young to remember it, my relatives have told me about what it was like. A strict curfew was one of the oppressive rules imposed on the people. At first the curfew was 7pm-6am, and later it was eased somewhat to 10pm-6am. If anyone needed to be out at night for any reason, they were subject to harassment and arrest. People might furtively ask a passerby at night if there were any military police around as they scurried home. However, this was also an opportunity for thieves to rob you scott free once you assured them there was no military police around. You knew if you cried for help, the military police, if they did turn up, would arrest you, too. It might be much worse than losing some belongings. The curfew terrorized people but it didn't help enforce the rule of law. Quite the contrary.

A potentially rational curfew #

The only way I could imagine a curfew making sense would be if we were besieged by some kind of giant spider that only came out at night and murdered people. Then we could have Giant Spider Curfew. Get home by sunset, because at nautical twilight, They awaken and by astronomical twilight, They hunt. If you stay out, no one is coming to save you. We'll lock the doors and when we hear you scream, we'll put in earplugs and wait until morning to collect your bones and then hang them on the wall together with all the others as a warning.

But you know what? Even if there were Giant Night Spiders, you wouldn't need a curfew. Some people always defy curfew anyway. You'd just inform people about the Giant Night Spider danger. You don't need to menace anyone or lock anyone in or shoot anyone. You just point to the wall of bones and maybe some informative Giant Night Spider info graphics, and if someone is like, nah, I'm going to go out anyway, you just lead them to the airlock, and say, OK, but just remember, no one's going to save you, and they'd be like, yeah right, Giant Night Spiders are just a conspiracy theory, and then they'd step right out and after they got eaten, you'd collect their bones and add them to the bone wall, and maybe add the recording of their gruesome dismemberment to the collection of snuff films about people who went out and hope it persuades the next person.

What I'm saying is that even in this ridiculous made up scenario where it might make sense to have a curfew, you don't actually need a curfew. People wouldn't need to be coerced to protect themselves from Giant Night Spiders by not going out.

But there aren't any Giant Night Spiders in Los Angeles. And if there were Giant Night Spiders, I think Angelenos would go out and punch them in the head or run them over with hot pink SUVs instead of letting them steal the sunset and the night.