The tweet shows two silhouettes, extending in familiar policeman shapes. The text is as cheery as a beat-walking bobby in an Edwardian children’s book: “If you think that by going for a picnic in a rural location no one will find you, don’t be surprised if an officer appears from the shadows!” And the message, directed in this case to the inhabitants of Central Bedfordshire in England, is an example of how even when they’re essential, anti-pandemic policies are always at risk of going a little bit insane.

I’m a skeptic, to put it mildly, of the skeptics of lockdowns and social distancing requirements. At best they make an argument for more speed and optimism in reopening, not a case that there’s an alternative world where the American economy stayed open and steady while the virus was killing more people weekly than car crashes, flu or cancer and New York’s monthly death toll was climbing above that of September 2001.

But the skeptics’ determination to catalog every petty tyranny inflicted in the name of quarantine is an important public service — not just because overreach always needs critics, but because petty tyrannies today are obstacles to the adaptation we need to get to semi-normalcy tomorrow.

The example of the British police hunting down picnickers even — or maybe especially? — when they deliberately head to isolated locales hits particularly close to home for me, because isolated streams and woods have been essential to my own family’s attempts to adapt to social distancing. Every other day, weather permitting, my pregnant wife and I have been dragging our children to one or another Connecticut state park, all of which happily remain open for solo hikers and families.