Dakota Beacon

First I will stipulate that I am in favor - wholly in favor - of people wearing face masks until evidence shows us any reason not to.  I also am in favor of the recommended “social” (or, rather, “asocial”) distancing which is making life awkward and very unpleasant. I want this disease to go away sooner rather than later and anything which we can do in some small way to help achieve this is, it seems to me, well worth it.  I’ve gotten in a few arguments over it with some of my ultra-libertarian acquaintances.

But we need to draw the line somewhere.  On Thursday the mayor of Louisville, a petty Democrat who shall remain nameless as far as I’m concerned, decreed, as though he were the High Poo-bah, that there would be NO religious observances on Easter in his town.  Well, I agree that crowds of people congregating within an enclosed church, some of them singing their lungs out, would be a good way to spread this virus.  But he ordered a church not to conduct Easter services in a parking lot, with the worshippers in their cars. Fortunately, the church went to court to get a stay so they could go ahead and celebrate Easter.  The judge ruled that they be allowed to proceed:  “On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter. That sentence is one that this Court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of The Onion," Walker wrote. "But two days ago, citing the need for social distancing during the current pandemic, Louisville's Mayor Greg Fischer ordered Christians not to attend Sunday services, even if they remained in their cars to worship — and even though it's Easter.”  Actually, this might be a good time to revive the 50s-era drive-in movies.  We need some kind of outlet!

This is an example of people getting a huge head because suddenly they think someone is listening to them.  I watched a video clip of a chief of police in Britain lecturing the masses that they should be under no illusion.  If they are indiscriminate about what they dare put in their shopping cart in the supermarket he would deploy his thugs to stand at the checkouts and rifle through the contents in case there was a contraband package of cookies or some summer sausage or cheese that he, in his wisdom and ultimate authority, deemed “non-essential”.  

We have guards counting heads at the local Walmart, we have arrows turning our supermarket aisles into one-ways.  Some stores are being banned from selling “non-essentials” such as clothing or electronics. Who determines what is “non-essential”?  Since when is clothing “non-essential”? When our entire communication system is cut off except for electronics, who is in a position to tell us “electronics” are “non-essential”?  We aren’t exactly getting together in any other way. If we want to watch a movie we can’t go to the movie theater.  Our electronic phones are our lifelines today.

Of course we should all be smart enough to avoid extra time spent in an environment that puts us at greater risk of becoming ill.  But some little potentate in Britain is telling people that their “lockdown” - which sounds like a prison camp -  will last until a vaccine is found!.  Well, inasmuch as people are found to be re-infected with the virus, that could easily be the Twelfth of Never. Our own brilliant Dr. Anthony Fauci, (who, to many of us, is beginning to look a lot like the character actors we used to see in films about Nazi interrogators, or the little fascist op trying to get the treasure away from Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark) just put this out:  Americans might have to carry around “health certificates” with them or risk - what? Jail time? Fines? - until the end of time. Is Fauci insane?

We just “celebrated” Easter, kept away from friends and extended family (in some cases, any family) and were not allowed to attend our churches.  Jews, likewise, were prevented normal observances of Passover. We can’t go to work. We struggle with processes to apply for unemployment through systems which have choked on the volume, we can’t grab a snack in a restaurant or shop for a new color of paint for the bathroom.  Festivals and concerts and sports events are cancelled so we can’t watch them even on TV. Even taking a simple walk out of doors is becoming a dystopian experience. Walking paths have been first painted with dividing lines . . . and then closed. We have drones taking pictures of parked cars and following lone souls walking their dogs in the wilderness, voices coming over loudspeakers from helicopters patrolling overhead, “reminding” us to socially distance.  This needs to stop.

We’re adults - we get it.  This is a serious threat - just look at Italy, look at China.  China hasn’t licked this yet - they just pretend they have. So we all understand that we need to take extraordinary precautions.  But there is a limit. When we can’t see the reason for the “rules” we will, at some point rebel. All of the rules will go out the window and that window will be open.  Someone needs to communicate to Mrs. Birx and Mr. Fauci that they have not been elevated to the position of dictators of the United States of America.  

We are dealing with enough as it is - this virus comes at the end of a long winter.  Now we are all out of work. None of us knows what is coming next. We have a government which thinks it needs to have friendly relations with a group of James Bond villains who concoct deadly virus strains, stealing them from wild bats in caves and perfecting them in their  labs in central China.  We have no idea when or even how this will end. Now we have every nobody on Planet Earth coming out of the cracks in the woodwork to dictate to us. They have no information of value to share. When they tell us we don’t need masks we know damn well it is because they have no masks to give us or sell us because they were not prepared.  They don’t know any more than we do what will be effective.  They could use a little humility. President Trump called the WHO out - they didn’t call this right.  He is absolutely correct there.  But neither did the medical team he has assembled. We can’t expect them to know, in fairness, what is unknowable, but this means that they are not going to be allowed by the rest of us to dictate a bunch of unreasonable decrees. We simply won’t take it. When it happens that they no longer receive any respect they will be unable to do anything helpful even if and when they could.

In fact all of this weird and unreasonable regimentation and control that these people are attempting to impose is actually counter-productive.  It is well known what a devastating effect stress has on the human immune system.  It destroys our ability to fight infections, it shuts down our defenses against coronavirus just as it does against cancer or heart disease.  We will begin seeing these effects and we will begin to see other adverse social consequences - addictions, domestic violence, suicides and other self-harm.  Someone - perhaps the president - needs to rein this kind of conduct in. We are not Chinese. We are not slaves. We are not British. We are Americans. We will pull together and see this through, we will bounce back and our economy will revive if these twerps are put in their place.  If their bosses don’t do it we will do it for them and it won’t be a good thing. If everyone simply rebels we cannot defeat this sickness. However we are not going to substitute one kind of sickness for another. As this crisis wears on, we must limit the authority of our little dictators and petty kings. .  They allowed this to happen. Our institutionalized guardians of the public health have been an unqualified disaster - the CDC twiddled its thumbs from the time we first heard about this virus (and this would have been December at the latest). Why were they not tuned in to what Taiwan knew? What South Korea knew?  What else do they have to do? Worry about weed? And the FDA - they sat on the hydroxychloroquine treatment - a drug which has been in use for a very long time for other human ailments - just to flex their little muscles. Why? People were dying. The real reason is probably because this medicine is no longer under a patent - which means it's cheap, which means that those who actually run the FDA - powerful pharamceutical companies - aren't making money on this and they'd like to hold off until they develop something that will make them a lot of money - some of which will be passed along to their pals in the FDA.   And then, of course we have people like the governor of Michigan, who outlawed the drug.  She’s not even a doctor. She just thought it would be annoying to President Trump if she outlawed something he mentioned as having promise. People died in Michigan who might have benefited. Her latest move against the virus is to ban sale of American flags and gardening equipment and seeds! Is this Michigan's "Great Leap Forward"?  I would hope their families sue this governor - another tiny dictator - for playing with people’s lives.

This whole thing is not being handled very well.  Government officials should have listened to Senator Cotton when he was urging action on this last December - in time to prevent it becoming widespread in the United States.  So the President dropped the ball. His team of “experts” are behaving in totally inappropriate ways, saying things which seem to have his assent, assuming powers no one is willing to extend to them and to which, quite frankly, their qualifications and experience, not to mention their success rate, do not entitle them.  They need to prove themselves before they start making the rules. We, the American people, also deserve respect. If we feel we are not getting it law and order won’t survive either. What this does show us, in a most constructive manner, is just what it is like to be under the thumb of a Leftist government.  It's as well we see this now before we elect anyone from that camp.

Instead of a daily presser what we need is someone to sit down and figure out how we are going to survive this economically and psychologically as well as physically.  Implementing my plan for economic recovery (March 21, 2020) would be a better use of their time - and ours.  

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