Back in March at the peak of the virus panic, I posted my dismay at the onset of the intentional near-strangulation of human activity from coast to coast, ocean to ocean, border to border. I reasoned back then that we couldn’t and shouldn’t lockdown almost everything and think that we can get away with it for very long. Well, we were beginning to come out of it and, lo and behold, our power-hungry czars are pushing us back into it. This re-strangulation is an affront to reason, prudence, and humanity.
It’s happening across the country. Our potentates of commissioners, mayors, governors, and army of zero-risk utopians hiding under the moniker of “scientific experts” – albeit in contradiction to other “scientific experts” – are re-imposing masks, re-shuttering businesses, and coming as close as they possibly can to making America a sputtering ghost town once again.
This morning, I learned that the Board of Health of Missoula County has issued a decree for the mandatory wearing of masks in public. And once again, another deep blue urban node (yes, we have those too in Montana) is spearheading the way back into the straitjacket. What’s this with the Left-liberal attraction for the totalitarian temptation (to borrow from Jean Francois Revel’s 1977 best-seller, The Totalitarian Temptation)? They get an erotic giddiness when they sense an opportunity to control the comings and goings and doings of an entire people. This will flounder and fail like the previous bout of authoritarianism.
It’s a twisting in the wind in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. No collection of commissars can control the lives of tens of thousands of people, let alone millions. Somebody will deviate despite their newly minted dictum and out goes the virus. You can “bend the curve” in the short run as you extend the “curve” into the long and longer run … or until the magical elixir of a vaccine is concocted which, as in most viral vaccines, won’t be a silver bullet. Or, better yet for our power-hungry ninnies, they experience the joy of a Biden victory speech on November 4.
The prospect of a vaccine pushes out the government-manufactured misery for at least the next several months, long enough for a depressed electorate to accede to AOC-inspired governance. Biden will be irrelevant since he is nothing but a floating piece of wood in a rampaging river.
We must get away from the strangulation and do what we were getting around to doing as we were opening up: therapies for the infected and isolation for the vulnerable. The development of natural immunities is the only path to health, as opposed to the slow suffocation of life and livelihoods by government dictats leading us into the world of decay and despair for as far as the eye can see.
Stop the madness. If deep blue districts want to smother their societies, those disinclined to that existence should … Move! No society can thrive with an off-and-on switch in the hands of newly empowered despots.
RogerG