“(They) care little for our freedom, they care little for our aspirations and little for our happiness. No more! We can’t let it happen going forward,” Governor Ron DeSantis said recently at the American Legislative Exchange Council meeting in Utah. This is how he characterized “Faucism.” He boasted about Florida’s efforts to reject mask mandates, vaccine passports, and allow schools to reopen without masks. He did not boast about Florida’s highest COVID infection and positivity rates in the nation.
DeSantis is commonly referred to as #DeathSantis on Twitter as he climbs over the bodies of Floridian citizens and the overwhelmed state’s health care systems in his blind ambition to be the Republican candidate for President in 2024. He, along with other populist, Trump Mini-Me Governors, have taken the position that some basic precautions, such as returning to wearing masks, violate the “freedom” of their citizens to make a choice, not to mention getting the vaccination itself.
This absurdity has even embraced the distorted logic that we, the responsible vaccinated, are to blame for “disrespecting” the unvaccinated.
Can it be more than three months that I wrote a guest column on this very topic for our local Palm Beach Post? And it didn’t change the world?
I’m no longer merely disrespecting “leaders” such as DeathSantis, but I am furious at him and other acolytes of the Trumpian vision, a transactional world where plutocrats can tap into populist sentiment and use it for their own benefit and not for the greater good.
I make the point in my article but I will reiterate it. One of the roles of government is to protect the public health. It took years of battling over the “rights” of smokers to light up anywhere they wanted until, finally, there was an acceptance of long-standing scientific evidence that second hand smoke kills. Imagine, public health laws went into effect to ban smoking in public places. The “freedom lovers” finally learned to comply. We don’t have the time to wait for them to comply with vaccinations and masking. Stay at home if you think your freedom transcends the greater good!
It is true that the CDC’s messaging over the pandemic has not been on the mark at times, but all along they warned that unless herd immunity was reached, we ALL would be at risk for the development of a variant that could overwhelm the defenses of even the vaccinated. Well, we are there. And where is the CDC’s message on booster shots which seem to be inevitable? The lack of transparency on the subject is distressing. Where is the data on the inevitable effectiveness waning of vaccination? It is known that this decline is more substantial among the elderly.
We personally have been impacted by the “freedom” exercised by the lemmings (I wholeheartedly disrespect them) who listen to FOX-made-up truths and friends like DeathSantis. We had planned a long delayed trip to visit friends and family (all vaccinated) in the northeast. We made all our bookings in May as things had improved substantially by then. We felt confident, finally liberated from quarantine prison. But as positivity rates rose to more than 20% here in Florida, and the culture wars over mask wearing and vaccinations raged, out of an abundance of caution we were forced to cancel those plans.
Perhaps younger people gathering in clubs, concerts, etc. don’t care whether they spend some time in the ER, but people our age have just so much time left and for us to be denied our “freedom” because of this culture and disinformation war is an injustice.
But the truly upsetting statistic is the large number of the US adult population – about 30% who say they’ll never get vaccinated (compare to 8% in Canada, a civilized country). Maybe deny them admittance to the ERs? Tough it out! Go to the Governor’s mansion?
This situation would be bad enough if we were talking about only the Delta variant and our poor response. But long term the Republicans are positioning themselves as the dystopian party of the minority who can still exercise control. Republican-dominated legislatures are passing laws to make it more difficult to vote and giving themselves the ability to override state election officials. They are in fact making it legitimate to “steal the vote.” Until now, it was merely their self-propagated myth.
