The Continuing Political Piñata of the Pandemic

 

It was one of my better Op-eds, “Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All (August, 2021)

 

The impetus for writing it almost exactly two years ago was DeSantis’ response to Covid at the time.  It was when he retreated from his original response (which was tempered by some sobering data), and he went rogue for political reasons turning Dr. Fauci into the enemy of the “freedom loving” people of Florida.

 

I walk into restaurants, theaters, or just down the street now and wonder, was it all just a bad dream?  Not really, the dream has morphed into yet another bad dream.  Maybe a worse one?

 

We now have more reliable data, but with the engine of conspiracy theories, abetted by social networking, it filters into the self-serving grab for political power, and we fail to learn from experience. The anti-intellectual vein of the American psyche goes deep, and populists very effectively tap into that.

 

One only has to read the July 22 New York Times article The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis's Vaccine Turnabout, and then the lead editorial in the July 26 Wall Street Journal, The Real DeSantis COVIDRecord

 

Nowadays, an alternative reality is easy to “prove” and the WSJ does a pretty good job at that.  I’m not going to dissect the two, but my article from two years ago makes some of the same points as the NYT.

 

I will however quote the concluding paragraph of the WSJ article as it is so emblematic of how we can choose to look at this horrible episode in American history: “The lockdown damage continues, but progressives can’t admit they were wrong.  Nor can Mr. Trump.  So they are trying to take down Mr. DeSantis for being right.”

 

There was no “right” or “wrong” when we went through the dark Covid tunnel.  There was scientific advice about responding to the rapidly moving target of the pandemic, and that advice was based on informed experience. However, I don’t recall anyone claiming that it was a hard and fast “truth.” It was thought to be the best advice at the time.  Who was closer to the “truth”, Dr. Fauci or Dr. MyPillowGuy?

 

Trump’s “Evita moment,” ripping off his mask, after climbing the steps to the White House balcony (gasping for air), following his Covid treatment at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was clearly a high point of his political narcissism.  Look at me!  Look at me! Mr. Tough Guy!  But he received the experimental monoclonal antibody treatment not available to most of his fellow Americans who were dying from Covid.  He did not opt for the "miracle cures" he advocated (and probably killed some of his cult supplicants) such as hydroxychloroquine or injecting disinfectants.  No, he listened to health experts.

 

So would have DeSantis with his own life on the line. Instead, he surrounded himself with hand-picked health advisors who supported his views, all calculated to put him in the White House in 2024.  Lots of luck with that Governor; you didn’t count on the increasing popularity of your indicted adversary.  Trump or DeSantis: demagoguery is their commonality.

Whose Freedom is it Anyway?

 

I originally wrote this a few weeks ago for the Palm Beach Post as an Opinion Piece.  The paper published others of mine before, but they chose not to in this case.  Perhaps it is because of the ennui of thoughts and prayers on the subject.

 

Therefore I publish it here as the dreaded date of July 1 approaches, when Florida House Bill (HB) 543 goes into effect. This was advocated by the Republican majority and Governor DeSantis, further expanding the 2^nd amendment to allow permit-less carry of weapons in Florida.

 

It will lead to more gun deaths in the state.  I’ve expressed my views on the subject of gun control numerous times in this space and consider this a summation and further expansion. 

 

The very preamble to the Constitution states it was to “insure domestic tranquility.” The proliferation of modern weaponry instead has facilitated a form of domestic dread.

 

Whose Freedom is it Anyway?

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address articulated four fundamental human rights that should be universally protected.

 

    Freedom of Speech

    Freedom of Worship

    Freedom from Want

    Freedom from Fear

 

In 1943 Norman Rockwell immortalized those Freedoms in paintings which were reproduced in “The Saturday Evening Post.” We saw the originals when visiting the New York Historical Museum in 2018

 

The painting “Freedom from Fear” depicts two children safely sleeping in their beds as their parents look on, the wife tucking them in, and the husband holding a newspaper which partially reveals a headline about the Blitz Bombings in London. 

 

That primary freedom we all want for ourselves and especially for our children, and our grandchildren, has mutated into the “freedom” to own and even carry military style weapons.  We now have two “competing” freedoms and a culture that celebrates weapons.

 

In Texas the sound of gunfire, just for the “fun” is so pervasive it is accepted as the norm in rural areas.  The recent Texas Mall shooting was the 199th Mass shooting of this year in the United States.   Next month it will be lawful to carry a concealed weapon in Florida, without a permit and without training.  Expect more gun violence here.

 

This is not the first time that we’ve had “freedoms” square off against one another.

 

At one time smoking was the accepted norm. It was part of our culture, as firmly entrenched as guns are today.  It took decades to remove the Marlboro Man from the popular American Mind.  The tobacco industry’s relentless ads subliminally communicated tough American independence.  Science proved that the ubiquity of 2^nd hand smoke has a detrimental impact on non-smokers. Living in a smoke free environment transcends the freedom of smokers to deny that fundamental right.  Laws were finally changed.  

 

 

Similarly, we have a gun culture representing so called American independence.  Some of our elected representatives even “celebrate” that “freedom” with social network pictures of themselves posing with weapons of war, even with their young children.  This form of indoctrination is not much different than the wide-spread smoking advertising which permeated the media of the past.  We genuflected to the tobacco industry as we now do to the NRA.

 

The time has come for our representatives to recognize that their constituents’ freedom to live in relative safety transcends the rights of gun owners to embrace AR-15s and to legislate against the deadly mixture of “stand your ground” and “permit-less carry” laws.  Recently we’ve seen anecdotal evidence of the consequences of the former, innocent people being shot because they mistakenly rang a doorbell or drove into the wrong driveway.  The gun owner simply felt “threatened.”

 

Furthermore, “permit-less carry” puts impossible demands on our police who now may have to go into a public place where a shot has been fired and suddenly scores of untrained citizens are there with their guns drawn.

 

The widespread carrying of guns simply leads to more deadly gun consequences.  The United States has more guns than citizens; it also has an exponentially higher rate of gun deaths and accidents.  It is a statistical inevitability.

 

One of the standard arguments against doing anything, even by those who agree that something must be done, is that there are so many weapons “out there” it is hopeless.  In the early 1980s we also thought that regulating smoking was hopeless.  It took years, but a civilized solution finally prevailed.

 

It has to start somewhere, sometime.  We need to change the gun culture; our representatives have to either agree or be voted out.  Weapons of war need to be outlawed. 

 

As in New Zealand, Congress needs to provide meaningful dollars for an amnesty period for turning in such weapons of war, paying fair market price for them.  After that period, anyone who is discovered with one (no door-to-door seizures, another fabricated action gun-mongers caution) would be subject to legal recourse.

 

Weapons would have to be registered, just like motor vehicles (the unregulated use of which would make them even be more dangerous).  As with automobiles, those with more than a certain number would be considered a dealer and subjected to another level of registration and scrutiny.

 

“Stand your ground” “permit-less carry” laws must be changed. The freedom to live in relative safety must prevail over the freedom to own (and carry) military style weapons

 

“Freedom” for the Few at the Expense of All

 “(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.