Paternalistic Government
Last week, the president addressed the nation, insisting that everyone continue to wear masks and rush out to get a COVID shot…and if and only if we all did that…then perhaps we could get together in small groups at home in time for Independence Day.
Talk about being out of touch with the citizens, their needs, and frankly, with the pandemic altogether.
We are just short of the one year mark where we were asked to shut everything down for 15 days. We did what we were told. We continued to do what we were told when that 15 days turned into 15 weeks, and then longer.
I hate to undermine the White House by presenting facts, but vast areas of this country are already well ahead of the doom and gloom being presented as national reality. Schools are open, people are gathering, and the fallacy of mask-wearing is being exposed. But in the power centers of national government, there is the continued sense that what is happening in few big cities and population areas is what’s happening elsewhere. And a continued desire to seize on that opportunity to hold on to emergency powers and dictate what citizens do.
The true irony is that the president said maybe by Independence Day, the government would allow us to exercise limited freedom of assembly. The whole point of Independence Day is to celebrate escaping the rule of a harsh monarch. The similarities between what we broke away from then…and how Washington politicians are acting now…are not lost on citizens. The attitude that we all have to continue to hunker down, be scared, and watch our way of life slip away until D.C. tells us it’s OK to come out into the light is not only incorrect…it’s wrong in so many respects.
They keep saying to “trust the science”…which is unsettled. How about saying “trust the citizens”…because the true spirit of America has never been in question, and won’t be broken now.
