As I write, the end of the world draws ever nearer. Shelby County now has one confirmed case of WuFlu for every 1,100 people. My odds of encountering someone through random sampling is approaching one in a thousand. For comparison, last year our county had ten times as many people injured in car crashes as we currently have carrying WuFlu. I’m almost afraid to get out of bed in the morning and drive to a job.
The news media are in high carnival these days. They haven’t had so much fun since the PTL Club fiasco in 1987. Every increased number, every young person whose death can be (deceitfully) connected to the virus, every photograph of somebody wearing a hazmat suit sends a shiver of delight through their souls. They put on their PPE and give their alarming reports while their cameraman stands there dressed normally and dutifully recording the charade. The old formula in news reporting is “If it bleeds, it leads,” meaning that such stories must be put first in the program or the headlines because that’s what customers want to hear about. It’s basic merchandising and I wouldn’t object to it if it weren’t deceiving the community into a panic.
But it is.
I grieve to see a whole city stampeded into blindly following and swallowing what they are drenched with 24/7 from the media.
I see people in their own cars with the windows rolled up, wearing masks. Don’t ask them why. They haven’t stopped to think that the only air they’re breathing is their own.
Where’s the toilet paper going? Kruger, a manufacturing plant up toward Frayser (just north of Harbor Town) turns out over one million rolls of toilet paper per day. Why is it hard to locate any in a store? Because people believe the sky is falling.
You can go to the store. What kind of quarantine is that? If somebody were quarantined for TB or cholera in the old days, could he go to the store? Of course not! You can go to the store, but you can’t go to your friend’s house for coffee. Presumably if you buy something at your friend’s house, you’re okay.
You can’t go to work unless, like me, you’re “essential.” Sit quietly and obey. I think that Dilbert’s Scott Adams says it well:
While the media whip this frenzy up, how’s their income? Certainly the corporation is selling more advertising since they’re offering the buyers more eyeballs. But notice also that the reporters aren’t missing any paychecks. They’re having fun. They get to lounge around, peck on their laptops, complain about Trump, and draw their salaries with no interruption.
Meanwhile these policies of locking down healthy people are wreaking financial ruin like a locust plague. This is when my blood starts to boil. I grew up in an unhappy home. My parents quarreled a lot and it affected me deeply. Do you know the #1 cause of marital discord? It isn’t sex, it’s money problems. We had them. I could write a book, so please forgive me for omitting the endless details. But I watched that man and woman struggle to make it through life. My father was a carpenter and I went to work with him innumerable times from before I can even remember. I watched him work to exhaustion, drag himself home, knock the sawdust out of his pants cuffs, hang up his overalls, go in to eat a very meager supper, and then get up before the sun to do it all again the next day. I remember the one day when he was too sick with a cold to go to work. I was very young, but I remember how strange it was to see him in bed, not going to work. It only happened once. All the other times he was sick, he went to work anyway.
Daddy used to say that he never joined a union because he was afraid that he might have to go on strike one day, and he couldn’t afford not to work.
Such people as he was are being sidelined by this tyranny. Our rulers should be making every effort to structure the needed precautions in a way that balances the interest in public heath with the rights of free men and the need to work.
