I’m fully aware that lots of people have bigger problems due to the current political lockdown. If you’re one of the suffering, you have my outraged sympathies. I’m not in a league with the impoverished, the busted, the ones in dire need of “elective” health care they’ve been forbidden to get, or the about-to-go-bankrupt entrepreneurs. <\/p>\n
But I reserve the right to be ticked off at the small stuff that keeps getting shoveled daily into all our faces and I’m presently irked because I can’t get away from the crazy.<\/p>\n
This is a small town. Other than the occasional village idiot (our best died several years ago during one of his stints in the state mental hospital and the current crop barely makes the grade), a meth rage now and then, or the rare robbery-murder that the police invariably mistake for natural causes it’s generally more sane than cities or anything that oozes out of cities.<\/p>\n
But from political panic-demic, no corner of the world is safe.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
Our beloved fish & chip wagon opened for the season last week, a mere five weeks later than normal. It’s take-out only and therefore legal, but the owner was taking a wait-and-see attitude before committing her money and her skills to opening.<\/p>\n
But open she did, during a brief spate of glorious weather. And loyal customers flocked to enjoy.<\/p>\n
Next to the wagon is a football-sized field with six picnic tables scattered — widely, widely scattered — over it. You could sit at any of those tables and devour your your battered cod, shrimp, oysters, and fresh-cut fries without ever breathing the same air as another human being. Heck, the tables are so far apart you couldn’t even hear<\/em> other people (unless said people are screaming children, who can be heard on the far side of the moon).<\/p>\n And people did sit, did enjoy. So happily.<\/p>\n The other day I drove by and every one of those “socially distanced” tables was festooned with forbidding yellow tape. The chip shop owner and her diktat-defying customers had been put on notice. Authoritah had spoken. Sitting down in the sunshine within 50 yards of a food truck is Bad For Your Health.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Between that and the other near-daily decrees our power-mad governator is dreaming up, I came home in yet another grouchy mood.<\/p>\n Rather than using any convenient politician for target practice (nerf guns only, of course), I decided to rub out a household stain that’s been refusing for years to go away. I fetched some Bar Keepers Friend and threw myself into domestic attack mode.<\/p>\n An hour later, the stain was gone. Two days later I’d deep-cleaned 10 feet of countertop, removed five feet of old caulk, applied new caulk, re-textured a bad wall, applied three coats of paint, scrubbed everything that lives on the counter, threw out everything that no longer deserves to live on the counter, disinfected the microwave, and applied four different cleansers to the stovetop.<\/p>\n Spring cleaning is good therapy.<\/p>\n Besides, as soon as the weather’s pleasant again, customers will cheerfully be sitting on the grass between the picnic tables. And if that’s merely a tiny, insignificant act of resistance, at least it’s something.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n I stress again that I’m not personally hurting from the lockdown (yet; misery will come to us all in the form of hyperinflation and depression). I also know I can’t claim any great, righteous acts of resistance — just the petty, everyday acts that increasingly rise among the populace after two freakin’ ridiculous, irrecoverable, catastrophic, unjust months<\/em> of punishment with no end in sight directed at the working and small-business classes, including my friends, my town, and our local shops.<\/p>\n Over that, I remain perpetually pissed and filled with mourning for the future.<\/p>\n BUT. Yes the resistance is growing. And is it any surprise? <\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Peggy Noonan has a strong column in the WSJ about those who are pushing back again the crazy idea of locking everything down until the world is “safe.”<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate. They haven\u2019t had familial or economic ease. No one sent them to Yale. They often come from considerable family dysfunction. This has left them tougher or harder, you choose the word.<\/p>\n They\u2019re more fatalistic about life because life has taught them to be fatalistic. And they look at these scientists and reporters making their warnings about how tough it\u2019s going to be if we lift shutdowns and they don\u2019t think, \u201cOh what informed, caring observers.\u201d They think, \u201cYou have no idea what tough is. You don\u2019t know what painful is.\u201d And if you don\u2019t know, why should you have so much say?<\/p>\n The overclass says, \u201cWait three months before we\u2019re safe.\u201d They reply, \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as safe.\u201d<\/p>\n Something else is true about those pushing back. They live life closer to the ground and pick up other damage. Everyone knows the societal costs in the abstract\u2014\u201cdomestic violence,\u201d \u201cchild abuse.\u201d . . . .<\/p>\n Meanwhile some governors are playing into every stereotype of \u201cthe overclass.\u201d On Tuesday Pennsylvania\u2019s Tom Wolf said in a press briefing that those pushing against the shutdown are cowards. … Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called anti-lockdown demonstrations \u201cracist and misogynistic.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can read it all here<\/a> without the sad nuisance of the WSJ’s paywall. (Sorry, WSJ; you deserve your income, but that article is courage and inspiration for the kind of people who’ll never subscribe to a Wall Street publication as long as they live, and couldn’t right now even if they still had jobs that enabled them to.)<\/p>\n Noonan is talking more about the polite public protestors and the politicians mercifully getting out of We the People’s way. But her words apply to the less polite defiant ones, as well. <\/p>\n Here’s the latest new authority granted to Whitmer<\/a>, BTW. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n And now we’re also observing the long-known, but previously theoretical perils of having a state-licensed business. Obey or we’ll kill your business, and perhaps kill you, too if you object too forcefully.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n The coming years may be dark, indeed<\/a>. Big Brother surely considers this the opportunity of his lifetime<\/a>. <\/p>\n Still, there’s good news. And it grows. Several of these links are H\/T ComradeX.<\/p>\n And on that cheery note, I’ll leave you. <\/p>\n I hope you (and I) can go through the rest of the weekend without any heavy-handed reminders that we live in a world gone mad under the “leadership” of frauds, cowards, economic ignorami, Social Justice Pecksniffs, safe-space dwellers, and the despots who love them all. Welcome to the Weimar Republic people!<\/p>\n But also welcome to the resistance of the small and weak, but not so meek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m fully aware that lots of people have bigger problems due to the current political lockdown. If you’re one of the suffering, you have my outraged sympathies. I’m not in a league with the impoverished, the busted, the ones in dire need of “elective” health care they’ve been forbidden to get, or the about-to-go-bankrupt entrepreneurs. But I reserve the right to be ticked off at the small stuff that keeps getting shoveled daily into all our faces and I’m presently irked because I can’t get away from the crazy. This is a small town. Other than the occasional village idiot…<\/p>\n\n