Sometimes it takes me a while to figure stuff out. At the very beginning of the current morass we are mired in, even as a conservative, I was willing to give the Executives at all levels — federal, state, and local — a little bit of wiggle room. After all, this China Virus thing was a bit different and I wasn’t the one sitting in the “Buck Stops Here” seat. I voted for my President and I voted (secondarily) for my Governor (who replaced the guy I actually voted for…long story). I’m not of the mind to second guess them for most of their decisions early on in this debacle.
Of late, I have come to a much less sanguine conclusion. I say this as an ardent Trump supporter. This lockdown is fundamentally immoral and has been from almost the very beginning. It took me a while to get to that place, but here I am, and here is why.
First of all, let’s address how the left views this. They have framed this as a choice between certain death or making money for greedy CEO’s. They promote the argument that the jobs we have taken from 30 million (and still counting!) Americans should be dismissed as “amoral dollars and cents.” Amoral? Please! How is a young couple working entry-level jobs to get their start in the workforce and to put together a few coins to start a family, amoral? How is a man working his keister off to start and run a family business, who gives people their first opportunity in the labor force, amoral? They aren’t. Period.
What is amoral, nay outright immoral, is arbitrarily deciding to deprive a certain class of American citizens of their fundamental right to feed their families. What could be more immoral than restricting the movements of American citizens who have committed no crime? Compounding said immorality, we did this based on little-to-no evidence that they posed any real danger to anyone but an extremely small segment of society. That segment could have been easily protected without trampling on the civil rights of the rest of our citizenry. This is the first time that I know of that we effectively quarantined American citizens whom we had no idea whether or not they were carriers of some disease.
We have driven and continue to drive the engine of our standard of living — small businesses — into bankruptcy and place most of their employees into penury. What is really sad, is that the people least able to weather such an economic storm are the ones most affected. People in more highly paid occupations, tend to be in jobs not as affected by social distancing measures as those at lower pay rates, who work in service industry jobs requiring in-person contact with other people. They are truly suffering. A paltry $1,200.00 check will do little to pay the rent and put food on the table, much less restore the dignity that having meaningful work and paying your way through life affords.
The folks who can least afford this paycheck interruption or worse, permanent loss of the jobs they formerly occupied, are the very ones who have been put out of work by this overreaction and disregard for American rights. By doing this, we have created two classes, haves and have nots, all by government fiat. Some of this might have been justifiable early on. Not so anymore. At this point, what every state Governor but one is doing, is flat out wrong—it’s immoral and needs to stop. Now.
Here are two of my related articles
Opinion: There Are NO Non-Essential Jobs
Your Property is YOUR Property
Here are two pieces written by fellow travelers
El Senor Dennis Santiago…new arrival to the Red State Front Page Team
And long time Red State Writer
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