Which “New Normal” do You Mean?
The good news is that most of us are headed back to work. Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many new things during quarantine to be sure about our new “normal”. We’ve seen citizens and politicians behave horribly. The new normal isn’t about wearing a surgical mask in public. I’m worried that our new normal is about accepting political domination.
Maybe we should accept social distancing for a few more months, but maybe not. A friend corrected me and said,
“Been there and had that. Now, I can’t get it and can’t spread it, so leave me the hell alone.”
My friend is correct. Social-distancing rules should not apply to him, as they should not apply to more and more of us each day. Is wearing a mask and social distancing something we do to appease paranoid people who are afraid of germs and want to control us with their fear? That isn’t healthy. Someone who suffers from mysophobia doesn’t need me to wear a mask; they need to see a psychiatrist. Crazy shouldn’t be the new normal.
I hope the new normal isn’t snitching on other families because they don’t cower in their homes. I hope the new normal isn’t making allegations against competing businesses or your employer. Sadly, we’ve seen the police shut down business at any time and for any reason while taking the owner’s business license. Where quarantine was once an excuse, it won’t be long until political payoffs become the underlying reason.
Been there. Seen that.
We’ve seen agents from Child Protective Services exceed their authority even before the outbreak of coronavirus. Now, CPS can take away your kids because you’re not schooling them “properly” or not wearing a mask and washing hands with the frequency the bureaucrat likes. Are you wealthy enough to protect your family from the state?
In case you think I’m joking, remember that a Texas judge put a business owner in jail because she wouldn’t say she was sorry for opening her business and putting her unemployed hairdressers back to work. Beyond a fine, the salon owner got seven days in jail because she wouldn’t bend a knee to the cops and judges.
I suspect that the judge’s behavior strikes you as tyrannical. The reason I think I’m not alone in being disgusted by the sentence is that the Go-Fund-Me account to pay the business owner’s 7-thousand dollar fine had 140 thousand dollars in donations. That says a lot of us don’t like that “new normal”. After she pays her employees, maybe the salon owner should use the extra money to run for public office.
The real casualty of the quarantine is in our diminished level of trust in public institutions.
After what we’ve seen, we can’t trust our politicians to be reasonable. We can’t trust police to show discretion, not after they arrested a state highway patrol officer for going to an empty park with his daughter. We saw police issue tickets after a husband and wife sat next to each other in public, or went on an “unnecessary” trip to get out of the house. We saw the police activate the beach patrol and motor boats to stop someone from swimming alone in the ocean.
That cure is worse than the disease. These public officials broke the public trust. They showed themselves to be bullies at best, and tyrants at worst.
You might say ‘we have to isolate to stay safe,’ to which I say ‘no.’ No, we don’t. We have to limit our social contacts only enough so our hospitals are not overwhelmed.. and not one bit more.
Any location where the respiratory treatment center in the hospital isn’t overloaded
has no justification for imposing a quarantine on healthy people. None.
There is no excuse for it. Some politicians, police chiefs, sheriffs and LEOs are hiding their lust for power behind a surgeon’s mask.
We can see them for what they are.
~_~_
I gave you 600 words. Please comment and leave me a few of your own. RM
Sources-
“https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-03/paddle-boarder-arrested-in-malibu-after-flouting-coronavirus-closures
“https://timesofsandiego.com/crime/2020/04/04/deputies-issue-citations-to-22-people-watching-sunset-at-beach-in-encinitas
“https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-officer-arrested-park-throwing-ball-daughter-due/story?id=70032966
“https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2020/05/06/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-immediate-release-jailed-dallas-salon-owner-shelley-luther/
“https://www.gofundme.com/f/shelley-luther-fund
SlowFacts 
You said it more completely and more eloquently than I could or have. I thank you sincerely.
Spence McMaster
Columbia, SC
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“The real casualty of the quarantine is in our diminished level of trust in public institutions.”
That’s a feature, not a bug.
We never could trust our public officials or the intuitions they occupy. Ever. Now that fact has been more clearly illustrated to more people. Maybe we can finally move toward less government and less control and more individuals deciding how to handle their own business.
The market is nothing more than a giant distributed processing network with each node (individuals) making decisions about the things that it has the most knowledge about and that affect it the most. There is no more successful or effective way to solve problems and take care of people and the freer the market the better it does. Hopefully more people see that now.
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Rob, my favorite quote from H. L. Mencken, was never more appropriate or timely than it is now.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”.
-H.L. Mencken
Here’s another quote that is even more apropos:
“We can contend with the evil that men do in the name of evil, but heaven protect us from what they do in the name of good”.
-Richard Boone, as Paladin, quoting from Erodius’ Second Essay; from the “Have Gun, Will Travel” episode “The Posse” (1960)
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Since the beginning I have repeated a couple of my own axioms: (1) when responding to a situation reach for the rapier not the 2×4; (2) only use as much as necessary but as little as possible.
Instead of these measured notions our government, at all levels (though Trump to his credit has dialed it down at the federal level) has found it hard not to bash us over the head at every opportunity. We know who these power-hungry, tinpot plutocrats are now and we won’t forget
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