“ In this new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher or a sage. And if everybody is an expert, than nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.”
Charles P. Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
The Arkansas Legislature reached a new low, if that’s even possible, last week. I will try not to belabor the point overmuch. Last Spring, the Legislature passed Act 1002, which reserved the sole right to impose mandatory face coverings with itself. Not the Governor. Not the State Department of Health. Not with local school administrators on the ground.
Itself. The Legislature. The Governor, evidently reposing trust in the downward trend of COVID cases at that time, signed the damn thing into law.
Well guess what? Not only did COVID come back, but it came back packing a brand new variant which is even more spreadable than the earlier strain. As a result, hospitals throughout the South and Missouri (which is a lot crazier place than I ever gave it credit for being) are jam packed with COVID patients. If you plan to have a heart attack or fall off the roof while cleaning the gutters you might want to hold that thought. Not unless you don’t mind waking up in an ICU in Maine. Because there’s no room for you here.
And, the vast majority of these admissions are of people that were not vaccinated. Like over 90%. More on this later. But first, back to the Solons of Woodlane Avenue.
School starts in a week. Kids 12 and up can be vaccinated. But what about the little ones? How do we protect them? A mask or face covering mandate makes sense. But the locals can’t impose it due to Act 1002.
Governor Hutchinson called the Ledge back in special session in hopes of undoing this crisis-in-the-making that he helped create. After all, every credible medical expert in the known universe was calling for the reinstatement of the mask requirement in the classroom for the unvaccinated little children until we get over this spike.
The Ledge was presented with data from the CDC. The superintendent of a little district up in the country where school has already started testified that he has 800 people quarantined already in the second week of the semester. The second week!
Of course it did not matter. Emergency proclamations and Health Department directives represent “government overreach” in matters that should be left strictly up to parents who “know better” the needs of their children. Thus saith the pious adherents to “limited government.”
There’s an old saying that law enforcement largely depends on the cooperation of the citizens. As somebody once told me, all it takes is a hard core 25-30% of the population to screw everything up.
I believe that recent experience dictates that we can likewise apply this dictum to public health. There is a hard core group of people out there that refuse to get vaccinated or wear a mask. Well over 90% of the admissions due to COVID are unvaccinated patients. Something like 98% of the deaths are in that group. These are cold hard facts.
The response that I have seen from these folks to this data? Get a shot? Of course not. Close the borders.
The real cause of the spike according to them, or so I have read, is that about 7000 migrants/day (that is the number the talking points consistently bandy about) are flowing unchecked across our southern borders where they are allegedly neither tested or treated and are then “flown around” or “driven around” all over this great land of ours where they spread germs unchecked.
Now I believe that it is worth mentioning just for the sheer hell of it that none of this is true. As in factually correct. People are being apprehended at the border. They are being tested, treated and isolated before they can be admitted to go freely. Many are turned back.
And even if this were true (And trust me. It’s never good when the Judge says “Even assuming you’re correct.”) how in the Sam Hill do folks crossing the border in Texas and California translate to a spike in COVID cases in Marion, Arkansas? Here’s the answer. It doesn’t.
The medical experts point out a virtual one-to-one correlation between people who balk at simple public health measures and the recent spike. These people are the reason you might wake up in that ICU in Maine if your shotgun goes off while you are cleaning it.
But no. Who cares what the experts say? The unvaxxed are the victims here. Not the folks who complied with sensible public health directives in hopes of eating out again. Or going to the concert or the ballgame. Or safely sending their young children to school again.
No. They can talk to each other on social media. They can blame the immigrants, they can blame Joe Biden, they can blame the stolen election. They can tell each other that they are being scapegoated by the MSM. They can send money to the “My Pillow” guy. In the nut bar echo chamber where everybody’s a regular they can blame everybody but themselves for the fix their irresponsibility and narcissism has put the rest of the country.
Former Arkansas Surgeon General Joe Thompson (whose car I once wrecked but that’s another story) put it this way: “If the Legislature takes no action and allows the ban on mask mandates to remain in effect in all schools while the Delta variant rages in our communities, children will be unavoidably exposed to the virus, some will be hospitalized and likely some will die.”
Why listen to Joe Thompson? He’s just a physician and a former public health officer. In Idiot America he’s no more an expert than the guy on the Internet that will sell you hydro chloroquine. Or that preacher in Tennessee who won’t let you walk into the church house if you are wearing a mask.
Go online. Do your own research. Handle snakes while you are at it.
You have a right to your opinion and it is as good as anybody’s. Right?
Right?
Footnote: Last Friday the Circuit Court of Pulaski County, Arkansas issued a Preliminary Injunction against implementation and/or enforcement of Act 1002 pending further proceedings and Orders of the Court. We may safely assume there will be masks in the hallways when school cranks up on the 16th. At least for awhile.
