By DWIGHT HOBBES
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz extended the corona stay-at-home order through May 18th. While not nearly long enough, it was a welcome reprieve from the threat of people being let loose on the street to keep spreading this catastrophic contagion.
This is no thanks to hundreds who demonstrated in mid-April outside Walz”™s home as the Liberate Minnesota Movement, demanding he lift the order. The rationale: it”™s costing the economy. Yes, businesses have faltered, even closed and people are laid off, fired. Hence, you had indignant folk hollering slogans like “We can sue! We can revolt over this tyrant. He is supposed to be working for us” and organizer Michelle Even telling Fox News, “We want our rights restored.”
Twin Cities”™ activist, Michelle Gross, took a different take, telling “the alley” newspaper, “Forcing communities and businesses to reopen prematurely harms workers. We are seeing this now with the order to reopen meat packing plants. People will be forced to choose between risk and income because anyone who refuses to go back to work at dangerous work sites will lose their unemployment.”
Protesters raising hell over lost income need a reality check. I saw the television coverage and it was a horde of white folk – few wearing masks, none doing social distancing – who look like they never missed a meal a day in their lives. They can just suck it up, make do with less and join the rest of us who”™ve busted our asses to keep food on the table all our lives. Bottom line, what good does it do to safeguard your income if you risk not living long enough to do a damned with it except afford a good funeral?
As could be counted on, Trump the Chump, who”™s downplayed the crisis and dodged accountability from day one, championed this willfully ignorant lunacy. Well, on May 4, U.S. News & World Report ran the headline “Reopening the Economy Would Add 233,000 Deaths by July but Save Millions of Jobs. In the story, “The number of Americans expected to die from the corona virus by the end of June will nearly double White House estimates circulated as recently as this week for total deaths through the course of the entire outbreak, according to [an] analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model.” Talk about do the math.
On May 12, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions that reopening states too soon invites disaster, stating “Problems will escalate if states do not have the hospital capacity to treat patients and to isolate people exposed to the virus.”
Those protesters think there”™s a problem now? God help us all if they get their way.
