The Man Behind The Curtain

There are currently a bunch of TV doctors and Talking Heads out there exhorting the masses to take back their freedom. Don't let yourself be fooled into staying inside and missing out on all that life has to offer. Don't let the government push you around. 

The masses, or what amounts to a mass when most of the country is listening to reason, are protesting these Draconian measures being handed down by governors and mayors. The ones that say that staying at home is the best way to slow the spread of the disease that has killed more than one hundred fifty thousand people. Forty thousand of them Americans. And those TV doctors and Talking Heads would like us to believe that those were the ones who were "on their last legs" anyway. 

And our "president" is Tweeting his encouragement of this insurrection. He sees this as "liberation." Liberation from reality? 

I think of America before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In September of 1939, a Gallup poll suggested that less than half of Americans wanted to see their country involved in a World War even as Germany threatened England and France. A month later, when Nazis stormed into Poland, that number went down still further. In May of 1940, only seven percent of Americans wanted to intercede as Hitler's armies marched across western Europe. In December of 1941, after Japan attacked our fleet in Hawaii, only seven percent opposed going to war against the Axis powers. 

Still seven percent didn't want to get involved. 

The number of protesters standing too close and insisting that they open their local Chick-Fil-A is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of seven percent. Most of us continue to shelter in place because it is the thing that keeps us from getting sick. And getting others sick. And dying. Those people on TV are telling us that it's our duty as Americans to speak out. Those people who are part of the propaganda arm of the government are telling the masses that they should exert their authority. Huddle together and yell and scream and cough on one another, and then claim that the death toll has been exaggerated. Or under reported or how more people die in boating accidents every year than this pandemic. 

This was no boating accident. 

First it came for the elderly, and I did not speak out 

Because I was not elderly.

Then it came for those with breathing ailments, and I did not speak out

Because I was not one with breathing ailments.

Then it came for the diabetics, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a diabetic.

Then it came for me

and there was no one left to speak for me.