Who the hell are these politicians to imperiously decide who’s “essential” and who’s not?
Non-essential, they hiss, pointing a finger at you. Non-essential!
If you’re non-essential, these tinpot dictators with their catastrophically wrong “models” tell you, stay home. Lose your job, your business, your life. What the hell do they care?
You’ll take it and you’ll like it! Nicht wahr? As certain Germans used to say. Isn’t that so? Jawohl!
They’ve got theirs, Jack. And it comes with State Police chauffeurs. They’re just trying to do the Reich, I mean right thing.
At long last, finally, working people are starting to push back at these damn-fool silver-spoon politicians who are gleefully destroying the economy for… what, exactly?
I saw a quote the other day from a woman with a “non-essential” small business:
“I’m not afraid of losing my life, I’m afraid of losing the life I built.”
Last week, there was a demonstration in Albany, as in so many other state capitals, by people who actually have, or had, real jobs, and who were demanding that this lockdown end before they are utterly ruined.
Gov. Andrew “Thanks Dad” Cuomo, of the insufferable Cuomo clan, was doing his daily 60 minutes of live-TV virtue signaling, and finally a reporter couldn’t take any more. She asked Junior Cuomo what he’d tell all his working-class constituents who used to have jobs.
“By the way,” Thanks Dad sniffed, now addressing his millions of soon-to-be destitute constituents, “if you want to work, go take the job as an essential worker. Do it tomorrow.”
Then there’s Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark. Earlier this month, he declared that henceforward, his city would be shut down on Mondays — for Be Still Mondays, as he called it, after “an old Negro spiritual.”
“We’re gonna shut the entire city down,” he said at his daily briefing, which they have all become totally addicted to. “If you’re not essential, if you’re not a cop, a fireman, or working in a hospital, we want you to stay home and we want all the stores to close. We want everything to close.”
Everything? I played this audio on my radio show, and I wondered, so does this mean that as far as the mayor is concerned, nobody who grows food — farmers — is essential? How about the truck drivers who deliver the food to Newark? Dentists? Pharmacists? People on assembly lines in factories?
One of my listeners texted me: “I work in a power plant. I make electricity. Am I ‘essential?’”
Only a handful of these fools seem capable of understanding that in a free economy, every enterprise is interconnected with everything else. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida finally said the other day: “I’m less concerned going forward about ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential.’
Let’s say you run, say, a guitar-repair shop. You employ guitar-repairers. Is your guitar-repair shop “essential” to your employees, who rely on it to put food on their tables? Your shop rents a storefront — does that make it essential to the strip-mall landlord, who has to make mortgage payments to the bank?
Are those payments the landlord makes … essential to the bank?
How come “non-essential” workers in the private sector are somehow less sympathetic to the media than government bureaucrats?
A while back the hacks on Beacon Hill even stopped using the word “non-essential” to describe all their cronies and relatives who get a paid day off every time there’s a dusting of snow. It was bad for their self-esteem apparently. The truly non-essential are now called “non-emergency.”
Every time there’s a federal “shutdown,” we are deluged with sob stories about $150,000-a-year bureaucrats living in the most affluent suburbs in America who are not being paid for a few days, even though everyone knows that they will soon be taken care of, after what amounts to a paid vacation.
But what about the 26 million Americans who’ve lost real jobs — not UMass or Massport and courthouse jobs? And by the way, all those vacationing hacks are still getting paid by weeping Gov. Charlie Parker, who doesn’t seem to give a damn about 600,000 newly laid off in Massachusetts.
Has it ever occurred to Tall Deval that those 600,000 unemployed were providing the tax revenue he needs to keep overpaying his tens of thousands of payroll patriots in their phony-baloney jobs?
I guess power really is the ultimate aphrodisiac, even if it’s only the power to destroy.
Most of the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) scoff at those who want this calamitous experiment in Orwellian control to end.
The protesters are called “virus deniers.” They care more about money than health. The Globe huffily attacks stores that remain open as “disobedient.” In Raleigh, cops with bullhorns tell protesters their First Amendment right are “non-essential.”
Randy Newman once wrote a song called, “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man.”
Very topical song right now, but the plea should be directed toward whatever power-crazed governor or mayor or (in Texas) county judge is trying to bankrupt you, or have you thrown in jail for surfing or having a yard sale or organizing a demonstration.
Take it away Randy:
“I know it may sound funny / But people everywhere are runnin’ out of money… We’ve taken all that you’ve been givin’ / It’s gettin’ hard to make a livin’… We ain’t askin’ you to love us / You may place yourself high above us….”
Mr. Clueless Governor, have pity on the working man.
