Listen to the rattles

OPINION

BY LEN CABRERA

It’s obvious that our elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats see themselves as our betters. In their minds, they are the noble herders of the mindless masses who are too stupid to make their own decisions. They rile us up with speculation and worst-case scenarios to convince us to surrender our freedoms. It’s time they stop giving orders and listen to their bosses, We the People.

Sadly, these politicians are partially correct. Government-run schools have produced generations of numerically-illiterate people who can easily be swayed into panic by complicit propagandists in the media. You’d think the streets of our cities looked like no man’s land during World War I. 

In reality, our politicians are destroying the economy, the constitution, and our freedom over an outbreak that likely wouldn’t be memorable if not for the overblown response. On the Diamond Princess, 83% of the people who were exposed to the coronavirus did not contract COVID-19. Of those who did, about 1.3% died from the disease–a similar number to the deaths in Florida, 18 of 1227, and the United States, 552 of 43,667 (dashboard numbers as of 8:29 p.m. on 3/23). So we’re looking at 1.3% dead among the 17% who contract COVID-19 (probably a high estimate, given the confined quarters on a ship). That’s only 0.2% of the population.

FDR said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but that’s not complete. Fear is inconvenient when irrational (and inconsiderate) consumers to buy all the toilet paper on the shelves, but that fear is disastrous when it enables politicians to take away our freedoms and destroy the economy and our way of life.

Our society will survive the coronavirus, but we may not survive the heavy-handed, one-size-fits-all, patronizing dictates from statist politicians, drunk on power, who forget that they’re supposed to represent the citizens, not rule them. 

One of the 27 specific grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence was: “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” These days, our politicians are destroying lives by edict, forcing businesses to close. Worse, some then try to claim ownership stakes as a condition to giving loans to the businesses they’ve destroyed.

Slimy federal politicians are using the “emergency” they’ve created in response to a bad cold to push every statist fantasy since Marx was mooching off the Engels’ family wealth: nationalizing industry, publishing corporate pay statistics, required early voting, same day voter registration, higher minimum wage, permanent paid leave, etc.

If they’d been any good at their jobs, we wouldn’t need any new legislation. We’ve had over 100 years since our last “racist” epidemic (Spanish flu in 1918). That’s plenty of time to pass legislation to deal with the possibility of such emergencies. The fact that they have to pass more legislation now demonstrates that they have been negligent and/or incompetent.

Maybe it’s time our new tyrants go study American history, especially how the Gadsden flag was created. They can hear the rattles. Let’s see how they’ll respond.

The best-case scenario is that 5 or 10 years from now, we will look back on 2020 like we currently look at Japanese internment during World War II–misguided government overreach that was supported by the courts. Unfortunately, history frequently shows that freedoms, once surrendered, are seldom regained.