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Hard lockdown fell at twelve hours’ notice two-and-a-half months ago. The initial lockdown term was four weeks.
Air tickets collapsed, the airport along with them. State borders closed. Jobs dissolved. Evening-to-morning curfews were imposed. Travel beyond a three-mile limit was forbidden. Protests banned. To post a complaint on social media was deemed criminal incitement. If your local supermarket didn’t sell it, you did without it. The postal system crashed. Welcome to the world’s most locked-down city.
The polls were seventy percent behind Governor Bradley Jones. Polls tell what they ask. You can never really know what voters believe from reading the poll results. But I can say with certainty that I backed the governor.
When the pandemic was declared, we feared the worst - loved ones dying in our arms, people dead in the streets, being dragged from family homes to quarantine centers. We feared food shortages. The collapse of the electricity grid. People emptied garden centers of vegetable seeds. They bought guns. My wife Judy and I talked about buying oxygen bottles.
We couldn’t believe that this devastation would befall us. But that’s another way of saying we feared it anyway.
What we feared never came. Bradley Jones’s rules saved us.
Democracies around the world have their flavors. There are revolutionary ones, mercantile ones, hierarchical, procedural, multilingual ones, and socially astute ones.
Mine’s an authoritarian democracy. I vote for it; I own it.
Governor Bradley Jones’s tough hand will deliver us from the coronavirus.
We’re on a dark ride back to the light, where we belong.
Like Bradley Jones said, “Lives matter, rights don’t.”
We’re at war with an invisible, snot loving enemy. A slime ball, a bug.
Lives matter, rights don’t.
People might not like to hear this. But it is what it is.
