By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
About a week or so ago I quit wearing my face mask. The only reason I was wearing it before was because store owners, for fear of the county health gestapo, were not letting anyone in who was not wearing a mask over their mouth and nose. Walmart has a person at the door checking people, so I wear my mask into the store, but once I am a dozen or so paces inside, it comes off. At the grocery store they don’t even check anymore, and half of the employees are walking around without a mask, anyways.
Earlier today, while in the store, a woman shouted at me, “It’s people like you who are killing people!”
I grinned, and said, “Over a virus that nearly all patients are asymptomatic regarding? That has a mortality rate lower than your chance of being struck by lightning? By killing the economy, it is people like you who are killing people.”
She turned and walked away without a response before I finished the final sentence.
While I was checking my items at the self-check a man tapped me on the shoulder. “May I see your shirt?” he asked. I turned and revealed it to him. It has Trump standing on a tank with the Red, White, and Blue in one hand, and what looks like it could be an AR-15 in the other. Fireworks are blasting in the background. “Cool,” he said, “that shirt is awesome.”
“So, you appreciate our President?” I asked.
“Very much so,” he responded.
“Then why,” I asked, “are you wearing a mask?”
Protests are beginning to emerge across the country, and the liberal left is concerned that we are putting liberty before safety.
Are you kidding me? What is wrong with people? Remember that famous quote that Benjamin Franklin may, or may not, have uttered?
“Those willing to give up liberty for safety deserve neither.”
We wonder, as we look back on history, how people were so easily manipulated into communism, Nazism, or Musolini’s Fascism. We are watching it in action, right now. Yet, less than a third of the American People support the protests demanding we reopen our economy, and less than a third of the country think that getting back to normalcy is a good move at this juncture.
Have you not been paying attention to the breaking stories?
The experts have been wrong. Shelter-in-place has done more damage than good. Anti-body studies are revealing that more people have caught the coronavirus than believed before, placing the asymptomatic percentage above 96%, and tossing the mortality rate below that of getting struck by lightning. The chances of you dying from COVID-19, based on the most conservative and liberty estimates of total cases, adding the information from the anti-body studies, is somewhere between 0.02% and 0.002%. It’s almost negligible. Yes, there is a virus out there. Yes, some people have died from it, though evidence is emerging that those numbers have been seriously altered and padded with false information. But, you have a greater chance of dying while driving your car, or coming down with the seasonal flu, than dying from COVID-19. There is nothing to be afraid of. They want you afraid so that they can control you. It’s historical tyranny all over again, and we are falling for it.
Yet, people are screaming at me for not wearing a mask. People are complaining that some conservatives want to get our economy grooving again. MSNBC reporters are critical that we are placing so much importance on liberty, and are calling for us to be lemmings to the government.
Let’s see how great government works.
Due to the coronavirus the toll booth at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is currently unmanned, and so the sign says “watch your mail for toll.” I hear the Golden Gate Bridge has the same thing going on.
I never received my bill for the $6.00 toll. When I called, they want me to pay a late fee for a toll that I never got billed for, and was unable to pay for at the booth.
My wife is getting unemployment insurance after her employer furloughed her for a couple months. She went back to work last Monday. It took six weeks for her money to come to her in the form of a debit card. It arrived in the mail a week ago on Saturday afternoon, two days before she went back to work. Because the money is in a card, there are some bills we can’t pay with it, so we need to get the money out of the EDD card and into our checking account. However, the credit union has reduced its hours, and is closed by the time she gets off of work. On Saturdays the credit union lobby is closed, but they have the vacuum tube teller out back available. So, a week after getting the card, we went to the credit union to get the money out of the EDD card. Except, they won’t do it through the outside vacuum tube teller, you have to come into the branch. “But the lobby is closed,” we said. “So, you have to come during the week.”
You know, while she’s at work?
Trying to save paper the government has given us money on a debit card that we pretty much can’t use for anything other than groceries.
So, we got online to look at our options and one page online said we could make the transfer into our checking on the EDD website. Great, we thought. Then when we tried, we got an error window that read, “Unable to perform transaction, please call customer service.” So we called, and the lady said, “we can’t do that over the phone, but you can on our website.”
Meanwhile, I filed an intent to file with the Veteran’s Administration. Because of the coronavirus, I have not been able to get a lot of the appointments I’ve been wanting to get to plead my case with a panel. I have a year from the filing of my intent to file but it looks like, because of the coronavirus, and the closure of most VA offices during the “pandemic”, that I will not be able to meet the one year deadline. VA’s response? “Then you will have to start all over again once the deadline passes.”
This is the government that people on the left want you to trust. This is the government the people on the left wants running our health care, and apparently, running our lives when you consider what we’ve seen during this virus.”
Is that what we really want? Do we really want to give government bureaucracy that kind of responsibility when it can’t even get unemployment insurance, taking care of our military veterans, or a bridge toll right?
Stop being mindless lemmings, take off the masks, and let’s get back to work.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary