doubleplusundead

As with so many crises, the ‘rona has brought out both the best and the worst in people. But mostly the worst.

Like many others, I’m going a little stir-crazy under our “shelter in place” directive. Most of us understand that such directives are to a large extent necessary. But more than a few mayors and state governors have gotten carried away with their newfound emergency powers, and they’ve forgotten that they’re governing actual people. Ornery, independent, American people.

There’s a natural distribution to the level of inconvenience people are willing to put up with. Some will put up with virtually nothing. Most, it seems, will tolerate quite a bit of inconvenience… for a time. But every individual has their breaking point, and the longer the restrictions go on, the more people are going to be agitated. The less the impositions seem to have any rational basis, the less the people are going to tolerate much of anything. And then all hell will break loose.

The slow-roll of increasingly arbitrary guidance and restrictions has been most maddening.

Don’t wear a mask, it will only hurt. Wear a mask if you want. You should probably wear a mask. You must wear a mask in public in order to enter a store and buy anything.

Stay active, maybe go for a walk. But don’t go to a park. Or a beach. And maybe you can kayak in some states, but don’t go motorboating.

Liquor stores in PA were closed, but beer distributors are essential.

Stay in your Detroit-metro homes in the densely-populated hotspot, and don’t drive yourself out to your second home where you can safely hole-up for a while.

Lowe’s can stay open, but your locally-owned gardening center can’t. Or maybe you can go to a store that sells gardening supplies, but those seeds you wanted were roped off because the items are deemed “non-essential”.

In a moment of absolute absurdity in a universe where cancer biopsies are elective and therefore banned, Governor Whitmer defended the continued allowance of abortion services as “life sustaining”. Now, there’s a constitutional argument to be made about keeping abortion services available — it’s a constitutionally protected right that is time sensitive — but to be so tone deaf as to call abortion “life sustaining” is rather galling when, at least for a time, Michiganders were prevented from buying child car seats.

Accommodations must be made. Open the damned garden centers, and don’t rope anything off in a store that has so-far been deemed essential. Allow hairdressers and barbers to open by appointment only and with adequate sanitation efforts. Don’t make impossible demands of small businesses about open space in their employee break areas that aren’t exactly expandable at the government’s whim.
Governors and mayors are not going to be able to sustain adequate preventive measures if they act like petty dictators and deprive people of some modicum of normalcy. The longer the restrictions are in place, the more arbitrary the restrictions, and the more disruptive to normal life, the more turmoil governments are inviting for themselves. The natives are getting restless.