Everybody must have bought all the toilet paper they needed
because now grocery stores have toilet paper. I am not so sure if the food
supply is adequate because the hoarders stopped panic buying but the shelves still
look empty at my local grocery chain.
The draconian social distancing rules have added more lines,
arrows, policing, one entry and one exit only, 50 plus lines of people outside
Costco and Wegman, waiting to get into the grocery store to buy their weekly
necessities. Before this opportunistic viral
plandemic, most grocery
stores stocked three days’ worth of groceries, now it looks more like a couple
of hours’ worth.
The progressive population around me still wears N-95 masks for
walks in the woods and give the rest of us dirty looks for NOT wearing facial
masks. We are there to get fresh air, not to catch viruses which are abundant in
nature and have always been. I am not so sure THIS virus even exists in nature.
Stores are still closed for the good of the fearful and the
moronic inhabitants of northern Virginia who don’t seem to listen or behave
well, the governor and other local powers that be told us, we keep having cases
of new infections among the illegal construction workers who don’t care about
viruses, they just want to feed their large families and work in close proximity
to each other, building more townhomes and apartments for the Democrats
flooding the area.
Since we have not declined our infected numbers, as
prescribed by the doctor-in-chief, Fauci, the governor was petitioned by the
third layer of government, the local ones, to extend our quarantine for the
healthy indefinitely.
The street are completely dead and silent, save for the wild
animals coming out of the woods in the absence of humans, looking for food, and
crossing the streets in the middle of day and walking behind our homes –
coyotes, foxes, deer, racoons, and the ever-present squirrels which have
multiplied since the lockdown weeks ago – nobody drives much to kill them
accidentally.
The cops are everywhere, bored but ever-vigilant for the few
unlucky drivers who venture out to essential stores such as grocery, pharmacy,
Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Office Depot, liquor store, the legal marijuana
shop, and who happen to speed on an otherwise empty highway.
On weekends, when the traffic picks up a bit, it is obvious
that people have forgotten how to drive properly during their nine weeks of
forced quarantine for the healthy. They look tired, harassed, old, and like woolly
mammoths with unkept hair of all colors flying in the wind like SOS banners.
The parks are still closed but people are inventive – they park
on the side of the highway and enter the parks on foot or pretend to go fishing
with their children. To be sure to not be stopped, they all wear facial masks,
some of them professional grade for good measure.
The gas stations seem deserted because nobody has anywhere
to go much but gas prices remained steady at $1.89/gallon.
People give themselves haircuts or learn to wear caps and
hats again with their favorite team that is no longer allowed to practice or
play.
High school and college graduates’ families have made
makeshift podiums in their front yards to make-believe that their graduating
children will have a memorable experience – Covid-19 Lockdown Graduation 2020.
After having cleaned their homes to a sparkling shine and
planted all the flowers allowed because vegetable seeds are forbidden in some
states or cannot be found, people stay on social media too long, desperate for
human contact, especially on Facebook but are angry because they are being put
in Facebook jail for their opinions even though we have a constitutional right
to free speech.
Facebook hired censors to shadow-ban us and to factcheck our
thinking and our opinions against such vaunted leftist opinions from media such
as USA Today, Yahoo News, Washington Post, Huffington Post, New York Times, etc.
We are allowed medical Zoom conferences with our doctors who
hide behind their computer screens at home instead of practicing medicine in
their offices and touching patients they are supposed to help.
Pharmacists yell at customers who dare come too close for
comfort even though they are now hiding behind six feet of space, masks, a
counter, and tall Plexiglas for their protection from the unwashed and
contagious masses.
The banks are also closed for our protection but it does not
matter because, after Nancy Pelosi passes another $3 trillion stimulus package to
pay their crony capitalists to remain in business and the ever-climbing
unemployed to stay home and not ever work, your money will be worthless against
rising prices deriving from the upcoming galloping Weimar Republic-style
inflation.
We are thankful that we still have trash pickup as we
generate tons of garbage from staying home. The mail runs much earlier than
usual because there is not much correspondence, bills to pay, or ads as stores
have remained closed for at least two months and are not planning on opening
soon, many having declared bankruptcy. But Amazon, FedEx, and UPS are busy
delivering groceries to neighbors and whatever else they shopped for.
Mountains of cardboard boxes are waiting on
the curb to be picked up by recyclers.
Some have asked me recently if this reminds me of living
under communism. The answer is yes and no. The lockdown seems like prison, but
it is a gilded prison by comparison as we have all the luxuries of western wealth
and civilization that we did not have under communism. Deliveries of goods,
food, and prepared food did not exist then.
The censorship of speech, assembly, religion, is fast
developing into a much stronger censorship than we had under communism and it
is more insidious as today’s technology makes spying on people so much easier
and cheaper.
The Democrat Party has turned into the Socialists and Communists
we feared, yielding a lot of power over our lives.
Our President today has been neutered quite effectively for
the “collective good.” The communist dictator we suffered under yielded
absolute power.
There are isolated cases, for now, of people violating lockdown
orders, and paying fines and going to jail, but I am not sure communists have
released hard-core criminals from jail for their own health. That is something
entirely different that no communist regimes have engaged in. Many were sent to
gulags for their political leanings, speech, associations, and thought. For
now, we are just censored in the U.S.
Constitutional rights here have been suspended just like
they were under communism. They were spelled out on paper but the Communist
Party, like the Democrats, did whatever they wanted with their citizens who
were locked down between borders and inside their homes.
A semblance of healthcare was provided under communism, best
for the elites, like today. We did not have virtual conferencing and virtual
doctors then, hospitals were not closed for lack of patients, we just did not
have many hospitals or drugs to treat the sick. Today, people are scared to go
to hospitals and their doctor’s offices are closed. You must take your own
temperature and blood pressure.
How close are we to communism? In some ways we are quite
close, in others, we still have a bit to go. But, at the rapid rate of freedoms
lost, it will not be long before we live under a totalitarian regime in the
U.S. as well. I just hope that the food and drug shortages to come will not be
as severe as I have experienced in my first twenty years of life under
communism.
From our vantage point, although in the grand scheme of
things, it does matter where this not-found-in-nature Covid-19 virus has
originated, like the Roman soldiers, who only cared abut the pebble in their shoes,
the average American wants to live in a free and dignified way. Yet, the more
we ask for freedoms we have lost, the more we are ignored and hear the chains
rattle.