Friday, April 17, 2020

Welcome Back to History America

 
Article by J. Christian Adams in "PJMedia":

Welcome back to history, America, it was wondering where you were.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended most everything we assumed about the future, including the assumption that the Drudge Report would forever be a grounded center-right news aggregator.

Of course, it is not just the United States where things have reverted to a mood from a few centuries ago.

In the town of Ragland, New Zealand, locals erected a sign at the town line telling outsiders to stay out and stop buying up all of the town’s flour. The good progressive government currently in power in New Zealand made sure the sign came down.

This story is repeating in one form or another all around the world. The progressive utopia of meatless meat, reusable shopping bags and a world without firearms has collapsed. Backyard gardens are in. Tapas is out.

In Ragland, instead of thinking globally and acting locally, locals decided to worry about locals.

You can’t buy seeds now either for those backyard gardens. Leading seed vendors are sold out of basics like lettuce and tomato seeds. Vermont has even banned seed sales as nonessential wherever they are on display in stores.

Vermont doesn’t get it yet either.

Americans are, for the first time since the Civil War, facing food supply disruptions. These aren’t war-rationing-style shortages, these are supply disruptions.

We didn’t expect the future to bring meat and toilet paper shortages.

Welcome to history, America. Civilization has always hung by a thread. The Founders of this country knew that, and that’s why they crafted a constitutional order best suited to nurture domestic tranquility and the general welfare.

It is also why they included a Second Amendment.

Perhaps we are appreciating in concrete terms the value of stable homes, industrious values, and faith. A nation that was abandoning God might reconsider.

Get your kids and grand-kids The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They had it worse than your kids do, at least for now. If you think Zoom school is bad, if you are growing weary of beans and rice, try heating your freezing house with twisted wheat and eating grain porridge for every meal.

This was what befell huge tracts of America just 140 years ago where the Twins, Brewers, Cubs, and Tigers should be playing right now.

Welcome to history. We had it so good for a spell. It was a bounty of the superfluous. Sociology degrees and safe spaces. Preferred pronouns and Disney cruises. Hipster brunch and guaranteed futures. It was the land of milk and honey.

Now it’s the land of 33,325 deaths, and climbing.

In Philadelphia this week, a gang of youths took advantage of the mess to attack a man on a SEPTA bus. No word if they were wearing SEPTA-mandated coronavirus masks. But we do know they picked the wrong target, a man with a legal concealed-carry firearm who promptly shot them all. Most were shot in the legs or buttocks, so in a few weeks, after a recovery paid for by the Medicaid taxpayer, they’ll be in fine shape to sue the shooter or otherwise blame someone else.

Many public schools have thrown in the towel for the year. Instead of Alice Cooper’s "School's Out For Summer," it’s more like school's out before the last frost.

Fairfax County schools, purportedly one of the better school systems in Virginia, tried distance learning and it came crashing down with students putting images of bongs on Zoom video classes. Fairfax waited weeks to try distance learning, and when they finally did, people contributed with racial slurs, Hitler salutes and X-rated memes. 

I shudder to imagine what the rest of Virginia schools are like if Fairfax County schools are the best in the state.

Speaking of Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, best known for either wearing blackface or a Klan hood to a college party, has imposed an emergency edict that prevents people from going to church. Ten people cannot gather in church, but the entire Virginia General Assembly will gather next week in a tent to consider budget matters.

It seems northeastern Democrat governors are more comfortable issuing edicts and orders preventing people from earning a living, going to church or kicking a soccer ball around a park. It almost comes naturally. But then again, southern governors like Ralph Northam (D-Dixie Land) also seem perfectly comfortable in his authoritarian skin.

Let see how much patience Americans have with these stay-at home-orders. Already in Michigan, rallies have occurred, with protesters yearning to breathe free.

For now, Americans seem ready to wait a few more weeks. But at some point, and that point is coming soon, the cure is worse than the disease. Economic devastation ruins lives too. Poverty, despair and economic ruin will cost the country a lot more than the coronavirus can. When hungry people reach that point, don’t expect Americans to pay much attention to government edicts.