The coronavirus has illuminated many truths that shouldn’t be forgotten, but one stands out above all others: Our politicians don’t really care about you.
This is clear from the antipathy toward small-business owners who were run out of work during the shutdowns. This is clear from the strong resistance to children attending school, despite the clear shortcomings of online “learning.” Yet the most explicit example of this may have been this weekend’s funeral for John Lewis.
Lewis’s funeral took place in Georgia, where indoor gatherings cannot have more than 50 people unless they are socially distanced. Yet photos from Lewis’s funeral show more than 50 people packed into pews like it’s any normal service.
I get it. My dad wasn’t important. So it’s ok to limit his funeral to 10 people tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/9MCAlNrRK4
— brink (@brinkofill) July 30, 2020
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser decided to lay it out simply for all of us: The funeral for Lewis is “essential,” and so attendees in Atlanta do not have to quarantine after they return to the nation’s capital. Funerals for nongovernment citizens? Those are nonessential.
Much as Black Lives Matter protests are acceptable and encouraged, while protests against the shutdowns are “terrorism,” the funeral for Lewis is exempt from the restrictions and the stigma to which nonpoliticians are subject. Lewis was a civil rights hero, of course, yet in America, no one individual is supposed to be afforded special privileges, no matter how influential they were in life.
Our politicians don’t care about you, but they do want to control every facet of your life. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer put coronavirus restrictions on personal gardening. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is using his authority to determine whether or not hot wings qualify as a meal, only after he oversaw the most disastrous coronavirus response in the country and turned New York nursing homes into coronavirus hotbeds.
Now, the Democratic Party looks for an even larger takeover of the American healthcare system than the failed endeavor that was Obamacare. Politico reports that Joe Biden “keeps inching closer to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party” on healthcare, casting his own healthcare plan in the light of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that politicians should be the last person you trust with just about any aspect of your life, particularly something as important as your health. After all, when it comes down to decision-making time, you are “nonessential.”
