Looking at my calendar this morning, I realized that this week three years ago was the last week of normality before America shut down for Covid.
I remember attending the Magee Chamber of Commerce Banquet on March 12, 2020. People were already a little leery of crowds. After that night the cancellations began. Most churches in Simpson County shut down on March 19. Our students didn’t return to class after spring break. My gym closed, just when I needed the stress relief of an aerobic workout.
Stores and restaurants closed, hotels closed and spring beach trips were cancelled. Non emergency medical and dental visits were cancelled.
But the hospitals were open, and the Covid victims began to flood in. Before spring 2020 was over, all of us knew someone who had died of the virus.
For several weeks my husband and I did what you were doing —we stayed at home. We found a few restaurants offering take-out and brought our food to the house. We started an emergency stash of supplies in a closet. We watched our church services on YouTube. For entertainment, we rode around and waved to friends who were riding around.
Mississippi may rank last in some categories, but I’m proud to live in a state that ranks #1 in People Who Do Not Lose Their Heads and Go Off the Deep End in a Crisis.
We bought masks and hand sanitizer, began to open our businesses and restaurants and got back at it. I think I was one of the first people out. Actually, because newspapers were declared essential businesses, I kept working. I had no special circumstances that made me super vulnerable to the virus other than my age (which is none of your business!) so I masked up and moved on.
I got Covid, of course. I was sick. I got over it. So did many of you.
I don’t fault anyone for being overly cautious in 2020. We didn’t know what we were dealing with and people did die, but as more and more of us survived into 2021, we realized that we were taking government imposed precautions way too far.
Folks in this state realized a lot during the pandemic, in fact.
We realized that closing schools doesn’t work. Kids don’t learn anything cut off from in-person instruction, and they got sick because they used their free time to socialize, spreading the virus anyway. America’s kids will probably never make up the academic, social and emotional deficits those years created.
We also realized that masks and hand sanitizer don’t save us. I was wearing a mask and sanitizing my hands when I got Covid. “Following the science,” as the officials told us, got us nowhere.
We also realized that if people get a check for not working, they won’t make any effort to work again. We’re still feeling the effects of that.
We realized that our government wanted to teach us to be obedient by imposing all these ineffective restrictions. “Big Brother knows best.”
And, if we didn’t already know it, we realized that our government will lie to us. We were told and retold that Covid came from an infected animal in a meat market in Wuhan, China. Oops! It was all a big accident! You can’t blame us!
Now, three years later, Washington is finally admitting that the virus was probably lab-created, possibly deliberately by the Chinese, to do exactly what it did: disrupt the world economically and socially without the expense of a war. With a population of 1.4 billion in 2020, what did the Chinese government care if a million of so of their people died to accomplish their purpose of world domination?
Why was the truth hushed up here? Now that we know how many people in the Biden administration had investments in Chinese companies, we wonder if they hid the truth to keep from losing money. Or maybe they were just cowardly, fearing Chinese retaliation. For some reason, head Covid guru Anthony Fauci, knew the truth and lied to us about it.
One man did tell the truth, President Donald Trump. He immediately called it “the Chinese virus” and called it a deliberate leak. The liberal media went into a frothing rage and pulled out their tired word bombs. Trump was a “racist,” a “conspiracy monger,” a zenophobe”!
The shameful thing for the media puppets of liberal government is that Trump was right, and almost the only person who who told us the truth.
As I listened to him speak last week about what he would do as president if re-elected, I thought, he’s one of us. He Doesn’t Lose His Head and Go Off the Deep End in a Crisis. He saw the virus for what it was, and he is the only one who will do exactly what he is promising to do about the mess America is in. How do I know? Because he did the things he promised to do the last time he was president.
I didn’t envision voting for Trump this time, but it might be refreshing to hear the truth again. It has been a very long time since we heard it.
