The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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So I’m in the airport check-in line and the guy in front of me is giving the TSA an earful about his rights as an American citizen. He’s not wearing a plague mask even though we’ve passed 100 signs telling us travelers they’re required at all times in this facility. By the time he’s bending their ears about being forced by the federal government, the damn government, to drink his pop before going through screening I figure I’ll be here for another half hour while they put him on the floor and do a cavity search in front of the rest of us compliant citizens. I’m praying that he won’t be a fellow passenger on my flight, the one who gets the place turned around so he can be taken into custody back where we flew out of.

Freedom for some folks is just nothing left to complain about. No shoes, no shirt, no service must be practically a call to arms. A friend of mine has a neighbor who drains his septic into the ditch by her house, no doubt another freedom fighter. The guy next door on the other side likes to shoot his automatic assault rifle after midnight, testing the patience of the sleeping neighborhood, maybe see who wants to confront him. The cops don’t care to so why would she? I need to reread that second amendment, see if the right to bear arms means the right to shoot them night or day below my window.

This pandemic has certainly brought out the new Minutemen, folks who think the government has a boot on their necks. Nobody has the right to tell them anything. And watching them storm the Capitol a few short months ago, I got an eyeful of what freedom means to them. More for them, less for me. You wonder why I live at the end of an island at the edge of a continent, it wasn’t to escape the reach of Rome, it was to escape these yahoos. That kind of freedom, trust me, is getting harder to find.

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In the 1300’s when another round of bubonic plague was sweeping the floor of civilization, a marauding army of Tartars set siege to Caffa, a port city on the Black Sea. The citizens there, fearing contamination, refused to surrender to the infected army so the Tartars, mightily piqued at this unseemly lack of camaraderie, catapaulted some of their dead over the battlements of the walled city. Velkommen indeed.

A friend of mine was in one of our local grocery stores recently on the wild and unwalled South End, a provisioning locus for State Park refugees fleeing the plague cities of Seattle and Gomorrah and a quickie mart for us residents who ran out of beer or wine and dreaded the nightmare run five miles north to the IGA. Not a mask on a single employee. When the manager was asked why not, given the Governor’s edict that all retail shops and all citizens should wear one, she was told the staff had medical exemptions. ‘How many employees do you have?’ she asked and was told, with a straight face, 27.

I suppose we should applaud our local retailer for hiring the sick and the infirm. Although I wonder what maladies, besides Covid, they might be harboring at that cash register. This past week’s editorial page in our local fishwrapper featured an angry letter from a local man who claimed it was against God’s will to wear a mask. And furthermore, it was unconstitutional to infringe on his personal, and I suppose, God’s freedom. I can only suppose the Constitution has some bill of rights not to wear masks. Or shoes or shirts. Or pants. We apparently have the right to infect our fellow citizens. God’s will be done.

These are tough times in the Land of the Plague. Partisan politics takes precedence over sound medical advice and in those places where the Lockdown was lifted and the partying commenced, the virus has proven immune to political debate, surprise surprise. Other countries have managed to contain the contagion, but here, we subscribe to the Don’t Tread on Me, I Can Do What I Want philosophy. So much for the idea that we are all in this thing together. Better to let the virus run its course and the survivors can carry on. Another few months of this and I expect to see catapaults launching the dead over the gated communities.

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