A typical winter for the DC Metro area – Plans for Martin Luther King Day – The advent of Governor Youngkin – Floridians ignore their Surgeon General’s sage advice – European nations take a hard line against the unvaccinated – Evening statistics
The winter is shaping up to be one more typical of the area than it has been in recent years. Little snow was seen during the winters of 2019 and 2020. There was quite a bit of precipitation in the winter of 2021, but for the most part it took the form of ice and sleet and rain. For this winter, however, we have already had one significant snowfall and we are undergoing another (although its accumulation is predicted to be less than the amount we have endured from the previous storm); and it is still only the middle of January. This morning was no colder than it was yesterday, but it felt much less comfortable, with blanched skies and that peculiar chill in the air that signifies the onset of rain or snow to come.
The roads will probably be difficult to navigate by tomorrow morning, and I am expected to be downtown by 10:00; but I plan to take the Metro in any case. If worse comes to worst, I can always walk to the station; the distance is about 3½ miles. There is also a local bus system available, although its timetable will almost certainly fall behind schedule tomorrow. Unless the conditions are unusually bad, I should be able to get there in time.
The event for which I am journeying is a meeting with various others to visit the Martin Luther King monument and pay the tribute of respect to this man who has contributed so much to our national welfare; and afterwards to embark on a 15-mile loop afterward. It is an activity I have done annually for many years running; although it was impossible the preceding year, thanks to the aftermath of the 1/6/21 riot.
Governor Youngkin was inaugurated yesterday and he has certainly begun his administration vigorously. Today he signed nine Executive Orders and two Executive Directives at the Virginia State Capitol. The first of these is the banning of “inherently divisive concepts” in the state educational system. These include, of course, Critical Race Theory, although it is not explicitly mentioned in the Executive Order. The actual wording lists the following concepts that are covered by the ban:
“(i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual’s moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”
And I’m afraid that until the advocates of Critical Race Theory rein in their more extreme adherents, it will not obtain a hearing. I am far from desirous of cloaking the history of slavery in our country with a discreet silence or to conceal the heinousness of the Jim Crow laws following the failure of Reconstruction or to minimize the corrosive effects of racial tension that have persisted to the present day. But neither do I desire to see children and adolescents told that they are inherently racist because they are white or to be held responsible for actions committed by their ancestors centuries earlier.
Other Executive Orders include an investigation of the Virginia Parole Board for failing to send crime victims and prosecutors notification whenever a violent offender has been released (it has failed to do so in the past on numerous occasions, in violation of the laws of the General Assembly), sterner measures to combat human trafficking, the establishment of a Commission to combat antisemitism, and an investigation of the Loudoun County School Board. This last one refers to a particularly distasteful episode that occurred on May, 2021. A girl was raped in the bathroom of the school she attended by a 15-year old boy, who was wearing a dress at the time. He was, or at any rate claimed to be, transgender. The School Board responded in a thoroughly discreditable manner, immediately transferring the rapist to another school without informing the victim or her family that her assailant had been allowed to remain in the school system. The promising olive branch upon whom the School Board members lavished their protection proceeded to justify their confidence by assaulting a second girl at his new school, and was arrested in October. He pleaded no contest to the charge of sexual assault by the following month. To add insult to injury, at a school board meeting a month after the attack school officials justified their transgender policy and announced that no rape had occurred in the bathroom at all; and when Scott Smith, the victim’s father, protested against this misrepresentation, he was dragged out of the board meeting with a bloodied mouth after the police were called to intervene. Actually, the phrase “insult to injury” gives a somewhat misleading impression of the activities of this enterprising School Board, does it not? To be strictly accurate, I should have said “to add injury to injury.”
All in all, this is not a bad beginning on the part of our new governor. I would feel less apprehensive about him than I have been up to this point, were it not for the fact that some of the new directives are fairly ominous: one that re-evaluates Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (and virtually directs the aforesaid re-evaluation to recommend Virginia’s withdrawal from it), one that lifts the mask mandates from Virginia schools, and one that rescinds the vaccine mandate for all state employees, on the grounds that this measure is a violation of individual freedoms and personal privacy. Of course, it is just possible that he may reverse this last one with a new Executive Directive later on, after the offices of state administration become steadily depleted by their employees calling in sick all the time as a result of having been stricken with COVID.
From The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, after Jack Worthing, the protagonist, having been abandoned (or properly speaking, mislaid) as an infant, is informed that Lady Bracknell can provide him some information about his parentage:
“Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?”
I daresay that the inhabitants of Florida also hate to seem inquisitive, but nonetheless wish that some qualified person would kindly inform them about their state of health. At any rate, when Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo deprecated the demand for COVID testing and said, “It is really time for people to be living, to make the decisions they want regarding vaccination, to enjoy the fact that many have natural immunity” – the state residents were having none of it. In Miami-Dade County, at any rate, some 70,236 residents have expressed a wish to be tested, the highest number to date. There is, you see, the trifling circumstance that contracting COVID can be fatal (the mortality rate in this country is currently about 1.3%), not to mention the fact that they might prefer to avoid infecting others, and that an early diagnosis could conceivably lower the chances of spreading the disease still further and even improve chances of survival. Despite this disregard of his advice, Ladapo has certainly his main objective: that is, to curry favor with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose attitude towards the threat from the virus is equally oblivious.
Austria, by way of contrast, is bearing down heavily on the unvaccinated, announcing that as of March, 2022, citizens will be fined if they cannot produce proof of COVID vaccination. Its attitude is far from unique among European nations. Germany has banned unvaccinated people from most areas of public life. France’s President Emmanuel Macron last week said that he “really wants to piss off” the unvaccinated. Claims about individual freedoms, which are repeated as a mantra in this country, are for the most part brushed aside in Europe. European countries with highly vaccinated populations, such as Spain and Portugal, have been less badly affected by more recent waves of infection and have been able to open up their economies; and the other European nations, where vaccine rollout has been slower, are anxious to imitate their example. “When my freedom threatens that of others, I become irresponsible,” Macron said. “An irresponsible person is no longer a citizen.”
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 328,674,108; # of deaths worldwide: 5,557,596; # of cases U.S.: 66,995,533; # of deaths; U.S.: 873,564.