There is a video making the rounds of a self-described desperate restaurant owner in California being confronted by several armed government workers who appeared because the restaurant owner – out of desperation and to make a point – had used his truck to prevent a Gesundheitsleiter (a “health inspector”) from backing his car out of a parking spot . . . so as to prevent him from “doing his job” to some other restaurant owner.
The point being that the Gesundheitsleiter wasn’t experiencing the suffering he was visiting so casually on others.
He had come to levy fines on the restaurant owner for not obeying the Gesundheitsbefehls – health orders – of Gesundheitsfuhrer Gavin Newsome, who has been caught ignoring his own befehls – which do not apply to him, of course, since he controls the Gesundheitsleiters and AGWs who enforce the befehls.
Some of these fines were apparently issued to the restaurant owner on account of people sitting outside his restaurant, on city-owned benches situated on the city-owned sidewalk – over which the restaurant owner has no control, since it’s not his property. How, he asked, is he supposed to police people sitting on public benches on public property?
But that wasn’t the point.
The restaurant owner was using his truck to try to convey to the Gesundheitsleiter what it felt like to be prevented from working, the very thing the Gesundheitsleiter had come to make sure the restaurant owner didn’t do by punishing him for trying to do.
Armed government workers arrived – to aid the Gesundheitsleiter. To make sure he was unhindered in the performance of his job.
They were carrying guns and wearing their Holy Rags.
A female AGW began to patronizingly order the restaurant owner to move his truck – and move himself away from the scene. Other AGWs, also wearing their Holy Vestments, arrived. Within a few minutes, a half dozen armed government workers are on “scene” – to browbeat and perhaps actually beat an honest citizen trying to earn an honest living – the one that pays (via extortion styled “taxes” and “permits”) the well-padded paycheck of the armed government workers and the Gesundheitsleiter, too.
They aren’t missing payroll, as the restaurant owner is. Falling behind on their mortgages. Freaking out over the looming propsect of not being able to feed their families. Because they aren’t “in this together,” as the restaurant owner points out to them. They are immune from the sickness being enforce on people such as himself – and not just himself but all the people who are trying to work at that restaurant to pay their bills (and taxes) and all of the people who’d like to patronize that restaurant, to eat and by doing so help the owner meet his payroll, so that his chef whose wife just had a baby will have the money to feed his baby.
The restaurant owner bravely stands his ground and shames the AGWs and the creepy little gesundheitsleiter, a clipboard creature so loathsome as to not merit the consideration one might give a roach that crawled out from under the refrigerator.
Two things could have happened here and probably will, soon – when another such situation arises.
Which it will.
The first is that another at-his-wits-end business owner will do more than stand his ground. He will defend it.
Ideally, he will have company.
Friends, neighbors and random strangers who are also at their wits end. People who have had enough of being bullied – of being ruined – by insane decrees without moral or even legal authority (no laws have been passed by the legislative bodies answerable to the people specifically sanctioning the “locking down” of anyone not convicted of a criminal act).
Because we are all in this together.
We outnumber the AGWs.
And a moment may come when – having been pushed beyond endurance – some of us cross the line that most of us are desperate not to cross but which we find ourselves pushed to the very precipice of, with the choice being to accept our ruin or respond to those who are ruining us.
Who are being paid to ruin us . . . with our own money.
This could get very ugly, very quickly. Enraged people filled with the fury of desperation, cobalt-salted with a sense of being in the right will tear their oppressors to pieces.
Once this starts it may not be possible to stop it.
Which brings up the other thing that could – and hopefully will – happen. Which – unfortunately – did not happen on the street outside that closed-down restaurant in California: An AGW a with a still-functioning shame reflex will cross the line, stand with the business owner and say, as the great Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said:
I want no part of this.
It might only take one armed government worker recovering his decency to inspire others to recover theirs. They cannot all be horrible people. It is probable that a goodly number of them are basically good people who’ve never really given much though to the nature of their work – and for whom they work.
It is probably fairly easy to convince yourself that you are not a bad person if you can persuade yourself that your work involves going after bad people.
But it is harder to so persuade yourself when standing on the wrong side of the line separating you and your gun from a desperate restaurant/bar/gym/coffee shop owner being ruined by insane, arbitrary decrees issued by criminals who flout them and profit from them and appear to enjoy the misery they are inflicting.
This is not the same thing as handing out a traffic ticket you know is little more than a kind of roadside tax.
There is a limit. Or so one hopes.
If that hope is misplaced then the first option becomes inevitable. In which case, may god help them – and us, too.
. . . .
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