Anti-quarantine protestors clad in Make America Great Again hats and waving little American flags flooded Huntington Beach, bravely demanding an end to the tyranny of the lockdown and the reopening of their beloved bars and hair salons.
After all, what are a few tens of thousands of deaths compared to being able to grill store-brand hot dogs on white bread at the beach? How can we expect these people to live without their stylists to dye their graying hair? It’s unconscionable.
Across every state, at every one of these protests, there are some commonalities. Pickup trucks, the flag, and, inescapably, the pro-Trump signs that saturate the crowd.
I am impressed how completely we’ve managed to politicize a deadly virus. Only in America.
The cruelest irony of this whole circus is these “activists” who are so incensed by this quarantine are the very same people who scoff at civil rights protests.
They are the ones who characterize Black Lives Matter as a “Terrorist Organization,” yet throw childish fits when measures are taken to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones.
For these people, bars closing is a cause to riot, but the disproportionate police brutality faced by Black and brown people is not.
Colin Kaepernick takes a knee and they burn their Nikes in protest.
There are countless videos of the outright murder of people in the street by police officers and not a peep from these protestors, but now since they can’t dine in at Carl’s Jr something must be done?
I would be more inclined to tolerate these protests if they seemed to care about anyone other than themselves. But their congregating together like a somehow-even-more-insufferable Coachella crowd is endangering themselves and everyone else.
This is an easily transmissible virus, with a high mortality rate that has left survivors with major lung and kidney damage. There are few environments where it is more easily transmitted than crowds where people are packed cheek to cheek waving cringe-inducing signs comparing this quarantine to the Holocaust.
How deluded do you have to be to be sitting at home and, after cashing your stimulus check, look around and say to yourself, “this is a lot like what happened to Anne Frank”?
Protests like the one in Huntington Beach are some of the grandest displays of willful ignorance I have ever seen. Operatically ironic, a monument to a complete absence of self-awareness.
People across the country are storming state capitals and flooding the streets because their lives are being inconvenienced.
Are there major problems with this quarantine? Of course, many Americans need more economic assistance, but reopening beaches won’t help that.
Plus the economic and health ramifications will only get worse if we reopen. The virus will come back in force, lengthening the lockdown and taking more and more lives.
Almost every expert is saying that we need to stay quarantined, and I get it, it’s hard. I’m not loving this either, but going to the beach is not worth someone’s life, no matter what the throngs of people demanding they reopen might think.
The irony that some folks who believe we should lock every petty criminal up and throw away the key can’t do 60 days in the comfort of their own homes to help ensure public health and safety. Great piece Perry!