I am fortunate to live in an area where COVID-19 is mostly something we hear about on the news. Locally, I do not know anyone who has had it. Most of my friends don’t either.
Two-thirds of the counties in Missouri, a state of 6 million people, have not had a single death from the disease. Some counties have had not had a single case, let alone a death.
There have only been 16 deaths in Kansas City itself, a city of 500,000 people. One county in Metro KC, Platte by name, has more than 100,000 residents and not one death.
For whatever reason, the St. Louis area has been greatly more afflicted than Kansas City where I live. Even statewide, however, there has been only one death of someone under 30 and only a dozen deaths of people under 50.
In other words, if you are a millennial in metro Kansas City, your chances of dying from COVID-19 are close to zero and your chances of being hospitalized not much higher.
Like Democratic mayors everywhere, however, our mayor, Quinton Lucas, has put Kansas City under the kind of Draconian orders that would have made the mayor of Wuhan envious.
Our so-called “reopening” scheduled for May 15 is so inherently flawed and self-defeating I am embarrassed to having actually endorsed Lucas for mayor. I take small consolation in knowing his progressive, lesbian opponent would have been worse.
From day 1, my friends and I have been protesting the suspension of our civil rights and the apparent exorcism of civic common sense.
My friends, however, are all crotchety right-wingers, several of whom are in the age cohorts most vulnerable to COVID-19. By contrast, the only thing I have seen young progressives protesting are protesters like us.
How dare we insist that churches be reopened? How dare we sit outside Paneras together and carry on unmasked? How dare we take to the public square and wave signs?
Personally, I am as unaffected as anyone I know. My wife and I have a big house with a yard and garden to ourselves. My wife is recently retired, and I can do my work from wherever. Area parks, at least on the Kansas side, have never closed. I go for long walks daily.
So why do I wake up each morning outraged at this assault on our rights as citizens while healthy young people, who have lost their jobs, their pastimes and possibly their futures, say nothing?
I have my own office in a hip, youth-oriented entertainment district filled with bars and tattoo parlors and vape shops. I go in every day. Parking is, I must admit, a whole lot easier. I have yet to wear a mask anywhere.
Most of the young people I pass on the streets, some of them jogging or biking or even driving alone, wear masks, many of them elaborate and almost burka-like.
There is a Whole Foods in my neighborhood. I see young people lined up outside of it, six feet apart, playing with their cellphones, virtually all masked given the righteousness of the establishment. I have never been and won’t go.
Mask wearing has become a form of virtue signaling. Friends of my mine have been publicly scolded. I cannot say that I have, but I have gotten more than my share of dirty looks.
As the days wear on, and the numbers don’t add up, my sentiment upon seeing these passive clowns has morphed from surprise to disappointment to outright disgust.
I keep thinking that some new indignity, some day, will push them over the edge and make them wake up, but I do not see that day coming.
I have a book coming out in August titled “Unmasking Obama” (available for pre-order at Amazon).
I might have to title my next book “Unmasking America.” That is, if I have stomach enough to write it.
