Have you ever noticed the difference between the zeal behind COVID lockdowns and the hair-on-fire panic about government shutdowns? The coastal elites had no sense of proportion in their reactions to both situations.
Mike Rowe became famous as the fun and gregarious host of the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, and it’s that same personality and common sense attitude that still endears him to fans. In this video, Mike Rowe gave that kind of thinking a good, hard throat-punch. There is a new word that replaces ‘deplorable.’
But first, let’s take a quick look at what it is he’s reacting to.
When the situation was a government lockdown measured in days or weeks, where most of the ‘essential’ services of government remained open anyway and almost everyone can expect to get back-pay after the fact, the Democrat politicians (who precipitated the Schumer shutdown) and their AV department in the mainstream press were practically wearing sandwich board signs on street corners, ringing a bell and shouting ‘The End Is Nigh.’
Fast forward a year or two to 2020, when shutdowns are destroying life savings, bankrupting businesses, leaving people without work and without any prospects of finding any unless they are the fortunate ones who are so financially insulated from the consequences that they can arrange to work remotely — or have a government job that won’t be laying anybody off — or the working stiffs whose labor we cannot possibly do without.
If you’re one of the thousands, who are deemed ‘unessential’? Well, you’re nothing more negotiating chip to be used in Nancy Pelosi’s game of power politics. You’re not getting any financial help unless her cynical political endgame in funding blue states and special interests can piggyback on that same bailout.
Small businesses can get left holding the bag, but Biden-appointee hotshot law firms somehow manage to cash in on 7-figure bailout packages. Yeah, that seems fair.
“There’s a new word for 40 million people in this country: Non-essential, and it’s crazy,” Rowe told host Sean Hannity. “We have deemed a giant hunk of our people essentially one click away from [being] unimportant or worthless.”
As states and cities reimpose lockdowns and stay-at-home orders amid a surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, Rowe said the looming closure of non-essential business is “just another example, in my opinion, of a big cookie-cutter approach in the name of public safety, where we treat everybody basically the same except for the essential folks.”
“During this pandemic,” Rowe added, “I’ve seen firsthand that everybody is essential to somebody, even if you’re just working to pay your own bills. So something is going on here that is that is fundamentally upside-down. And the fact that these policies are now being instituted by leaders who have shown themselves to be the very definition of rank hypocrisy is, I’m afraid, going to lead us into a place where it’s going to be very difficult to get the poop back in the goose.”
…”It’s a quilt. And if you start to arbitrage certain people out of the mosaic based on some harebrained definition of essentiality, then you’re going to get the really depressing parts of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and it’s going to keep going on and on and on.”
Rowe has an honest appreciation of the people who labor at those invaluable, under-appreciated ‘non-essential” vocations just to ensure that their kids have a roof over their heads, food on their table, and a life that is easier than theirs. Mike Rowe, himself no stranger to the life of the working stiff, is making the point that the COVIDictators don’t seem to understand.
EVERYONE is essential.
Not just the coastal elites. Not just the well-connected.
Everyone.
So many of the decision-makers in this country have lost sight of that.
It’s not just the guy in a power-tie and a corner office who matters, or the IT tech, or Janice from accounting.
The dishwasher paying his way through college matters. And the florist. And the waitress.
All the mom-and-pop shops that are the backbone of a community and the real, local cultural expressions that no chain store can hold a candle to, the franchises, the rental car and travel companies, the hotels, the musicians who have nowhere to play a gig.
They, and a thousand other people matter.
Every life has significance.
Cross-posted with Clash Daily
