Just suppose there is a person who believes that the “government” has no right to tell him (or her) that they can’t walk in the middle of a country road in the heart of “don’t tread on me” white nationalist territory: it impinges on his “freedom” to do what he wishes. The “government” can’t be trusted to inform him about what might happen to him if he keeps walking in the middle of the road. He has been lucky so far, local drivers have swerved around him; maybe they call him “brave” for “standing up for his rights.”
Then one day somebody who isn’t from around those parts and has a different agenda comes driving through and hits him because he is just there, being stupid and unprotected. He has a serious head injury and various punctured organs. But when he is taken to a hospital, there is no place to put him, because it is overflowing with “freedom lovers” like him from all over the county who thought and did just as he. Since there is no room for him and others like him, the hospital sends them to another state that still has available hospital beds, because federal law requires that they must take in cases of even those who refuse to accept the "government" laws banning unsafe walking in the middle of the road.
That is basically what is happening in Northern Idaho, once the home of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations and the site of the Ruby Ridge incident, and still for many the “white homeland.” Vaccination rates are among the lowest in the country, and the refusal by the population in general to do anything to mitigate the spread of COVID-19—for many it is simply a government-inspired “myth”—has come home to roost, and a massive surge in cases is underway. The New York Times is reporting that the “extremely high” positive test rate in the state suggests that the current numbers reported is a significant undercount.
One could also look at the current situation as a modern day twist on Edgar Allen Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” These “special” people up in their enclave far from “liberal” urban “blight” and the tentacles of “government” thought they were “safe” from a disease that either wasn’t real if you didn’t believe it was, or all those reported deaths were “faked” to scare people into giving up their “liberties.”
But the virus was laughing at the ignorance of these people, as it took its sweet time making its presence known. Northern Idaho is the kind of place that has the “perfect” victims: purposefully misinformed, few believe that vaccinations work, few practice even the most limited amount protection, and most think that quack remedies will “save” them even if they do, by “chance,” become ill from the virus. Reports of hospital staff being verbally abused by patients who claim they don’t have the virus has been reported, as well by those who demand “alternate” medication—until, of course, they can’t say anything once they are life support machines on the verge of death.
The result is that Idaho hospitals are, according to NPR’s Weekend Edition this past Sunday, so inundated by new cases from unvaccinated people that they have been forced to “ration” health care because they only have enough resources to help those who are in serious jeopardy of dying, with needed surgeries for non-COVID cases put off if they are not yet life-threatening. The New York Times is reporting that things have become so desperate in Idaho that they have been requesting emergency transfers of cases across state lines to Washington, which as I noted yesterday has its own problems. In nearby cities like Spokane, despite local hospitals having to deal with spikes in resident cases, they must by federal law take in patients from other states if they have the bed space.
The Times reported Washington Gov. Jay Inslee as saying that while he was happy to help a neighbor state in crisis, he scolded Idaho leaders for not being proactive in making even the minimal effort to enforce safety standards, instead of making their crisis “our problem.” What was Idaho’s Republican Gov. Brad Little’s reply? Well, nothing; he wasn’t “available” for comment. Little obviously wasn’t a big proponent of vaccinations before the current surge, with his state having one of the lowest—if not the lowest—vaccination rates in the country. All he is willing to do is to ask people to “choose” to do the “right thing,” when the “right thing” for most people in “white country” is to choose to do the opposite of what they are “told” if it is an “annoyance” for them.
Of course such attitudes are frustrating for those in this state which was initially an “epicenter” of the virus, but due to early mitigation has not been hit has hard as others in the long term. The Times quoted the Washington State Hospital Association president Cassie Sauer as saying that it is “ridiculous” that in Idaho where the health care system is “melting down,” that even issuing mask mandates isn’t on the table; it is “just bizarre.”
Little, for his part, showed just how small-minded he is by claiming that Pres. Joe Biden is “out of touch”—presumably meaning with the extremist-right element—and “mandates only add to the divisiveness within our country.” But even simple measures like mask wearing only become a “divisive” issue if you have state “leaders” who refuse to lead, and who deliberately act “contrary” to what the other “party” is doing for pure hyper-partisan reasons. In states like Idaho, it is the fools who follow the fool.
Take anyone who thinks Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is at all a man with any sense. His latest attempt to “mitigate” the effects of COVID in his state—which is rapidly moving to surpass Tennessee as the state with highest per million infection rate in the country—is to conceal the effect it has had on education. DeSantis has moved to end the Florida Standards Assessment tests, because they are “outmoded.” The real reason, of course, is because of the bottom dropping out in math and science scores from pre-pandemic years. “We need a more ‘nimble’ approach,” he proclaimed—which of course means finding a new “bottom” from which to “measure” student “achievement.”
One wonders just where the “bottom” is for many Republican governors; maybe not until the fires of hell start licking their fundaments.
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