‘Stupidity’: Ozarks COVID-19 recklessness should anger anti-shutdown conservatives
You’re not going to pass Johnson County Commissioner Mike Brown in the right lane. If you try, I suggest you take an all-terrain vehicle with you, because there’s no pavement on his right flank.
No one in Johnson County has been more vocal about the need to reopen the economy. In fact, the conservative Republican nearly took his own government to court to force it to open up the local economy sooner.
So it says something quite extraordinary that Brown is as aghast as anyone at the orgy of recklessness we all just witnessed in the waters and watering holes at the Lake of the Ozarks.
It’s precisely such images of foolhardy abandon by spring-breakers in Florida that gave coronavirus shutdown proponents wings early on, he figures.
“And now this stupidity pops up, creating further fear,” Brown wrote on Facebook Tuesday.
Posting an already infamous photo of a packed Ozarks pool, Brown suggested that if you want the economy opened up, “then the kind of stupidity in this picture — and other videos and pix from New Jersey, Florida and elsewhere — has to be tamped down. The disease is one thing but the fear is equally impactful — and our economy getting locked down again is not an option.”
The inanity bordering on insanity, and the understandable fear it engenders, may be a more proximate danger than the virus itself — that is, if the Memorial Day episode doesn’t spread just as much virus as apprehension. Indeed, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, St. Louis County Public Health Department and Kansas City health director have all asked those who were at the Ozarks over the weekend to self-quarantine for 14 days.
Brown nonetheless got some blowback on his post, with one commenter arguing in favor of such displays as “civil disobedience.” No, civil disobedience is sitting at a lunch counter to press for racial equality — not the “right” to spread a historically contagious disease that can easily kill the old and infirm.
Brown rightly wonders how insurance carriers would look at their commercial clients who either allow or entice such behavior.
This kind of breakout during an outbreak should be the last thing any anti-shutdown conservative wants. If throwing caution and COVID-19 droplets to the wind gets people sick or dead, then the pro-shutdown side will only be proven right.
I happen to think the shutdown was the best course of action, though it’s definitely time to reopen the economy — albeit safely and sanely. But the truth is, we just don’t know as of now whether the shutdown was handled as well as it could’ve been. At the same time, the lockdown mentality has become an unquestionable religion, with an unmasked store customer in one viral video being loudly besieged as a heretic by holier-than-thou fellow customers.
Moreover, Brown’s commission colleague Steve Klika — conservative, but more centrist — says the acute cabin fever detected at the Lake of the Ozarks was terrible, but that it was the body politic’s natural overreaction to what he considers to be the shutdown’s own overreaction.
“When people have been cooped up as long as they are, in such an extreme fashion,” Klika says, “people are going to go off to the other extreme. Unfortunately. And I think we’re going to have a little bit of that for a while. Had we done this thing in more moderation, there wouldn’t be such knee-jerk on the other side of it.
“Do I condone those types of groups coming together? Nah. But I don’t think we’re going to stop it. It’s a result of how we handled this whole thing. It’s going to go from one extreme to the other before it settles back to the middle.”
Klika may be right, but that won’t console him if the coronavirus flows from the Ozarks.
If conservatives want the lockdown doctrine discredited, I suppose one way is to jump in the deep end of the reopening pool and just hope for the best. With any luck, and a miracle here or there, they might prove themselves right.
Then again, if wrong, just understand that the people you splash when you jump in that pool may get sick. Or worse.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 3:13 PM.
