Our real problem

By Will Davis, PublisherMonroe County ReporterThe line at Dickey’s Peaches was 50 deep on Sunday, so my 6-year-old and I picked strawberries while we waited for the line to go down. ’Where can we go that has lots of berries left?’ I asked the basket lady.’Nowhere,’ she replied, ‘the whole field has been picked clean.’Indeed it had. Middle Georgians have apparently had enough quarantine. Since studies have shown the virus is very hard to catch in the sunshine, they made a wise choice. We gathered about 4 pounds and then headed to our reward ‘” the best homemade strawberry ice cream.Dickey’s hires mostly Mary Persons kids, so I knew about all of them.’You should have been here yesterday,’ one friend told me. ‘You would have had a story.’She said a woman berated co-owner Cynde Dickey for having the temerity to be open during the ‘pandemic’. Then on Monday we got take out from our friends at El Dorado in Forsyth.’Are you doing dine in?’ I asked.’Well, we were going to,’ he said sheepishly. ‘But this woman started ripping us to pieces about it and we decided not to. Yet.’ Probably the same woman.Finally, the rec department told me they cancelled spring sports due to some emotional protests to playing from the local Karens on Facebook. I have read about mobs. Now I have lived them. Look I get that it’s a scary virus. But the virus has exposed a bigger problem than a highly contagious respiratory disease. It’s exposed the inner Karen of Americans everywhere. They’re terrified. It’s OK to be scared. But when you try to deploy force to make others not leave their homes, to destroy their dreams and livelihoods, and basically make them miserable, well as Merle Haggard crooned, you’re walking on the fighting side of me. And if you saw the line at the food bank at St. James last Friday, and know they ran out of food, you know that the shutdown crowd is causing real and lasting harm.Famed newsman H.L. Mencken said that Calvinists were people who carried the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, was having a good time. I think that’s an apt description of our Panicked Karens today. They are an army of terrified housewives waiting to harangue and hector anyone who doesn’t agree that we’re all going to die ‘” today. And they really spew their wrath on Facebook. In turn, that has prompted the 8-week shutdown as panicked politicians virtue signal for Karen’s vote. Thank God, the number of cases and deaths are going down. Hospitals have had enough beds, and in fact are laying off employees for lack of work. Yet Monroe County taxpayers are still barred from access to the school facilities they fund.My daughter’s a senior on the MP soccer team. All seniors have lost their final spring sports seasons, and it’s been hard for her and us. The Lady Bulldogs had a chance to win a region title. Better yet, they had formed bonds of friendship that were playing out for a final time on the field. Alas, it was all cruelly ended in early March. I don’t like it, but I understand.But now that the worst has passed, would it hurt anything to allow the girls to have a scrimmage at Lancaster Field among themselves? Would it hurt to let them have a private Senior Night with their families there? Is that too much to ask?Our superintendent said he is waiting on the GHSA to let them use school facilities. So I called our principal, who’s on the GHSA board. He said they’re just going by the governor’s directive that schools are closed. So I talked to our state legislators. They liked the idea and called the governor’s office. No, the governor said he’s not going to overrule the GHSA. Nobody has the guts to make a decision for faith over fear. They all need a prescription of Growacet.Hundreds of thousands of Georgia teens are sitting home bored, getting fat and getting into who knows what. We the taxpayers have generously funded large athletic complexes for them. And they can’t use them. Just who do school officials think these fields belong to? They belong to us, and our kids should be able to use them. Now.Someone in government who has been helpful is Chris Wiggington, the director of GPSTC. He tells me every Tuesday before deadline how many patients he has recovering at the corona virus RV village there. This week he had two.Then, just an hour ago, I got a call.’Yes this is (name withheld to protect him from the HIPPAA police) from _____ Ambulance and we can’t get into the gate at GPSTC,’ he said. He explained that they had a corona patient for the virus village and the internet told him to call the Reporter. So I called Chris.’I was just about to call you,’ Chris laughed. ‘Our two patients left so now we have none.’’Well, I’ve got another one for you!’ I said, and he helped them get into the gate.Meanwhile, another helpful government official, sheriff Brad Freeman, tells us Monroe County only has three corona patients in the whole county, according to GEMA. Unlike the Department of Public Health, GEMA righly rolls off patients after 21 days because the virus is then gone. We’ve been told we had 22 cases, but that’s not true. All this to say there’s a lot of good news out there. But the Cantankerous Karens and CYA Government Mandarins don’t want to hear it. I am afraid some of them just like lockdown and control. That’s a problem that taxpayers should insist on addressing. Like yesterday.