Back in late January and February, we tried the travel bans and flight restrictions to protect America. As we headed into mid-March, we were told to wash our hands and not touch our faces. By late March and throughout the month of April, Americans were told that we must not leave our houses, lest we be responsible for murdering Baby Boomers. Now it’s May and we have tanks in the streets. Who could have seen that coming?!
Picture this happening in a small American city with a population of 27,707:
A county sheriff’s department SWAT team pulls up to a cocktail bar in an MRAP (pronounced EM-rap). MRAP stands for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected. This is a really big vehicle that was designed by the Department of Defense to withstand the explosions of mines and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you’re driving around in your Humvee and feeling like the big man on the block, you don’t want to have a collision with an MRAP. It’s big, covered in armor and designed to crush and run over things while protecting the soldiers – or in this case, sheriff’s deputies – inside it. The MRAP that pulled up to the cocktail bar has a SWAT guy in a Rambo costume up in the turret, aiming an assault rifle at the bar patrons who are outside on a sunny May afternoon.
Multiple SWAT team guys with machine guns and some sheriff’s deputies pour out of the MRAP and aim their weapons at the bar patrons, including an armed militia group that chose not to start Civil War 2.0 for some reason. Someone on a loudspeaker, safely ensconced inside the protective bulletproof shielding of the MRAP, tells all of the bar patrons to keep their hands in the air, while screeching at reporters to stay back so they won’t get shot.
That just happened. In America.
The cocktail bar was a charming place called Big Daddy Zane’s. It’s located in West Odessa, Texas, population 27,707. The nice lady who owns Big Daddy Zane’s has been struggling to keep all of her bartenders and waitresses paid during the Chinese virus shutdowns. Like many small business owners across America, she can’t keep her place closed down much longer before it becomes a permanent situation.
The local government sent a tank and cops in body armor with machine guns to shut down a lady’s bar. So much for that freedom-loving reputation that the red state of Texas has. Ector County, Texas, where this took place, has had 84 confirmed cases of the Chinese virus to date and four deaths.
Not that blue states are doing much better. In Sacramento, California a horde of police officers dressed up as storm troopers surrounded the state capitol over the weekend. They were armed with peasant-beating sticks in order to keep the unarmed populace from storming the palace with pitchforks and torches, apparently. They used their peasant-beating sticks to beat up and arrest a pastor who apparently wasn’t social distancing enough. Or maybe he didn’t have a mask on.
The mayors in places like Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles are threatening to send the cops out to arrest anyone who doesn’t comply with their latest orders that they just made up off the top of their heads. If the cops have an MRAP in West Odessa, just imagine the toys that Mayor Lori Lightfoot is ready to spring on Chicagoans just as soon as she finishes getting her hair styled!
As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about, fearful Americans are now dying of hypercapnia. What’s that? When you wear an N95 mask for too long and rebreathe your own carbon dioxide, it basically shuts your brain, your kidneys and then the rest of your body down. Early symptoms include dizziness, headaches and shortness of breath. Leave the mask on too long, and you’ll croak.
But if you start to feel the symptoms and take your mask off in public, a police officer is likely to hit you with his peasant-beating stick in order to protect the public from you. So, it’s a judgment call on your part. Hopefully, America will wake up from all of this soon. But from the looks of places like West Odessa, it doesn’t appear that some people want us to wake up.
