The proverbial “straw that breaks the camel’s back” just happened:
I live in Allentown PA, across the street from the farmers’ market. There’s a pizza place there that I’ve been going to for almost 40 years (more, if you count the times when I was a kid that we’d come to the area to visit family). Today I wanted some pizza.
I had to stop at an ATM first, so I bundled up against the 29° weather and headed two blocks to my bank. Half way there, I realized that I’d forgotten to bring a mask. No big deal, the pizza place is right inside the door, I don’t need a mask to eat (no Newsom here forcing me to put my mask back on between bites), I’ll go in, eat, and leave. I had no other plans for there anyway.
I get my cash at the ATM and walk to the market. I head inside at the pizza place and … no seats. It’s a counter and they use stools for seating. All the stools are gone. I know what has happened but I ask anyway:
Me: “Can’t sit, eh?”
Girl at Counter: “Nope.”
Me: “Can I at least eat here if I stand?”
Girl: “Nope. Everything has to be to go.”
Me: *
Girl: “It’s a state order.”
Me: *
Girl: *
Me: “You know that the state supreme court declared all this stuff unconstitutional, right?”
Girl: [stammers a bit]
Me: “I’m not taking it out on you, just saying.”
Girl: “Sorry. Do you want anything?”
Me: “Forget it.”
And I walk home.
I didn’t show it at the pizza place but I’m fucking FURIOUS! Our asshole governor went and issued the same damn orders he had issued in the spring, this time after they were declared unconstitutional. And people are complying with it!
Well, I am no longer doing business with any establishment that bends the knee. I didn’t mind masks too much, but these orders that have been declared illegal by our own court are too much. So my “turning around,” a la Bill’s MB2A, now includes turning away from everyone who caves to the mini-dictators. If it weren’t for my granddaughter who lives here in Allentown, I’d already be on my way to Texas. (I have to do what I can to protect her from her idiot parents, one of whom is my idiot son. I raised her on my own, with both her parents living in my house, for the first six years of her life. We’re extremely close.)
So that’s it, they can all go to hell.
10 replies on “It’s On in Earnest”
Our local biz’s here in CO were “ordered” once again to close to inside dining. The biz owners say if they don’t comply they will lose their license. I’m asking them, “Well, if you go out of biz because you don’t get enough “carry out only” biz to pay the bills you won’t have a biz anyway, so what’s the dif.?” They wear the mask, they 1/2 their indoor seating, then they spend more money to make “outside dining” areas which take up much needed parking spaces in limited supply already. What’s the use of having outside dining in Colorado in Winter? One restaurant in a small town defied the order and the cops and ATF showed up, made the customers leave, seized their alcohol, and made them close . . . All with NO WARRANT! Just a governor’s “edict”! A governor who recently bought a $5M condo in the trendy Boulder, CO! And people just lower their eyes and head and say “yes, master”. Beyond belief.
I cannot comprehend the capacity of most people to submit. I never have and I never will.
I think y’all need a new governor. How about Bill Whittle?
How about Michael Piz? 😉
But I’d never run, too many skeletons in my closet to survive scrutiny. All in the past now, but that doesn’t matter any more, does it?
Michael, I know the pizza place. I live up in the Poconos and get down there fairly often. Guess I won’t be stopping in there any more.
The one inside the farmer’s market? Yeah, it’s a nostalgic place for me. Until recently, their pizza tasted exactly the same as the ones we used to make at my little league baseball field. Little round ones about 6″ – 7″ across. Sold ’em for a quarter. lol
(They don’t taste the same any more because the company that made their crusts went out of business because COVID shutdowns. Grr…)
I feel your pain, Sir.
This is a huge problem that is only resolvable by ousting these dick-taters — either through polite elections/recalls or other more aggressive means (flaming tar and feathers anyone?). The businesses (especially small ones) are caught in the trap of being required to retain business licenses to operate without prosecution (persecution?), and that is the ONLY reason I submit to wearing a mask in any proprietor’s establishment within this draconian State of the Wuhan Lujans (Michelle and Benny Ray), New Mexico.
The solution is not the boycott of compliant small business, but the elimination of the tyrants in government.
Here’s the thing: If we’re going to execute MB2A, we have to “turn around” on everything and let it collapse. This is very difficult, since we don’t have a physical Galt’s Gulch we’re all moving to. It will take time to set up an economy within the economy. But if that’s the goal, we have to be willing to give up even things we care about, even the honest people who aren’t going to do anything about the world they’re sinking into.
That’s the really hard part. There are things I still care very deeply about and I’m not willing to give them up. That keeps me stuck in the failing world. We have to find a way to bring them with us into our “new” world or reach a state of indifference to all those things so that we really, truly, and deeply feel nothing for them, nothing at all, so their loss means nothing to us.
I have in effect already “gone Galt.” I’ve been that way for about 10 years now. There is just one thing holding me back from vanishing altogether, the granddaughter I mention in the post. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be indifferent to her – it seems impossible. Yet there’s no way to “take her with me” that I can see. But I have reached indifference to all else. The honest small businesses struggling to survive can all crash and burn with the rest and I won’t bat an eye.
I’m not sure Bill really understands what he’s trying to start here. It’s extraordinarily difficult to achieve psychologically, a true state of apathy toward everything in the failing world. True apathy toward anything is incredibly rare. I always ask something like this when trying to explain it: How do you feel about your younger/older/middle/whatever brother? (Meaning a person that doesn’t exist.) Well, you don’t feel about that person. You can’t. That is what you have to reach, toward everything. It’s a long way to go.
How are they to be eliminated now that they blatantly cheat and there are no consequences?
Because this is the Internet, on which nothing dies, I vaguely alluded to “more aggressive means.” I leave the details up to the readers’ imaginations, but I think Thomas Jefferson stated it plainly:
That said, there may be other things in the pipeline, of which we are all unaware, that are currently public speculation at best.