Wherefore shalt thou flee, Governors Abbott and DeSantis?
It is inevitable, now that hospitals are already short of space, ventilators, and nurses to treat those suffering from the Delta variant, that there will be uprisings against the Governors who blocked sensible masking and vaccination mandates by communities desiring them. It doesn’t matter that some of the people could be fooled all of the time, they are not in the majority. The obvious failure of their anti-vax and anti-mask beliefs will become painfully apparent to them.
The Governors of Texas and Florida could try to escape to each other’s states, but the anger would just transfer. They could try to flee to Cancun like Senator Ted Cruz did with the Texas freeze and blackouts. However, both Governors blamed all the infections on infected migrants coming across the border from Mexico, even though Gov. DeSantis forgot that he doesn’t have a border with Mexico. Even if all million arriving from Mexico were infected, Texas with 30 million people and Florida with 20 million will outnumber the immigrants 50 to 1. So the people of Mexico will not welcome their escapes, especially considering many of the infected in Texas have relatives in Mexico.
The Governors could ask Trump to ask his old friend, Vlad, if he would take the Covid virus trash in, but Vlad knows the fake Trumps from the real Trump.
Remember when we spent weeks worrying about the number of people killed in the Surfside building collapse, and DeSantis was there every day. Now he is blocking mandates which could really save lives in Miami-Dade county.
The Governors could also apply for visas to Canada, but the Canadians have done much better with vaccinating than the US, even though having initial supply problems. The last people they want are influencers for vaccine and mask denials.
I still find myself wondering how people become so convinced that vaccination and masks are some sort of weird plots. Is it the fault of algorithms that take them yet further deeper down the rabbit hole of falsehoods and conspiracies? Or are these people just the end of a Bell curve of human behavior and beliefs.
After a night of deep thought, I realized that I had left out the third member of the Triumvirate of Mask and Vaccine Dystopia, Tucker Carlson. Tucker had just been abroad kow-towing to Prime Minister Victor Orban, who has taken over Hungary and made it into a dictatorial one party state for Fidesz. Orban has served for eleven years now, and had served for four more before. Obviously, all three could probably find refuge from deportment there.
Why might they be pursued? It only took days before Governor Cuomo of New York was disgraced, abandoned and threatened with impeachment, before he had to resign.
And how did the Governors of the second and third largest US states, with excellent universities, get themselves sucked into the anti-mask movement? Texas has the Johnson space flight center, head to manned space flight, which I once toured. Lots of high tech moves to Texas. Florida is the state of space craft and space flight launchings at Kennedy Space Flight Center and Cape Canaveral, again where I toured.
I can see that turning Texas and Florida into cities and school districts of high anxiety for parents of school age children will seriously discourage young recruits and therefore high tech businesses from moving or expanding there.
We thought that Trump went off the deep end when he speculated about his own invented cures for the Coronavirus. That was only news for a day. What about the Governors continued defiance and Pollyanna beliefs that all will soon end well without intervention?
I really don’t see that Governors have the right to order educational institutions to do anything, especially when their boards are elected themselves. Governor DeSantis also cannot deny funding to districts who were funded in a budget passed by the State Assembly and Senate. Nor threaten the salaries of elected school board members and County Supervisors.
Yet nobody sees a way out for these wayward Governors drag racing down the riverbed into a flood of infections and suffering.
