We've learned that we cannot eat in restaurants, unless we eat outside the restaurant, inside an enclosure.
We've learned that if one mask is good, two or even three masks is better.
We've learned that our governor, health authorities and law enforcement possess sweeping powers to control our lives and private decisions, including where and with whom we can gather (including our own families and elderly loved ones), which businesses we are allowed to patronize, what we must wear, what kinds of recreation are safe and what kinds are forbidden.
We've learned that trooping around with hundreds of other shoppers in Costco or Walmart is perfectly safe and healthy, but gathering with fellow believers in church is hazardous.
We've learned that schools and colleges must be closed and that 70-percent to 94-percent effective vaccines will save us all from a 99.8-percent survivable disease, although as of Feb. 3, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) stated that teachers are safe to return to schools without vaccinations.
This begs the question: If teachers do not need vaccinations, why do any of the rest of us?
At this point, it is becoming clear that mandatory masks and virus testing were just the beginning.
Mandatory vaccinations are already a reality in some public and private businesses, and the general public is next, at least if you want to patronize a business or fly on an airliner.
We've learned that looting, burning, attacking police and federal buildings, shutting down I-5 so “protesters” can march across the Interstate Bridge are all acceptable, non-punishable forms of free speech, but the Clark County Sheriff's Office and Salmon Creek Legacy Hospital recently gave out purposely misleading information about a civil rights incident, leading citizens to believe that the family and friends of a frightened patient who just wanted to go home were “dangerous extremists, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers” and that a lockdown was necessary to protect patients.
Media have largely cooperated with this narrative, although many of us who know the people involved are aware that this defames everyday people from our area who only gathered to support the patient and her adult daughter.
It should be noted that, per official reports, there were no arrests and no violence during this incident, although the adult daughter of the patient was brutally punched in the throat by a deputy preventing her access to her mother.
The last 12 months of predation by officialdom have taught me that citizens might be willing to trade away freedom for “safety,” if they can just hope for a few more stimulus bucks.
Samuel Adams might well say that we've learned nothing:
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen."
