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Essential Workers Honk Back
One of the posts I wrote that got the widest circulation was on what actually matters in a crisis. Instapundit and even Ace of Spades picked it up. Back then, people were really worried about the pandemic, other issues tended to fade into the background. All that mattered was surviving the virus, and our response to the virus.
Pretty rapidly, we were introduced to the concept of the “Essential Worker.” The Essential Worker had to be at work, no matter what. Critical infrastructure workers, health care workers, food supply chain including grocery stores, delivery drivers, and first responders. I was a second-tier essential worker, as I was around to support people researching the virus. There was a lot of gratitude for essential workers back then, when you could say “We’re all in this together” and get determined nods rather than eyerolls.
One of the main groups of essential workers was truck drivers. Quite simply, without truckers our supply chain is dead. Amazon is nothing without a freight fleet, and our economy and civilization would fall into disrepair as items pile up at railyards, docks, and factories. Right now, part of the supply chain nightmare is that truckers are in short supply. Around when I wrote the article above, truckers were finally getting some thanks. Even Justin Trudeau tweeted about thanking truckers for their hard work during the early pandemic.
A funny thing happened to the Non-Essential workers during the pandemic — they got to feel virtuous by staying home. This included a lot of government workers and even politicians. The lockdown was not so bad for them, and for many the promise of social control was too much to resist. Meanwhile, the essential workers were taking all the risks and working extra hours. Gratitude faded into entitlement, experts torched their credibility, and the lockdown dragged on.
Vaccine mandates combined with a lackluster vaccine took this standoff to a new level. The elite political class, which is about as far from essential as you can imagine, decided to crack down as opposed to actually persuading. Essential workers began to push back, and suddenly the contrast became clear. Essential workers realized they held the power in society. All they had to do was organize.
The Convoy is a cousin of the Tea Party in the US, a demonstration by civic-minded citizens mostly drawn from the middle class. It has the benefit of being backed by labor union tactics without the bureaucracy. Perhaps now that they hear the blaring of horns from miles of trucks, the non-essential workers will get off the road and out of the way of the essential workers that keep our economy moving.
Honk Honk!
Published in Domestic Policy
In the UK and in Washington the Whips do not have nearly the same official authority to discipline MPs as Canadian party leaders enjoy. In the UK and Washington the Whips have to be more … creative … which is precisely why the House of Cards tv shows are so dramatic. Frank Underwood can’t just say, “vote how I tell you or you’re no longer a Republican”.
And this raises the question, What does the government want with putting truckers out of work?
What would have been the better slogan? “You gotta do what you gotta do!”?
It lets them know their place. It teaches the working class who is really in charge, and who they are not allowed to criticize. Pour encourager les autres.
Or maybe, and this is crazy, but maybe they want to lower the standard of living in the affluent western world.
Well, not for themselves. They’ll dine on Wagyu Beef and toss the working class some peanut shells.
If by peanut shells you mean meal worms and crickets.
Never heard of it.
I’ve heard the term. I probably never understood what authority they have.
I guess I am not that cynical. I figured there would be enough self-preservation instinct to keep the governing class interested in actually controlling the pandemic. Also, I remember the spirit of innovation in the early days where people kept on adapting to the threat out there and the guidelines seemed to be based on evidence. It took the virus, the control measures, the experts, and the vaccines underperforming to destroy all the years of trust I built up.
I’m curious, did you post about this cynical stance here in early 2020?
You are completely missing the context here. Essential vs. Non-Essential is about dealing with a crisis / disaster. It’s a way of prioritizing – if we can’t have everyone working, who absolutely must be on the job? If you have a massive blizzard, some people need to be at work no matter how high the drifts are. Utility workers and first responders need to be out there. The mayor and his staff can wait and use Zoom. This is part of nearly any emergency or business continuity plan. Have you never heard of running on a skeleton crew?
The problem was that our initial approach was never changed, despite evidence coming in that it was not needed. The initial lockdown was for 15 days, remember. I expected the coronavirus would die down once we hit the summer of 2020. Essential vs Non-Essential is meant for a disaster that is eventually over, not the new normal. The snow has melted, and we were still acting like there is an ongoing blizzard because it is a little windy and the temperature is in the 50s.
You are completely missing the point here. Why can’t we have everyone working? You know who must be on the job? The people who need to earn a living to keep their homes, their families, food on the table, etc.
Screw anyone who decided certain jobs or businesses weren’t essential and used the force of law to close them down and put them out of work. Screw them all. To hell with them.
And it didn’t do a damned thing. Had we initially locked down for 15 or 30 or none the result as far as COVID goes would have been the same. But at least if we’d locked down for ZERO days there would have been less economic impact.
Good points. But doesn’t Essential (Life Saving) Personnel only apply for the short duration of time when people can survive without going to the store to restock food supplies? Two weeks were possible, after which people were going to start starving anyway. Once you have people shopping and engaging again, hasn’t the time for emergency back-up solution passed?
This x 1000000000000000000000000000
“We are all in this together” is the same vacuous noise as “thank you for your service” coming from the left.
I never thought healthcare workers were “Heroes” by the way. And I am one. I have plenty of evidence that they were not.
+ 1
Not once they started spending their days choreographic dance moves on Tik Tok, telling us to stay home, while they went out to march with BLM because it was soooooo much more important than your job.
That was the turn. That was the moment many of us realized this was all a farce.
Of course, then the government turned on healthcare workers as soon as they had leverage over them. Take the jab or you’re unemployed!
Conclusion: the government is not going to help you. The government is going to screw you over. Trust that to always be the case.
I will make sure to tell people in March 2020 once I invent my time machine. We did not know then what we know now. People wanted to avoid what we saw happen in Italy, and we did not have a lot of tools to approach the situation. Rage against me if you want, but the concept of essential work is key to emergency planning. However, emergency preparedness also demands that you stop and reassess if the plan is actually workable or if it is counterproductive.
The problem was that they never stopped to see if the lockdown was working, same with masks. You are right, we have solid evidence now that both are largely ineffective. We should’ve gone back to our protocol for flu season instead of this never-ending quest for zero COVID-19.
I think your rage is better directed at the lockdown in general, and the cult of zero who keep it in place.
The Lockdown was stupid from day one. It flew in the face of everything ever learned about how to deal with outbreaks. They tried something novel. I speak as someone who knows people appalled from day one at the actions, pointing out this sort of thing had never been tried before and it was not what were set up for. They lied about two weeks. Period.
No Grace and no forgiveness. If there were justice, the people who helped to do all this damage, who all live their happy 6+ figure lives, would be in cement prisons with rats.
I wonder why some staffer in the WH Press Office hasn’t come up with something along the lines of the Covid Medal of Honor. Opportunities for Oval Office photos.
A COVID compliance “hero” from each state, for starts.
Epidemiologists have long understood the disastrous consequences of lockdown measures, and even the WHO began to complain loudly about them in the fall of 2020. Only Sweden seems to have remembered the policy and they presented us with a sterling example, which we righteously ignored.
The U.S. House of Representatives also has a majority and minority whip leadership position. The Democrats treat this seriously, while Republicans pretend not to have the same power to impose party discipline. We should want strong Whips in a representative republican government, as they help keep clear for the voting public the real positions of the parties under which candidates run.
I could see the lockdown in principle. If the disease runs it’s course within two weeks, and if we have good knowledge that people get at least a month’s immunity after catching and getting over it — or else, if we decontaminate all surfaces, and wash out clothes and sterilize our water bottles, and change out bed linen daily, and wear gloves at all time, changing them frequently with good sterile technique (I’m not joking here or being hyperbolic) then making everyone never touch each other for two weeks would stop all transmission and incubation.
That’s impossible but was worth a try. Why we have lockdowns, lockouts, and arrests for not getting the vaccine two years later is purely political.
Maybe a Covid Stakhanovite award.
If people were really against lockdowns, they would take some of their anti-Fauci energy and demand that Biden repudiate Michael Osterholm, who still serves on his covid advisory board. People like that must be glad to have Fauci as their lightning rod.
The concept was initially not about stopping the disease, it was about keeping the spread to a sane level. The goal was to avoid mass numbers of people getting sick at once. What people were terrified of was not the disease, but everybody and their brother getting the disease at the same time, overwhelming the medical system. That was what flatten the curve was all about, not actually stopping the outbreak entirely.
Well, there was no mass illness. But people kept up the lockdown because they had to do something, and it gave them lots of power. The shift toward actually expecting to eliminate the virus with lockdowns was crazy. Quarantine works only when an outbreak is in the early stages, which we missed because China is @$$hoe.
Only 10% of the truckers. As the Trudeaupians keep telling us, 90% of them have been vaccinated.
Aren’t any of the vaccinated ones among the protestors?
Maybe this is so. But I wonder. Nevertheless, it seems that a good portion of the protesting truckers are fully vaccinated. Certainly the representatives in Ottawa want their food and packages delivered, silently and passively. This protest isn’t about the vaccine, it’s about the mandates and freedom.
Yes. One of the top three interviewed says that he has had three shots.
It has been repeatedly claimed that most of the protestors are fully vaccinated, but there is no hard evidence to back up the claim.
It has also been repeatedly claimed that 90% of Canuckistani adults have received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine.
A 90% vaccination rate only two years after a disease has even been identified would be utterly unprecedented in the history of humankind. If the claim is accurate it very much raises the question of why mandates could possibly be necessary.
It is certainly true that when doses of the vaccine were in short supply the demand for them was very high. Now that doses of the vaccine are readily available governments say it’s utterly imperative that they impose mandates. Curious.
“Anything that is not permitted is prohibited. Anything that is not prohibited is mandatory.”