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Day 92, COVID-19: I Went to a #ReopenCalifornia Protest
I went to the Operation Gridlock protest in Sacramento yesterday. There were actually two separate protests that were scheduled: one was a “stay in your vehicle” protest similar to the Michigan one last week, the other was a gathering on the Capitol steps. This led to some confusion. The vehicle protest was really just surrounding the Capitol Square area with vehicles and signs and was to run between noon and 1 p.m. The Capitol steps protest was scheduled for 1 p.m. In some reporting, there seemed to be some confusion about what was supposed to be happening. The Governor apparently thought people would be staying in their vehicles.
The permit for planned protests was granted by the Capitol Protection Unit from California Highway Patrol. The governor said he thought it was allowed based on protestors staying in their cars.
“My understanding is the protest that CHP has supported has social distancing, physical distancing, that was allowable on the basis of people being in their vehicles and not congregating as a group,” Newsom said.
But there were two events and, as you can see from the photos, there were people walking around with signs on the Capitol grounds while vehicles sat on the roadbed. People were not leaving their vehicles to protest if they had not come for the second event.
Main Street is not a well-oiled protest machine. It is made up of people who spend their lives focused on everything but politics. The local public radio played up more of the fringe elements — the anti-vaxxers who I suspect were the more organized part of the group given their history of protesting school vaccination requirements before the current epidemic.
But the pain is real on Main Street —
“In my little town, there’s a lot of businesses that are closed right now, people are losing their businesses and closing. It’s sad,” Young said.
Tom Orr, who owns a construction company in Rancho Cordova, says he laid off 60% of his workforce since the outbreak began.
“We need to reopen the state and stop this craziness and let people get back to work before the economy completely tanks,” he said.
I went, not because my income is directly affected (for now), but for the hairdressers and nail persons and food service workers and shop owners. It feels like these people are the ones we have asked to “go over the top” (a World War I trench warfare reference) and catch all the pandemic “bullets” in a terrible waste of lives from a flawed strategy. This was the first protest I or Mrs. Rodin’s mother, who accompanied me, had ever attended. Staying in the car and driving (or more correctly, idling) around the capitol was our speed. We went just to show up and add to the density. Unlike other vehicles, we had no signs or flags. We were just there.
I am unsure what impact the protesting will have. The politics of the state are decidedly collectivist. Gov. Newsom has little to fear from extending the lockdown. Voters in this state have been accepting deterioration and decay for years so long as it is not in the more tony zip codes in the Bay Area and Southern California or the coastal gems. Whatever you can’t see from the freeway or in your own neighborhood or work area doesn’t exist. If red states open up and life gets better there more quickly, the middle-class migration will accelerate, but ballot-harvesting will secure Newsom’s political future in the state regardless.
Do the protesters have it right? Well, yes and no. Certainly, there is an element of denial in some of the #reopen community. The people who get a serious case of COVID-19 are in a world of hurt and it is really important for us to better understand — to the extent we can — what set of factors put you at risk of not just getting the illness, but really having a bad outcome. Not just death, but serious chronic conditions even after recovery.
But our public pronouncements, broad as they are, are unhelpful. Those pronouncements seem to be designed to promote undifferentiated fear and caution, and justify health orders. But we need information upon which a free people can make personal choices. If not to the public, at least to our healthcare providers, so that people with individualized medical histories can make reasoned choices about how they are going to live their lives.
Government is supposed to be our servant, not our master. Our ancestors did not take the risks to come here for us to simply cower in our homes and wait for permission to live.
[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]
Published in General
Thanks, again, Rodin. I feel you represented me in my protests against further destruction of the people who are integral to our lives. Wow, your first protest. Were you glad you went, even though it’s uncertain how effective they might be?
The protests are good at getting politicians to reveal their true selves.
Protestors not abiding by mandated protest guidelines from the governor they are protesting. Oh, the insolence! Off with their heads! Don’t these peasants know how to follow orders!
The cases are peaking this week in Massachusetts, so we’re locked down for the duration. :-)
There’s a new plan in our state that looks like South Korea’s. Jim Yong Kim is the architect, and he has a lot of experience in managing epidemics. (He was also the president of Dartmouth 2009-2012.) He wrote in the New Yorker this week:
Our governor Charlie Baker is proceeding on this plan as of last week. We shall see how it works. Perhaps we can reopen the economy while managing the virus outbreaks until we get a vaccine:
This plan means we’ll soon be quarantining individuals, not places. :-)
I suppose they could have compromised and driven their vehicles up onto the capitol steps to make Gov. Newsom happy.
As far as how Californians see their governor, some of their mayors and other people at the end of this shutdown, it will probably depend on how long it stays in place, and how much the people who are working class, but normally vote lockstep with the coastal upper-middle class and rich elites, hang with those people.
The COVID-19 shutdowns have devastated the service industry, especially hospitality and restaurants, and you would think those people want to go back to work as much as those who gathered in Sacramento on Monday, who are assumed to mostly be part of the states’ Republican minority. Are the Democrats working at restaurants, hotels and other service industry sites in California so locked into their party affiliation that the state could stay locked down through 2021 and Newsom and others would pay zero price with those voters? Or do they also have their breaking point, at where the shutdowns go from seeming necessary to seeming authoritarian, and they decided to punish the people involved at the ballot box.
It took New York City almost three decades of higher crime and declining quality of life before just enough voters finally got fed up in 1993 and elected Giuliani, and the same thing is the question here — how far can the Democrats push their shutdowns before some of their own voting block starts pushing back, like New Yorkers did 27 years ago (and might again in 2021 after the hash de Blasio’s made of things), or is California so far gone it’s like Detroit or Chicago nowdays, where for the non-elites who can’t shelter themselves from the worst of their pols’ governing excesses, no amount of plunge in quality-of-life can get them to not vote Democrat in every national, state and local election?
Yes I am glad I went. They have scheduled another for May 1. Might as well have the capitalists out in force on May Day not just the communists. I will probably make a sign this time.
There is a saying that conservatives do not protest because they are too busy working.
Now they are not working.
It’s an interesting problem getting Main Street to protest. It probably explains the uneasy coalitions forming amongst people that do not buy into progressive politics but otherwise may have profound differences. I hesitated to sign up for some of the FB groups (and the MeWe.com alternative in case FB censors reopen posts) because I knew there were people going there who might be anti-vaxxers (which I am not) or may think that 5G is a conspiracy to spread COVID-19, conduct national surveillance, and other such fears that I do not share. But it is these groups that have the protest chops to organize that Main Street decidedly does not. So just like forming an Israeli government, there needs to be some joining together to fight government dictates lest we lose the “self-” in self-government.
Still, I wonder if there’s another way to learn when these protests are taking place without those platforms. How did you learn of this first one?
I think I saw a reference to #reopencalifornia and then went to twitter to search that hashtag. I think it was twitter where I saw a poster of the event. I then worked backward to a FB group which also had a reference to MeWe,com
Is the lack of social distancing in the main picture supposed to represent the participants’ view that there is little to worry about?
Thank you for this report, Rodin
As far as your remarks here:
Do the protesters have it right? Well, yes and no. Certainly, there is an element of denial in some of the #reopen community. The people who get a serious case of COVID-19 are in a world of hurt and it is really important for us to better understand — to the extent we can — what set of factors put you at risk of not just getting the illness, but really having a bad outcome. Not just death, but serious chronic conditions even after recovery.
####
I see no element of denial. We are all of us smart enough to realize that only because COVID was somehow deserving of a pandemic status categorization, which was only offered WHO’s proclamation of COVID being pandemic-level only after Bill Gates donation of 100 million bucks, then in the intervening weeks since Trump shut us down due to Pandemic, we should not be seeing the same cashiers at the grocery stores and pharmacies where we shop. By now some one or two of them should be home ill with COVID themselves or else tending to family members who are ill. But everyone is still around.
Furthermore, with some real analysis based on random members of society, the Stanford Study on Covid mortality rate should be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, just as the Left’s hold on the media brought entire enclaves of society to “wake up” to the idea that as far as immigration, not a single immigrant mom with a crying baby should ever be denied entrance to our country, now the lib media lets us know that until we can conclusively state how it is COVID came about, how it operates, why some people get it and some don’t, and most importantly, until we are absolutely sure not another single person will be infected with it, “rational, science-based” citizens must refuse to re-open society.
Stanford’s random survey numbers indicate the disease’s mortality rate is more akin to the srious flu seasons of 1957 and 1968. Yes tens of thousands of people died during those outbreaks. But at least we did not have a media taken hostage by BigPharma, and going full blown over the top with hysteria that we must shelter in home until Gov Newson says we can be free.
(I will be back on Rico later to put up an essay on how point for point, Newsom’s six necessary requirements for re-opening the Golden State match point for point both the statements and desires of Bill Gates. So are these two men brothers from separate mothers, or what? Although if that is the case, Gates got the brains while Gavin got the good looks.)
Some of the people at the protest referred to the virus as a “hoax”. My point was not to characterize protesters generally as not believing the virus was real. After all, I was a protester, too. My only point was that the #reopen movement has a lot of supporters for very different reasons, some of which I am in much accord and others that I am less persuaded by. But we can make common cause to maximize liberty.
If I lost my business because the state shut down 80 percent of the economy, I would be irate and irrational.
I can’t judge people who are protesting to regain their lives and livelihoods because I would do the same thing, civil or uncivil disobedience, in some cases, probably worse.
This is different but the end result is similar… my parents lost a couple businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (April 30, 1992). I can tell you I was irate for a few years. Let’s say I became more cynical and vehemently anti-gun control.
Bastiat had great admiration for America because no other country mandates the protection of individual liberty and property.
Until Covid-19…84
May 1 is international worker’s day
I am totally serious
Truth is stranger than fiction
Meanwhile in Idaho – unmasked and ungloved police officers arrest a mother (who along with other mothers) was letting her children play at a playground. Have we had enough of this nonsense?
My favorite protest picture:
A year ago I read one of the best business leadership books I’ve ever read. It was written by Steve Farber, author of the good-selling book The Radical Leap. His new book is called Love Is Just Damn Good Business.
It’s relevant to our current debate over reopening Main Street and whether the press and the local, state, and federal governments have acted properly and in our best interests in partially shutting down the economy for two months. (As I wrote that, I remember as if it were yesterday that I thought two weeks would do the trick. :-) )
I don’t see saints and sinners in these decisions that have been made. When this started, I remember thinking I wouldn’t want to be in a public policy-making position for any amount of money. These have been extraordinarily hard calls to make in what the Navy SEALs call our present VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) circumstances. I believe Main Street will find its own footing soon. Its primary challenge will be to assure the public that it has taken the necessary steps to keep them safe while they are on each business’s premises.
The reason I respect the decisions that have been made around the world and here to shutter communities as much as possible is that those decisions were mindful of what really drives human beings to act–to work, to conduct their business, to plan, to get out of bed in the morning. It’s not self-interest in a pure sense. It’s really love. So to tell people not to care about the people around them who are suffering from this disease is counterproductive. That would not have happened no matter how many times the government tried to make it so. People have been worried about their loved ones. That is truly a good thing, and it is actually the thing that keeps the world turning.