Open it and they will come.
The children did come, too, when Washington state grandmother Kimberley Taxdahl “opened” a town park so kids could play in the sun. The police also came, however, and arrested the “fed up” grandma for violating their governor’s orders. It’s just the latest example of Americans taking a stand against coronavirus-crazed government officials who lock down their states because they are immune — to science and reason.
As Q13 Fox reports:
A grandma was arrested in Sedro-Woolley after taking a stand against Gov. Jay Inslee’s “stay-at-home” order.
For weeks, Kimberley Taxdahl says she’s watched as officials canceled long-standing summer traditions in Sedro-Woolley.
Thursday, she says she didn’t want to standby watching any longer.
“I want the parents in our community to make the decisions to whether or not they should bring their children out to play,” said Taxdahl.
She came down to Riverfront Park and removed caution tape surrounding the playground equipment.
“I’m advocating for our poor kids that have been locked up for fifty days,” she said.
Taxdahl posted to Facebook, telling people to come to the park, offering free cotton candy to the first 50 kids.
Appreciative, parents and children responded and did come. But the cops followed. They asked Taxdahl “to leave the playground, and after she refused, she was given a paper arrest and charged with criminal trespassing,” WND.com tells us (video below).
Taxdahl is one of a growing number of Americans taking a stand against governor-imposed, science-defying lockdown orders, joining in this a Maine restaurateur, a Texas salon owner, a 77-year-old Michigan barber, a large group of California churches, and a New Jersey gym proprietor, among others.
Taxdahl says she’s “fed up” with Washington’s now 45-day-long lockdown. “‘I wake up and wonder, Am I really here? Is this happening?’ she said of the order to stay at home,” WND also relates. “I just don’t understand what has happened to our state” (one of her Facebook posts below).
But irrationality has happened. For example, while Taxdahl has received support, she said she has also “been harshly criticized for her actions and even called a ‘child molester’ and a ‘pedophile,’” WND further reports. This isn’t surprising, though, given that so many are in thrall to mind-molesters.
One person thus deceived appears to be Sedro-Woolley mayor Julia Johnson. While her comments in the above video reflect good intentions, she is another public official who, owing to ignorance, is paving a road to Hell with them.
For instance, addressing Taxdahl’s arrest Friday on the Sedro-Woolley Police Department’s Facebook page, she wrote that “the harsh reality is that none of us get to pick and choose which rules we are going to follow” (post below).
Actually, the harsh reality is that some of “us” — the rich, powerful, and connected — do. Just consider Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, CNN host Christ Cuomo, Barack Obama, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, all of whom apparently violated lockdown rules they support/impose on others.
Johnson also stated that while “encouraging children to play on park equipment may have appeared to be making a statement to the Governor regarding our constitutional rights, in essence it may have possibly endangered their lives. If even one of those children were unknowingly carrying the COVID-19 virus, it may have put all the other children in harms [sic] way.”
This is ignorance. It’s now widely established that the Wuhan virus is less deadly to children than is the flu. For example, the latter killed 358 kids during the 2009-10 winter season alone; the Wuhan virus has claimed just a handful. And do we shut down schools and parks every flu season?
Moreover, consider Sedro-Woolley’s county, Skagit. It thus far has 14 virus-attributed deaths out of a population of 129,205, which is 0.01 percent of the population. Also note that 61 percent of Washington’s virus-attributed deaths have involved nursing-home residents, and Skagit shares the nursing-home problems. Furthermore, most virus cases are contracted indoors, and the pathogen reportedly degrades in three minutes under midday sun. In other words, worrying about kids playing outside is a bit like the medieval concern about miasma.
But Wuhan virus verities have already been explained an infinitum (e.g., here, here, here, here, here, and here). The deeper issue is that the current virus hysteria was entirely predictable among a people that has, over time, been inured to the nanny state.
For decades we’ve accepted what was previously unimaginable: government dictating to us about smoking in our own establishments, wearing seatbelts, donning bicycle helmets, having health coverage, pronoun usage, and a host of other things. “My body, my choice!” ironically, now only relates to actions involving the body of another person: a child (whom you may kill in the womb, but not spank outside of it, according to leftist governments).
So we currently have a bubble-wrap, Cult of the Body society. It’s a worldly cult, in which, absent belief in God and the afterlife, fear of losing this life becomes inordinate. And intensely fearful people are yet more irrational than people normally are (quite a trick). They may even keep healthy children locked up over a disease affecting the sick and elderly.
Ironically and tragically, this inordinate fear of death could contribute to our Republic’s death — a fate the lockdowns, if not halted, may very well visit upon us.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.