This campground, our home base for a while, is quieter now, emptier. ‘Tis the season, it seems, or more accurately the season’s end — summer is long-gone and autumn is on the wane. Few campers pass through these days, and those who do are hardier and haven’t traveled far, getting in one last trip before winterizing their rigs.
Those of us who remain are the long-timers and the winter-over crowd, folks who have made this an extended stop for one or another reason. (We have our own purpose.) All the faces are familiar. We know each others’ routines.
Our hosts are more relaxed, too, striking a easygoing pace now that they’re relieved of the pressure to turn over dozens of sites each day. There’s still plenty of work to do, of course — sweeping up fallen leaves, making various repairs and upgrading fixtures and facilities, stuff that’s hard to get done when the place is busy.
This park’s location makes it more of a destination than a waypoint. Access to an Interstate highway means driving 70 miles north or west, 115 miles south or almost 200 miles east, and most of the connecting roads don’t make for a quick’n’easy detour in this direction. So it’s unlikely that we’ll see many (if any) snowbirds bound for the Gulf Coast.
We’re comfortable here. We have all the services we need. We’ve made friends in the area and Deb’s cousin is an hour away. It’s not just “as good a place as any” — it’s a very good place.
The rain that was predicted to fall yesterday never materialized, at least not here. We had threatening skies pretty much all day but that was it. Deb and I dropped by Walmart for provisions, visited a local powersports dealer to window-shop UTVs and had dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant.
And it looks like we got Ernie’s furnace fixed just in time. The weather pattern has changed, and tonight we’re looking at a low of 27°F. A week from tomorrow, the day after Thanksgiving, the forecast calls for a similar low and morning snow showers.
We can deal with that.
As promised, my posts lately have been a mix of commentary and journaling. Maybe you like that, maybe you don’t, and I’m good either way. I do have a few things to say today on the subjects of health and Liberty — and if you’d rather not read that, keep scrolling (or come back here tomorrow).
A guy we know back in Ohio tested positive last week for WuFlu. He’s 30, has underlying conditions and has developed some severe symptoms, though not serious enough to require hospitalization. The Ministry of Health tracked him down, called and peppered him with questions, then “ordered” him to self-quarantine.
He confessed to us his belief that the “order” prevented him from leaving his house to get the medication his doctor had prescribed for him. We quickly disabused him of that notion — regardless of what the bureaucrats intended, we told him to ignore the government “order” and get his ass to the pharmacy to pick up the damned prescription.
By the way, he was infected and has exhibited an array of symptoms despite being “fully vaccinated.”
He did ask his doctor about some of the treatment protocols he’d read about. The doc replied that even if he were to prescribe, say, hydroxychloroquine, his script would be refused by the pharmacy.
So a private physician’s ordered course of therapy or prophylaxis — developed in consultation with a patient — can be nullified by a pharmacist and the State. Right? Got it.
Yesterday I became aware of something that Fauci said few days ago in an interview with CBS:
“[There is] this misplaced perception about people’s individual right to make a decision that supersedes the societal safety.”
That, my friends, is as un-American as it gets. From the lips of an unelected bureaucrat come the words of a tyrant. Now compare Doctor Doom’s unvarnished collectivism with the words of Benjamin Franklin (1755)*:
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
We must choose one or the other. It’s absolute and it’s binary — Fauci or Franklin?
There is no intellectually honest middle ground. Liberty is inalienable
I’ll close with one of my favorite quotes — this from Andrew Napolitano in 2013:
“What is the only moral relationship between liberty and safety? It cannot be balance, because liberty and safety are not equals, as one created the other. It can be only bias — a continual predisposition toward and preference for freedom.”
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
*Don’t give me any shit about the original context of Franklin’s statement — I know it very well. And fascinating though that history lesson may be, context doesn’t invalidate the fundamental principle, which is sound and appears throughout ol’ Ben’s writings. So put a sock in it.