This column does not offer drive through COVID vaccines. But, for $100, I’d be glad to encourage you to take the vaccine. Is that the way this works, or no? Honestly, I don’t know anything about any of this and neither does anyone else. We’ve had 18 months to prove that. Science is science and those are the facts. I don’t make the rules.
If you are keeping score at home, mark me down for leading you astray recently. I told you that former Gov. Jay Nixon may jump in the upcoming United States Senate race in Missouri. He confirmed to multiple media outlets last week that he was NOT running for US Senate. Shocking that a sane person would not want to jump in a Senate race that features former Governor Eric Greitens, Attorney General Eric Schmitt and potentially Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. There is not enough ego space in the State of Missouri for that crew. We might have to borrow part of Kansas to fit their heads into a debate venue.
Greitens is busy doing physical fitness runs to please the older conservative woman crowd and hanging out with Rudy Giuliani. Eric Schmitt is busy suing China and the cities in his state and Lucas is busy trying to personally stamp out COVID and dominate Twitter. Add a hundred million dollars of righty and lefty money and that senate race will be an all-out crazy fest. You just wait.
Kansas City Health Director Rex Archer retired last month. I suspect his career had several substantial milestones that did not involve COVID, yet this is where it ends and began for most. In fact, I suspect that the health director of most cities operated in relative anonymity for years until 2019.
I suspect he did a great job; I have no idea, though. I am going to miss his badge. To me the health department badges that became more prominent during the pandemic press conferences became a symbol of the wrong way thinking path we are headed down. If you think about it, in the last two years we have had a large part of the population call for more enforcement from health officials and less enforcement from law officers. That is a little scary to me and it should give you pause as well. We want to take badges from police officers and provide more “social worker” type solutions, yet they want more health department enforcement of perceived or real health risks.
The more that the health industry is emboldened as an “enforcement” entity, the more things you’re going to give up. Your cigarettes, your liquor, your Little Debbie snack cakes and even red meat are at risk. Maybe that is what we need, but it still quite a shift in overall thinking and these health department badges are a shining example of the power that we have shifted to them.
I’m not sure what my break point is but it is probably beer. They can quarantine me, social distance me, close our restaurants, bars and make me get a vaccine and vaccine passport, but if they take away Bud Light, I’m fighting. Not sure if I’m prepared to travel to DC for an insurrection over it, but I would stand in the middle of a Trex Mart and take on all comers in a fight to the death for a sixer of suds. I’m not proud that my break point is Bud Light, but it is what it is. I’m sure most of you have a higher moral threshold and for that I am glad. For now, mine remains relatively low; hopefully a few of you can relate.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or trying to buy a health department badge on Ebay)