OPINION:
Once upon a time, America was free. Then COVID-19 came, civil liberties left, and everywhere there started appearing headlines about the “new normal” Americans were supposed to suffer — a “new normal” of face mask wearing, 6-foot social distancing, speech curtailing, speech stifling regulatory controls that come by way of executive pinheads and medical bureaucrats.
No. The standard in America is not and will not be this “new normal.” The standard in America is freedom, erring on the side of individual rights not government dictates.
Fight the “new normal.”
The “new normal” that’s being pitched is not America.
It’s collectivism over individualism.
“COVID-19: Will social distancing be the new normal? A Mayo Clinic expert discusses what the future might look like,” Mayo Clinic reported.
The post went on to state, “[N]ew projections suggest social distancing may need to continue through 2022. Researchers predict that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will return every winter, and that prolonged or intermittent social distancing strategies could limit the strain on health care systems.”
That’s right — 2022. And when 2022 comes, mark these words, it’ll change to 2024, or 2026, or there will be some other crisis to come to justify 2028.
The “new normal.”
Make America Great Again? Make America Asian is more like it.
A quote from Gregory Poland, with vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, in this Mayo piece: “I think we very well may become a culture, at least in the wintertime when there are so many respiratory viruses circulating, that we’ll be more like Asian cultures, where they more readily wear masks when outdoors,” he said.
The “new normal.”
The “new normal” puts the likes of Bill Gates, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at the head of deciding national policy — not the president, not Congress, not elected officials who are accountable to the people.
From the website of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, comes this headline: “Amid Ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic, Governor Cuomo Announces Collaboration with Gates Foundation to Develop a Blueprint to Reimagine Education in the New Normal.”
This is the same Gates who brought America the bureaucratically bloated top-down approach to public education called Common Core. And now he’s working hand-in-hand with New York’s governor to develop a post-COVID-19 education plan for the state’s public school system?
Egad.
Among some of the topics of the Gates-Cuomo “reimagine education” campaign: How to better use technology in the school systems — “because the old mode of our education system where everyone sits in a classroom is not going to work in the new normal,” Cuomo said.
In other words: Make way for the forced remote learning. Make way for the forced at-home, online classroom instruction. Make way for the forced intrusion of government-developed technology into personal home space, under cloak of the “new normal” of learning.
Spit on this “new normal.”
Remember when education was a parent’s responsibility?
A local government’s jurisdiction? It still is.
The government, however, wants that forgotten. The government wants it believed the the new way, the better way, is group think.
It’s all about the larger body; it’s all about doing good for the greater good.
“A New Normal With COVID-19: The Next Steps We Must Take,” the nonprofit ThinkGlobalHealth wrote. “With good strategy and strong execution, we will be able to return to a safer, more united world with better health care.”
A united world; but what of the republic? Hmm. What of the American democratic-republic indeed.
“There is no returning to normal after the crisis,” the World Economic Forum wrote.
We’ll see. That’s debatable. We still have choice and free will. And guns; and thank God, thank the wisdom of Founding Fathers, a Second Amendment. But more than that, Americans have moxie.
Americans, by and large, are a hard bunch to enslave.
Americans can choose to fight this “new normal” — should choose to fight this “new normal.” Because what this “new normal” means in America is this: Not America. And a free America is very much worth saving.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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