A respected Chattanooga resident upbraids me for my pending bid to compel Gov. Lee to obey the health statute amid the alleged health crisis.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7 FM
“I appreciate your work on the social security number,” he says. “But I am amazed if you are actually fighting against mandated masks which have been proven to help stop the passing of Covid-19. I am 80 years old. I am at risk of contagion and death. I mostly shelter in, and when I must go out for groceries, I wear my mask willingly and am grateful to all those who do the same.
“I am a man of WWII (not a participant), and I remember our country demanding our 17 year old “boys” carry 50 to 100 pound packs on their back and jump off onto Omaha beach to fight Nazis for the sake of my life and the life of our nation — and you react negatively to being mandated to wear a cloth mask out in public to help save my life and that of other U.S. citizens?
“What has happened to you, David? How can you feel so little obligation to or caring for the rest of us?”
It’s not just a mask
I am grateful to hear objections to my analysis of the CV-19 crisis that has plunged the world into a depression and hastened the breakdown of the American way of life. But the story is much bigger than the man thinks. It’s not just the masks.
The entire show by state government operates outside the state’s limits in the constitution. We are under government by emergency, not under government obedient to law.
The GOP/Dem parties in charge are running their public health show on 7 words and a period. These words are, “with the force and effect of law.” That is, any edict Gov. Lee makes, and allows others to make in the counties, has the force and effect of law, and that the lot of them have legislative power upon the people generally.
Law shields commerce, travel; Gov. Lee halts them
But what we’ve lived under since April 2 is not law, but absolutism of the worst kind — people told to shut down their businesses. Jail ministries shuttered. Ministries to the old and sick barred. Mercies of worship prohibited. Duty to put bread on one’s table for one’s children prohibited by “stay at home” orders, in defiance of the law at Title 68 that says the governor and his commissioner must combat disease “with the least inconvenience to commerce and travel.”
Is this stricture honored? No, not in the panic, not in the purported “necessity” of shutting down one of the U.S.’ most prosperous and most free economies here in Tennessee, with a loss of billions and billions of dollars, and a descent into domino-row insolvencies, business closings, an altered landscape that cannot be restored as the damage is permanent and from which there can be no recovery, since that buffers and margins no longer exist in the economy.
Necessity is the tyrant’s plea since the writings of Shakespeare and Machiavelli, and it’s no different today.
I hope the critic has been reading my reporting on the lack of authority left and right in this mass tort by the state against the people.
No authority. No limit. No due process.
Title 68, ignored by Gov. Lee and his GOP cranks, requires respect of the individual and respects due process right to two key elements of prosperity and liberty. And that is notice and hearing. You have right to a notice and a hearing whenever the state points a finger of accusation and claim against you. Under CV-19, no such possibility exists.
We live under arbitrary government WORSE than if the krauts or the reds had taken over the country and were manning checkpoints on Brainerd Road, I tell my interlocutor.
An enemy invasion could hardly do more damage to the state of affairs in Tennessee than salvific government without competency or proper declaration “fighting” a disease.
