There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. – Buffalo Springfield
I’d encourage you to buckle your seatbelts for this overture because there’s gonna be a rather long list of caveats before the main event. So, since we’re all busy people, let’s get right to it!
First! My regular readers are well aware of my propensity to bristle whenever I hear the fuckin’ word “unprecedented” as it’s applied to this plague era. As anyone who made it through 1968 intact will tell you, there’s absolutely nothing unprecedented about it. The “Asian flu” took 4 million lives and there was no vaccine to stop it. Martin Luther king and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Chicago “Race Riots” raged on a mere 10 miles from our Evanston home and the anti-Vietnam war protests were becoming increasingly violent.
Next! In what will come as no surprise to anyone, I wholeheartedly agree with the Second City Cop blogger when he or she recently wrote:
Wholesale banning of “dissident” voices. Voices with legitimate points of view and information to share. Safe treatments for COVID, some off-label, some not. Many effective beyond any sort of scientific doubt. The inane masking of children, who are in so little jeopardy from contracting COVID that their numbers don’t even show up in the statistical reports, yet who will shortly be forced to take a vaccine they don’t need. Suicides, along with numerous other mental and physical health issues long observed to be on the downswing, suddenly skyrocketing thanks to a megalomaniac doctor who has lied to Congress numerous times about gain-of-function research and who funded the Wuhan Lab that most likely released this pathogen.
Wanton destruction of what had been a thriving economy and small business boom. Inflation about to eclipse the worst of the 1970’s, bare shelves starting to appear here and there, shortages of silicon chips across the automotive and manufacturing industries, and don’t even get us started on gas prices. Every week there’s a new “condition” to be met to unmask and return to “normal.” A “normal” that was promised would take fifteen days to reach about 600 days ago. If Robert Heinlein and Stephen King co-wrote a sci-fi or dystopian horror novel, they’d be hard pressed to make even close to what we’ve been experiencing these past few months.
Put more simply, though I really shouldn’t be, I’m always amazed by how quickly the rabble is willing to trade freedom for a false sense of security that always arrives wrapped in n a form of fascism.
Third, as a veteran journalist and a reasonably successful campaign manager, few people understand the reality of a political blood feud better than I do. So, let’s just say the current kerfuffle between the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police and Mayor Lightweight would put the Hatfield and McCoy conflict to shame. Furthermore, the only way to describe Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is “an inexplicable disaster of epic proportion.” To say she wasn’t nearly prepared for the gig would be the blitheringly mildest of understatements.
When you consider major businesses are threatening to flee the city in the face of the unrelenting violence, her approach to the CPD is beyond impossible to fathom. The animosity has gotten so bad that I would encourage the Mayor to adopt the George Costanza “do exactly the opposite of what you’re thinking of doing” dynamic going forward. Can you say, “One and done?” I knew you could!
I suppose I just coulda said “I get it” 500 long words ago, but those nuns always insisted that we “show our work” and old Catholic habits die hard – pun intended. But even though I really do get all that, what I don’t get is why any police officer, and particularly the Second City variety, would refuse to be vaccinated against the plague.
Trust me! As a liberal who can’t stand liberals, I understand that being ordered around ad nauseum by a generally incompetent leadership with no real statutory power to do will quickly get to the draw-a-line-in-the-sand point, and it would seem that Mayor Lightweight’s CPD vaccine edict is that sandy line. There’s nothing quite like a more-than-morbidly obese governor regularly pontificating on our health, is there?
But when I consider the fascinating cast of characters CPD officers are tasked with dealing with on a daily basis – drug addicts, the homeless, and the mentally ill to name just a few – were I in their shoes, I’d want to be inoculated against EVERYTHING right on up to leprosy and the bubonic plague. There’s absolutely no doubt that the risk of this pandemic continues to be vastly overstated, but when COVID-19 surpasses all the other obvious dangers to become the leading cause of death among law enforcement officers, that is a real risk.
Aside from being proven safe beyond any reasonable doubt, studies have shown the Moderna and Pfizer varieties are 90-plus percent effective at preventing infection, and a booster shot puts the Johnson & Johnson iteration in the same ballpark. Meanwhile, if you do manage to contract a breakthrough COVID case you have a:
- 1 in 25,000 chance of being hospitalized
- 1 in 110,000 chance of dying
- And you’re 65 percent less likely to transmit the disease to someone else
To say that’s a truly massive across-the-board improvement over remaining unvaccinated would be yet another massive understatement. And a recently released study showed that being vaccinated against the virus reduces your mortality rate in general.
While so many of the COVID mitigations (masks, lockdowns) have been pure unadulterated bullshit, the vaccine is the one that isn’t because it works!
So, in light of all that medical evidence, I’d hate to see the increasingly contentious feud between the FOP and Chicago’s fascist mayor continue to become the proximate cause for CPD officers choosing not to do what’s clearly in their best interest. The sad truth is, it’s difficult enough being a police officer particularly during this progressive “defund the police” reign of terror. So, I would think the last thing an officer would want to do is court the kind of delta variant danger that’s been rendered utterly unnecessary.
Perhaps, as a retired officer suggested, this is a case where most of the CPD has been vaccinated, but they’re withholding the data to make a point about a vaccine mandate that clearly runs afoul of the FOP’s collective bargaining agreement. I certainly hope that’s the case. But regardless, I will continue to encourage all the men and women in blue to set aside any unnecessary conflict and simply get the shot. Mayor Lightweight will clearly be relegated to just another temporary bout of Chicago political insanity, but the too-frequent effects of the delta variant on the unvaccinated will not.
