I am taking breakfast in a diner in East Hartford, uncrowded on orders of Governor Ned Lamont. It is Monday, generally not a busy work day but, because of Coronavirus restrictions, far less crowded than usual.
Business has suffered, here and in every other restaurant in
Connecticut, because the governor has got it into his head that restaurant
business should be reduced by half. This restriction has reduced profit-taking,
and the halving of profits has led to a proportional decrease in staffing, and
an increase in all overhead costs, such as rent. To be sure the rent cost has
not changed, but the ability of the diner owner to pay the rent has been
halved, on orders of the governor.
We are not permitted to know how Lamont, operating in the
absence of a legislature and a judiciary, both shuttered because of Coronavirus,
reached his decision to cut in half the number of people usually
serviced by restaurants across the state Why half, why not a third? Better still,
why not allow capacity to be determined by the owner of the diner, presumably more
concerned with the health and welfare of his staff and customers than Lamont
who, for all we know, has trouble scrambling eggs in the morning? If the diner
produces sick customers, it will lose customers and earnings.
We are four months into a Coronavirus infestation in
Connecticut that has tapered off considerably, and yet models of governance
have not changed to meet changed circumstances.
A great deal has changed in the four month period since the initial
nationwide Coronavirus shutdown. The so-called “science” of Coronavirus, we now
know, had not been very scientific; which is to say, some of the early postulates
were highly misleading, but useful to politicians. Science is self-redemptory,
and so is politics – when scientists, governors and lawmakers are able to
incorporate important changes into their brittle and ridged policies.
Early data models indicating a static, predictable relationship
between Coronavirus morbidity and contagion were, to put it very mildly,
unreliable, because we could not know with any degree of certitude the ever
changing numerator or the denominator of the Coronavirus equation. Death forecasts
relative to Coronavirus contagion, we now know, were hugely overstated. And the
early unreliable models that undergirded the political response to the pandemic
were themselves subject to rapid change. The political response to Coronavirus
in Connecticut, owing mostly to a stubborn governor, remains static. The total death counts flourished by politicians to frighten the bewildered were totally useless.
For example, we now know – and have known since the onset of
Coronavirus in Connecticut -- that the victims most vulnerable to Coronavirus
were nursing home residents; sixty percent of Coronavirus deaths, both in
Connecticut and New York, occurred in nursing homes. If Governors Lamont and
Andrew Cuomo of New York had intervened early and properly to prevent morbidity
in nursing homes, the number of deaths in proportion to the number of persons
who had contracted Coronavirus in both states would have been greatly reduced –
halved, in fact. As a result, the Coronavirus menace would have seemed far less
lethal, and far less useful to manipulative politicians. Good Lord, how they lovingly massaged those figures.
We know now – and have known since the onset of Coronavirus
in Connecticut -- that children under the age of fourteen are in no
mortal danger from Coronavirus, yet schools servicing this age group in
Connecticut remain shuttered.
We now know that tele-education is a pale imitation of in-person
education, yet white, privileged Harvard, refusing to provide other than video
classes to its overcharged students, has made no provision to reduce its yearly
cost of $50,000.
My neighbor has taught in Hartford public schools for a couple
of decades. I asked him to describe in a sentence the difference between
tele-education and in-person education in Hartford.
One works, he said, the other doesn’t.
In addition to education, public and private inner-city schools
provide to children the comradeship of like-minded peers and a safe place from
shooting galleries in which kids murder kids. Teachers, some of them male, provide
a model of right behavior to children brought up in homes without fathers. When,
if ever, will someone start a “Black Fathers Matter” movement? Inner city
schools provide food to children with empty cupboards at home, spiritual nourishment
to desperate souls, and much else besides.
What is the one thing you would change in public education
in Hartford, I asked? This produced arched eyebrows. There is not one problem
in urban schools, he said. There is a scorpion’s nest of problems. Therefore, there can be no one solution.
These kids are suffering from battalions of problems, many
of them rooted in dysfunctional homes. And the ruinous solutions provided by “woke
-- read “progressive” -- legislators only deepen despair and rootlessness.
During Coronavirus days in Connecticut’s disordered urban areas, everything bad
has become much worse. Domestic violence, suicides, street shootings, social pathologies of
every kind have dramatically increased. Deprived of teachers, some progressive
quasi-Marxists are now on a murderous mission to rob inner cities of police
protection.
Back to the diner.
“You don’t think this place will close, do you? It serves
the best breakfast sausage in Connecticut, and the wait-staff isn’t half bad.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “I have to look out for myself and
my family.”
“Children?”
“Six, some of them grown and working. They should be
supporting me.” This humor is typical of him. During my last visit, he asked me
if I’d like some tequila with my coffee.
“Good for you. How long have you worked here?”
“Seventeen years. I have to make more money” so that, when he
retired, he would not have to beg.
He’s Hispanic, mid-forties, confident, energetic, a proud
family man.
“You’ll be fine.”
Through his Coronavirus face mask, I could tell, from the
slanting of his twinkling eyes, he was smiling.
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