DAVID MARCUS IN TOMORROW’S NEW YORK POST: End New York City’s lockdown now!
Last Friday morning, some 3,500 New Yorkers lined up at a Catholic church in Queens to receive free food hours before it even opened, according to the New York Police Department. Catholic Charities has reported a 200 percent increase in demand over the past month and a half.
By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.
It needs to end. Now.
In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.
We were told we were moments away from running out of ventilators. We weren’t, and now the United States has built so many, we are giving them away to other countries.
Meanwhile, the Big Apple is dying. Its streets are empty. The bars and jazz clubs, restaurants and coffeehouses sit barren. Beloved haunts, storied rooms, perfect-slice joints are shuttered, many for good. The sweat equity of countless small-business owners is evaporating. Instead of getting people back to work providing for their families, our mayor talks about a fantasyland New Deal for the post-coronavirus era.
Open the city. All of it. Right now. Broadway shows, beaches, Yankees games, the schools, the top of the freakin’ Empire State building. Everything. New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance. Businesses can adjust. The elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.
Actually, given Cuomo’s policy of pumping infected patients into nursing homes, it’s more like begin to be isolated.
Plus, a call for revolution:
In late April, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp defied experts by opening his state. The Atlantic magazine, once a serious publication that should now come with a stick of stale bubblegum, accused him of engaging in “human sacrifice.”
You want to guess what happened? Guess, come on, take a guess. Instead of the predicted spike in deaths, the number of cases of coronavirus and associated deaths declined.
We should always consider that we are led by idiots, as one of my friends likes to remind me. Cuomo and de Blasio have no plan. There is not a single question about when New York can get back to normal to which they have a straight answer. Not one. They cash their taxpayer paychecks while immiserating the rest of us.
If our elected leaders won’t save the world’s greatest city from a slow death by economic strangulation, then the people of New York must do it themselves. Barbers, tailors, nail salons, sporting-goods stores, movie theaters and others should open their doors — while maintaining social distancing, of course — and dare the state to shut them down.
Our politicians serve by our consent; we don’t run our businesses or live our lives by their consent. The suggestion to the contrary is an affront to Americanism.
If you live in this world, you’re feeling the change of the guard.
The Post’s front page for tomorrow:
