What possesses a person to travel to another country for a luxury vacation only to complain it doesn’t mimic the dystopian hellscape they came from? I wouldn’t know, but perhaps Josh Freed, a writer for the Montreal GazetteYou can find some information at. That’s exactly what he did after vacationing in Florida and then returning to his home in Quebec, Canada.
Ron DeSantis is invited to The Church of COVID
The obvious COVID hysteric penned an entire piece detailing the horrors of freedom that await those traveling to the Sunshine State, and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. There haven’t been this many quotable moments since “Napoleon Dynamite” came out.
These are essential reading. This is a barrel of laughter. https://t.co/GkwR92ZDwM
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) January 23, 2022
Let’s dive into some of the highlights, shall we? Here’s the opener, which is just a barrel of contradictions.
My friend informed me of a condo available in Florida. We made the last-minute decision to temporarily escape and work remotely. But the second we landed, it felt like we’d arrived on another planet.
Quebec has gone into full confinement. Florida, however, is Cowboyland. There you will not even know that COVID is occurring despite the fact that there are higher rates of new cases and hospitalizations than in Quebec.
It’s lunacy by Canadian standards, but an eye-opening experience. For starters, everyone’s out and about, filling bars, restaurants, movies, gyms, and jam-packed sports arenas.
Note that Freed pointedly says he had to “escape” his current situation in Quebec, which is rife with curfews and other tyrannical mitigation measures. It “felt like we’d arrived on another planet,” the writer proclaims, shocked at people doing such insane things as eating at restaurants and going to the gym.
But the wide-eyed wonder at people not being forced to seal themselves in their homes after a certain time didn’t last for long. Eventually, Freed’s article devolved into the typical, virtue-signaling trash we’ve come to expect from those who treat the pandemic as a religion.
In ever-friendly America, some customers even shake hands with their waiters before leaving, to say: “Thanks, I’ll have some germs for dessert.”
It’s easy to spot Canadians at restaurants, as we’re the ones properly masked and nervously sitting on the terrace, even in the rain.
You can see that the Canadians are doing completely crazy things, such as eating in rain. They believe Omicron will kill them. It is obvious that such behaviour raises the question of what all this mitigation (including vaccines) really means if they still need to stick an N95 on their faces to prevent human contact.
Freed said that he was shocked by the fact that local media outlets were willing to report on COVID-19.
But the first mention of COVID anywhere in the paper was exactly 18 stories down, with the headline: “Amid Omicron surge, hospitals are stretched thin. What can Florida lawmakers do?”
As usual, it’s best to ignore. Meanwhile, the 19th story was: “Florida COVID update: 71,742 new cases as hospital patients increase.”
Among the many stories played far higher up were: “Miami Marlins name managers for minor-league affiliates” and “Microbial contamination in laxative can cause a ‘life-threatening’ infection.”
All the talk about COVID deaths ignores that Quebec has a much higher current death rate. Florida with its 21 million population has an average seven-day COVID death. Quebec has only 8 million people, but they have an average of just 68 deaths during the same period.
Given that, shouldn’t Freed be tipped off to the fact that 1) case counts are irrelevant and 2) that all his precious mitigation is completely ineffective? It gets even funnier. At one point, he apparently interacted with some Floridians who didn’t show the requisite concern he felt they should for the pandemic.
In Florida, entire conversations happen without the C-word mentioned, unless you bring it up — which, of course, I did. I asked a group of seven 60-somethings I met at a restaurant terrace how they felt about Florida’s non-existent pandemic rules.
Each person who spoke said Florida is a great place to work. In the words of one woman “Our philosophy here is: I look after myself and you look after yourself. You should wear a mask inside if you don’t want to. If you don’t want to go to a restaurant, you shouldn’t.”
When I asked about our collective responsibility to protect others she shrugged and said: “That’s just not how we think here.”
I mentioned Quebec’s recent curfew, but they all just laughed, dismissing it as “Canadian communism.”
I’ll have to stop the block quotes there for fair-use reasons, but rest assured, the hand-wringing just keeps going and going. Freed appears to yearn for something in the middle between Florida’s horrendous freedom and a strict medical system.
What people like him don’t seem to understand is that there can be no middle ground. You can give the government power to enforce curfews or mandates on a virus that has a 99.99% chance of survival (and higher for those who have been vaccinated) and they will abuse it. That’s the lesson of Quebec, and one Freed seems blissfully unable to grasp — even as he seems to admit things have gone too far.
In the end, Americans in free states are going to continue living their lives as they always have because that’s the sane, rational thing to do. If that’s too much for Freed or anyone else to handle, they are welcome to stay within the confines of their COVID-19 obsession. All of us can happily do a little more for them.
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