Thanks for Nothing, DeWine
Thanks for Nothing, DeWine
Mike DeWine is who we thought he was.
I woke up yesterday in a buoyant mood which is a nice change of pace from my usual first thoughts of the day:
I took a shower without sitting in an orthopedic chair. I can walk around my house without a walking boot. And I can almost taste solid food when my jaw gets unwired in five days.
I asked my brother to take me to the Columbus Division of Police Automobile Impound Lot, which is located off infamous Jackson Pike in an area where you need another car to access your original car.
I had to limp my ass to Row 36 under the sweltering sun, which was the most exercise I’ve had in a month. My high spirits quickly evaporated as I shuffled along the deathly mixture of gravel and shards of auto glass while glaring at the hunks of twisted metal that had the sorrows of at least one person attached to them.
My stomach sank even more when you realize all the other people peripherally attached to the accidents in the wreck and how much carnage we tolerate because oil executives in the 1950s railroaded the interstate system through America to entice every one of us to own one of these death machines. Even in cases of survival, you’re still talking about millions of dollars in hospital bills in that lot alone.
Then, among the wreckage of human misery, you finally come to your own story of misfortune.
People ask me what happened. As best I can tell, I came too hot off the Sullivant Road Exit on I-70 and hit a median? One of the 50 doctors that came through my room said the EMTs told him they suspected spinal damage.
I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is waking up in the Trauma Ward of Grant Hospital and thinking, “Thank God they didn’t take me to Mt. Carmel where I could have been assassinated by a rogue doctor of death.”
The front of my 2012 Honda Accord didn’t look worthy of a trip to the ICU. The inside of my car, however…
I suddenly understood why the doctors were so concerned with making sure I could feel and curl my toes. I could have broken my spine as easily as my ankle or ribs.
Seeing my dried blood splattered against the air bags and passenger seat made me feel like I got off light. That vehicle could’ve easily served as an impromptu coffin. Last time I felt that way I was dehydrated and gasping for air with block dots bursting in my eyes after I collapsed on the floor of a Costa Rican rain forest.
If I lived in a country that believed in adequate public transportation, I would never drive again. Sure, I still enjoy the odd road trip to a new place, except literally everything else sucks about it.
Instead we live in the great state of Ohio where for two entire months we led the country in response to the novel coronavirus which was no small feat considering our governor is a lifelong reactionary with medieval views on women’s reproductive rights and climate change.
Yesterday, DeWine moved his typical 2 p.m. coronavirus updates to more of a “fireside chat” at 5:30 p.m. This was my prediction from yesterday’s subscriber-only post:
[DeWine] let rightwing nutjobs protest with automatic weapons outside Dr. Amy Acton’s house (surprisingly nobody got maced there) and you can draw a direct line from that moment to three states deciding we have to self-isolate for two weeks if any of us diseased freaks show up within their borders.
I’m sure this will be a paternalistic lecture about how we need to do our part, like he’s a random grandfather we found on the street and not a governor who could mandate masks in public.
If he refuses to do that, then we’ll be Florida in two months which will make it fun when it’s 20 degrees outside and gets dark at 5 p.m.
Well, we got the kindly grandfather routine. After warning us that without a change of action, we would soon be like Florida and Arizona. His course of action was to then read some passages from books he read about the Kansas Flu during our nation’s last once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
DeWine knows we need a mask mandate. He installed one during the first week of May, only to rescind it fewer than 24 hours later because some Ohioans find being told to wear a mask in public “offensive.”
Large swaths of right-wing Ohioans can’t even be troubled to wear a mask to protect elderly, at-risk populations and workers while Krogering. Well, Kroger is done asking starting next week.
Ohio’s coronavirus cases are climbing despite the last two months of the governor’s office asking us to “be smart and do right.”
All DeWine did was kill an unknown number of Ohioans so when numbers keep rising he can at least say “I warned you in a sternly worded televised statement at 5:30 p.m. on a Tuesday like it’s 1950 and everyone is at home watching one of five channels on television.
Europe’s outbreak told us we needed an early an unified government response. That was out of the question thanks to 68 million Americans electing a criminal gameshow host as president. His administration is now cutting out the Centers for Disease Control from official coronavirus numbers in order to juke the stats in the run-up to the November election.
DeWine, to his credit, was ahead of even Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer when the virus landed in Ohio. But then hobgoblins in his own party — the overly ambitious House Speaker Larry Householder, Urban Representative Nino Vitale and an assortment of hobgoblin backbenchers — decided to use the outbreak as a tool for political advancement.
Three months ago these jokers were saying it was “just the flu” and it would disappear with warm weather. Now we’re still pretending like it’s possible schools will be open this fall instead of trying to figure out how best not to leave behind poor and rural students when distance learning is still the norm du jour.
We get the government we deserve. Not all of us, obviously. But this is the crescendo of Republicans running Ohio since 1995. Mike DeWine can’t really care about us because his family won’t be on the front lines like ours will be. We’re fodder to guys like Vitale and Householder because we don’t line their political coffers or vote for them to be in charge of more than running a Sunoco in Risingsun.
These are the leaders for a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic in which the eviction, unemployment and financial marker crises haven’t even begun.
We all end up in coffins or scattered ashes or whatever. It’s only a matter of who or what put us their. Personally I find death easier to handle when it’s by my own ineptitude, not by gross negligence from the minds our society has deemed wise enough to lead us.
These bums should be thrown out of office, and I’m not sure the Ohio Democratic Party is competent enough to do anything about considering party leadership decided to claim Paycheck Protection Program money and haven’t returned it like Florida Democrats did.
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