by Dennis Prager
I
am writing this column upon returning home to California after five days in
Florida. For the first time since my first trip to Los Angeles in 1974 and
moving there two years later, I dreaded going to California.
That first trip, as a 25-year-old New Yorker, I
experienced the palpable excitement looking at the American Airlines flight
board at JFK airport and seeing "Los Angeles." For most Americans, the
very name "California" elicited excitement, wonder, even envy of
Californians, and most of all ... freedom. While America always represented
freedom, within America, California exemplified freedom most of all.
Yet, here I am, sitting in a state where corruption
reigns (one of the leading Democrats of the last half-century told me years ago
that politicians in California are window dressing; the real power in
California is wielded by unions) and where, for nine months, normal life has
been shut down, schools have been closed and small businesses have been
destroyed in unprecedented numbers.
During these last five days in Florida, a state
governed by the pro-freedom party, I went anywhere I wanted. First and
foremost, I could eat both inside and outside restaurants. At one of them, when
I stood up to take photos of people dining, a patron who recognized me walked
over and said, "I assume you're just taking pictures of people eating in a
restaurant." That's exactly what I was doing. I even took my two grandchildren
to a bowling alley, which was filled with people enjoying themselves playing
myriad arcade games as well as bowling.
None of that is allowed almost anywhere in
California. It is becoming a police state, rooted in deception and
irrationality.
Restaurants have been shut down (except for
takeout orders), even for outdoor dining, for no scientific reason. After
ordering Los Angeles county restaurants closed, the health authorities of Los
Angeles county acknowledged in court that they had no evidence that outdoor
dining was dangerous; they ordered restaurants closed, even to outdoor dining,
solely in order to keep people home.
The left's claim to "follow the
science" is a lie. The left does not follow science; it follows scientists
it agrees with and dismisses all other scientists as "anti-science."
Science does not say that eating inside a
restaurant at least six feet from other diners, let alone outside a restaurant,
is potentially fatal, but eating inside an airplane inches from strangers is
safe.
Science does not say mass protests during a
pandemic (when people are constantly told to social distance) are a health
benefit, but left-wing scientists say they are -- when directed against racism.
In June, Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted: "In this
moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic
racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus." She cited the
former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom
Frieden: "The threat to Covid control from protesting outside is tiny
compared to the threat to Covid control created when governments act in ways
that lose community trust. People can protest peacefully AND work together to
stop Covid. Violence harms public health."
Even The New York Times, in July, acknowledged
the double standard: "Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown
protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less
comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism."
Science does not say, "Men give birth"
or, "Men menstruate." But the left routinely argues that
"science says" such things and that "science says" there
are more than two sexes, many more.
The last time I felt I was leaving a free society
and entering an unfree one was when I visited the communist countries of
Eastern Europe. As a graduate student majoring in communism, during the Cold
War, I would travel through the countries known as Soviet satellites: Poland,
Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In the middle of
my trips, I would stop in Austria to breathe free air.
Never did I imagine I would ever experience
anything analogous in America, the Land of the Free, the land of the Statue of
Liberty and of the Liberty Bell. But I did yesterday, when leaving Florida and
returning to California.
There is no question that America is becoming, if
it hasn't already become, two countries: one that values liberty, from small
businesses being allowed to operate to people being allowed to say what they
believe, and one that has contempt for liberty, from eating in restaurants to
free speech.
I am asked almost daily by friends around the
country and by callers to my national radio show whether I intend to stay in
California. Were it not for all the close friends who live here and the
synagogue I and a few friends founded, the answer would be no. But at a given
point, I am sure that I will leave this Soviet satellite for a free state. The
bigger and far more important question is: How long will the Soviet states of
America and the free states of America remain the United States of America?
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