The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

Excessive pandemic restrictions invite the resurrection of civil disobedience

Maybe the shuttered bar owners need the nuns to march for theme. The Sisters of Charity marching 1965 in support of civil rights. (Uncredited photo.)

Civil disobedience was once the honored touchstone of the Boomer generation’s fight against racial injustice and anti-war protests.

Now, it should be redeployed to fight unjust, excessive and dangerous Covid-19 pandemic restrictions that are destroying small businesses and abusing children by keeping them out of schools.

Sadly, so many Americans today are unaware of the critical role that civil disobedience played in ridding the country of Jim Crow and pulling America out of the unpopular Vietnam War.

It was used in lunch counter sit-ins and to protest other racial wrongs. Those who used it were willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was rightly praised for successfully employing the tactic to fight racial discrimination.

Now some restaurant owners are openly defying the pandemic restrictions in the same manner, although the woke left might not call recognize it or call it such.

In Washington state, officials have threatened fines and criminal charges against businesses defying COVID-19 restrictions. In Staten Island, Mac’s Public House is openly defying Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s unscientific and loopy order shutting it and others down.

Today’s media of course put down such actions as “flouting” instead of acknowledging the once honored practice. Maybe the bars that are protesting their shutdowns should recruit some nuns to march with them, as the civil rights protesters did in the ’60s and ’70s. Just to show you how little civil disobedience is resected today, on Saturday Night Live, the wealthy Pete Davidson disrespected the protesters and bar owners. (See below)

In Illinois, strip clubs were open, but now getting a burger and a beer in a tavern is verboten. Many schools have shutdown in-person learning. Constitutionally protected places of worship have to initiate costly legal battles to stay open. And so much of the suppression of American’s civil right is done contrary to the scientific evidence.

Today’s media of course chose instead consider the protests that led to arson and murder as something heroic. Small businesses, in turn, are either ignored or portrayed as in some cases so ignorant and money-hungry that they would willingly murder by virus their customers.

It’s as if the media years ago would have condemned King as an ignorant law-breaker. Come to think of it, some did.

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