President takes heavy-handed approach to reopening

Last Thursday marked one year since the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown in the United States. It is a grim anniversary that our president commemorated with his first primetime address to the nation, in what could have been an opportunity for optimism and unity as the pandemic finally begins to succumb to a historic vaccine rollout.

Instead, President Biden chose to use the moment to point fingers, lecture and wield the threat of future lockdowns over the American people. The tone was odd for the leader of a country in which many regions have bucked restrictive mask mandates and closures entirely for months, leaving the people in peace to assess the risks and make their own decisions to keep themselves and their families safe.

With COVID-19 rates plummeting, the country reopening and effective vaccines reaching millions more American arms by the day, the continued moralizing about what we should be permitted to do and which freedoms we should be granted is beginning to ring hollow.

Even the vaccinated are apparently not beyond the reach of the COVID nanny state. “In the coming weeks,” Biden promised us, “we will issue further guidance on what you can and cannot do once fully vaccinated.”

The correct guidance as to what you can do once fully vaccinated, should be, in a free country, “Whatever you want.”

But Biden wasn’t stopping there. He magnanimously pledged that “by July the 4th, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day. That doesn’t mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.”

Forget the fact that small groups are allowed to gather outside virtually everywhere in the country at the present moment. To suggest that more than two months after vaccines are made available to every American that wants one, Biden should still be the arbiter over what people can do in their own backyards is bordering on pathological delusion.

But President Biden is apparently living in an entirely different country, one in which he has unlimited power to drag out emergency pandemic shutdowns indefinitely. And even July 4th is far from a guarantee.

“We can’t let our guard down. This fight is far from over,” Biden told America. “On July 4, with your loved ones, is the goal. A lot can happen. Conditions can change. … Because if we don’t stay vigilant and the conditions change and we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track, please, we don’t want to do that again.”

There you have it. Biden doesn’t want to take Independence Day away from us. Just like blue state governors didn’t want to take away last Easter. Or Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. But he might have to for our own good, you know.

Trump’s vaccine success with Operation Warp Speed and the subsequent vaccinations under the current president mean that the American people are about to be done with restrictive COVID19 measures forever. Don’t let Biden turn back the clock to 2020.