Highlights, lowlights from the week in news
HIT >> Even though the cancellation of the Silver Dollar Fair for the second straight year is considered a miss, the idea of a Halloween-themed carnival sounds like a pretty nice consolation prize.
The Silver Dollar Fair announced that it would be holding a Harvest Fair that runs from Oct. 28-31 that includes a carnival, live entertainment and a haunted house.
Hopefully, by October, we can be at herd immunity or at least close to make it a safe and fun environment for the community.
The fall weather is usually beautiful in Butte County making corn mazes and pumpkin patches enjoyable events for everyone. Add in the possibility of spending a cool, autumn night at a carnival, and that definitely sounds like a good time.
MISS >> It’s pretty easy to criticize the relaxing of some coronavirus regulations while applauding others. We still think you should wear a mask in public and stay socially distanced, especially indoors. And by all means, get vaccinated just as quickly as you can.
But, darn it, some of this stuff just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s suddenly OK for high school kids to play football — but, it’s not OK for cheerleaders to perform at the games? (At least that was the deal before Friday, when the state momentarily came to its senses.) And, it’s OK for some fans to show up at some sporting events, but it’s not OK for spectators to be at others? Even outside, in stadiums where the crowd numbers can be kept down, and there’s plenty of room?
And finally, Chico State has decided it can’t do outdoor graduations because of the risk of thousands of people coming to town — after allowing thousands of out- of-towners to come here for school in the first place, before there was such a thing as a vaccination?
These are not easy decisions. Making the call between “It’s safer this way” and “It’s time to start living” is going to be a tough one for a long time to come. We get it. At some point, though, common sense — and consistency — need to start winning out.
HIT >> On the bright side of the COVID world, vaccine eligibility opened up to people age 50 and older living and working in Butte County on Friday.
Community vaccination clinics are happening in Chico and Oroville. The more vaccinations that can be administered the better it means for getting life back to normal. And Butte continues to do quite well in this regard, as more than one-third of its residents have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Statewide, that number is up to 23 percent.
With Butte County now in the red tier, we’ve seen indoor dining, movie theaters and museums open back up. That’s always a good sign.
MISS >> There’s nothing like politics to bring out the very worst in name-calling and stereotypical mud- slinging. After all, where would we be without that stuff?
There’s nothing new or even shocking about any of this and there hasn’t been for several hundred years. But, we sure wish one side or the other would be the first to knock it off.
The most recent example is the effort by Democrats to tie everything Republicans do with the words “QAnon.” In short, QAnon seems to be the new Koch Brothers — a term used to demonize and impugn everything the right is doing by saying the marching orders are coming from one nefarious place.
Well, there’s a big problem with that. Just as an overwhelming majority of Democrats aren’t really America-hating cancel- culturing socialists sleeping on couches in their mothers’ basements, an overwhelming majority of Republicans do not pay any attention at all to QAnon — in fact, we’d wager to say many, if not most, don’t have any idea what QAnon is.
And yet, the Recall Newsom movement is already being targeted as a “fringe QAnon effort,” even though 2 million people have signed the petition. That’s one heck of a fringe.
There are absolute nut-jobs in all corners of the political arena. Most Americans do not sit in those corners. Unfortunately, negative advertising works — even on a lot of those people in the middle — so it’s not going away.