Journaling Coronavirus (COVID19) Pandemic,
Reflection #65

 

It begins.

The mayor of Milwaukee let slip a little known and even and heretofore undiscussed element about the ‘voluntary quarantine at home’ situation. The word voluntary is always trotted out, as it was by the mayor of Milwaukee on Monday. After discussing the policy, he then went on to grow a bit angry, and also mentioned that police were being called in to cite violators of the self-quarantine orders. What happened to the word voluntary in all that? Out the window. The mayor continued to comment, this time saying that it was within his power to station police officers outside homes where anyone in the home was required to self-quarantine.

So far, to my knowledge, Hawaii is the only state to make enforced quarantine violations criminal. As far as that law, passed in a heated rush out in the Hawaiian Islands, is blatantly unconstitutional seems not to matter these days. The fact that Wisconsin has no such, and Milwaukee no such ordinance, allowing the police to issue tickets, detain, arrest or even surveil violators of self-quarantine ‘orders,’ is a pitiful example of how far this virus, and the nation’s reaction to it, has taken us all away from the lives we all believed we had before. We sure as hell do not have them now. Maybe the USA should become like Australia, Korea, or even China…where the far right-wing dictator-style leaders have simply changed the numbers at will to make themselves hugely more popular by supposedly ‘defeating’ the virus.

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