Everyone is sick and tired of the COVID lock-downs. Not only were we lied to about their duration (“15 days to flatten the curve!”), and about the severity of the disease, but the measures themselves are apparently unconstitutional.
Nevertheless, they are in force. If you are like most people, then it probably feels like there isn’t much you can do about it. If we want to keep working, or not get arrested, then we have to grit and bear it.
But if we have to grit and bear it, it is still within our power (with the First Amendment still more or less standing) to tell the powers that be what we think of them.
And I can’t think of a better depiction of the sort of Super-Karen who is currently tyrannizing over our country than Dolores Umbridge.
Under the guise of addressing legitimate problems, Dolores Umbridge imposes draconian authority, and delights in creating “order” in other people’s lives. More than even Kafka could have envisioned, she is both the distilled essence of bureaucracy and its final, logical conclusion: condescending power in pink with a cheery smile.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
Those enforcing today’s COVID lockdown are doing exactly this. They are little Umbridges, and deserve to be reminded of it as often as possible
America has repeatedly fought deadly wars — willingly sacrificing the lives of millions of men — for freedom and self-governance. What could be more pathetic, peurile, and un-American than mid-wit bureaucrats in scrubs and polo shirts passing laws limiting this freedom “for our own good?”
To further this end, I have designed simple stickers and masks:
They are available here on teespring.
(Eerily foreshadowing current events, Umbridge actually did say “Boys and girls are not to be within eight inches of each other”).
I encourage you to share this, or to come up with your own variations and paste them in appropriate places. The beauty of putting it on a mask is that the message is appropriate basically whenever you’re wearing it. Put the stickers next to the signs of businesses that command (by order of local mandate) customers to comply.
And the best part is that the message is the same as the mandate.
It just puts the voice in the right key.
