MY ANNUAL HOLIDAY MESSAGE FOR POLITICALLY CORRECT IDIOTS
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally accepted calendar year 2021, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. And, without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes. By accepting these greetings, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for herself or himself or others, and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher. MY CHRISTMAS MESSAGE FOR MY FRIENDS WHO WILL NEVER BE POLITICALLY CORRECT Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I love you. WHILE THE COVID-19 CLOCK TICKS… The vaccine is here. I don’t know about you, but I’m more anxious now than ever. I keep thinking about an article I read by Kevin Knodell, a journalist and author who wrote about a man named “Charley” Havlat who died in World War II. On May 7, 1945, Charley’s platoon was conducting a recon mission on a dirt road when Germans of the 11th Panzer Division attacked with machine guns and small arms fire from concealed positions in the trees. Charley was in a vehicle, an unarmored open-top jeep. He ducked down behind the hood, but when he peeked his head up to see what was happening, a German bullet struck him directly in the forehead, killing him instantly. The Americans returned fire until their radio operator received word that a ceasefire order had gone into effect. It turned out the ceasefire went into effect just nine minutes before Charley died. The war was over, but a kid named Charley Havlat was dead. I keep thinking and I worry that the Covid-19 war will be over, but who will die of Covid-19 before they can get the life-saving vaccine? Those of us who want the vaccine are being told we may get our shots in spring or early summer. This is not about those people who refuse to take the vaccine. I wish them luck, but I don’t want to be in their shoes when they start to cough, can’t catch their breath and run a fever. What a stupid way to die. This is about those of us who want the vaccine and want to live. We don’t want to die after the war has been won. So I wear a mask and keep my distance from people and I look at the calendar. Spring seems like a hundred years away. MY COVID-19 WISH As we come to the end of 2020, a year that shall go down in infamy, I want to point out that no two people have done more to destroy New York City during this Covid-19 nightmare than Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo. Someone posted a Facebook comment saying that while Osama bin Laden spent years thinking of how to destroy New York City, de Blasio and Cuomo have managed to do it in a few months. There’s no sense to some of their rulings except to remind us that they’re in power, and the truth and what we think doesn’t matter. Think of the thousands of restaurant owners whose lives and businesses they’ve destroyed. The thousands of restaurant workers who are facing a bleak Christmas unemployed and broke because Cuomo has once again closed indoor dining in New York, even though the state’s own contact tracing data shows that restaurants and bars account for just 1.43 percent of recent known Covid-19 exposures. That data, based on 46,000 coronavirus cases across the state from September through November, shows that private household gatherings are linked to the majority of infections at 74 percent. In the face of those numbers, only a power-hungry fool would close the restaurants and ruin so many lives. And that’s what kind of a fool we have for governor – a power-hungry fool. As for de Blasio, he is not a power-hungry fool, he’s your regular garden-variety, dopey fool. So he closed the schools when all the evidence showed that being inside a school was the safest place a child could be. He did it because he cares more for what the teachers union wants than he cares for our children. It won’t change anything, but it would give a lot of us a sense of joy if de Blasio and Cuomo show us that they have a shred of decency and both of them announce that they will not receive their vaccine shots until the day when all schools are open to all children and all restaurants are open to indoor dining. Don’t hold your breath.
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