If readers remember the original Twilight Zone episode “The Old Man in the Cave” (please click below if the viewer would like to rent or purchase the episode on YouTube,) they can see easy analogies to today’s handling of the Coronavirus.
It has a Fauci type figure (Mr. Goldsmith portrayed by John Anderson) who tells the suffering townspeople (survivors from nuclear war,) after speaking with the old man in the cave, that the food is too irradiated to eat.
Enter the Science denying figure (it could be Donald Trump or Kelli Ward in Arizona) in the person of Major French (played by famed actor James Coburn) and his paramilitary force who makes a power play for control of the town by challenging Goldsmith’s claims that the food is dangerous.
When they make Goldsmith take them to the Old Man in the Cave and find he is an advanced computer system, the people go Luddite and destroy the machine. They (along with French and his men) then eat all the radiated food and, predictably, die.
The only survivor is the Science Believing Goldsmith.
Apply this episode to what is happening in this country now.
You have the scientists (the Fauci’s, the Redfield’s, the Surgeon General) telling people to wear masks, social distance, and take precautions.
You have the Science deniers (Trump, Kemp in Georgia, Ward) taking a more live and let die approach.
This last weekend in Mohave County, Kelli Ward, a was the French character from the Twilight Zone episode when she helped host a Republican Party get together of over 50 people (above CDC guidelines) in Kingman.
The people at the get together, a picnic, represent the townspeople from the Twilight Zone episode.
Among the special guest stars were Senator Martha McSally and Representative Paul Gosar.
In the pictures of the event, social distancing is virtually nonexistent and the only person that appeared to be wearing a mask was McSally.
According to reporting by AZ Central’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Mohave County, one of the few in the Grand Canyon State that have not mandated mask-wearing, COVID 19 cases have increased faster than the states (64 percent to 49.) Please see below a sample from Dr. Ward’s Facebook Page to see how much mask-wearing and social distancing were actually practiced.
Efforts to reach the Mohave County Head of the Republican Party and a Mohave County Supervisor both resulted in hangups.
There were no scientist types (like Goldsmith in the Twilight Zone episode) to tell the people that they were putting themselves at risk of catching COVID 19.
There was no Governor Doug Ducey, who lacks the ba…courage to mandate mask-wearing across the state to tell the members of his fringe base that this picnic was potentially dangerous for them and the other people they come into contact later in the week.
Hopefully, this get together will not have the same ending as the Twilight Zone episode.
People will know in two to three weeks.
In the meantime, the people need to support public servants that believe in science and will not hold large gatherings like juvenile children out to spite their parents.
The people should not vote for those who Kelli Ward favors since she, and those who she surrounds herself with, have demonstrated time and time again a talent for consistently failing Mother Nature’s IQ Test.
Please remember:
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