Skin in the Game
Jeffrey I. Barke, M.D.
They tell us we must stay in our houses and only leave if we have essential business. They tell us we should not gather with family or friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, weddings, funerals, the birth of a child, or any other traditional and important event. They tell us we cannot eat at a restaurant, send our kids to school, worship at church, or shop at a local small business.
It’s for our collective good, we are told, against a pandemic virus with a 0.017% U.S. death rate.
Listen to the scientists, heed the experts, obey your leaders or face consequences. In Costa Mesa, California, Mayor Katrina Foley has imposed a $100.00 fine if you are caught in public without a face covering - at least you are not thrown in prison or worse as is the case in some totalitarian countries. If you are an opinion or political leader in the U.S., however, you are exempt from the rules and consequences: Think Governor Gavin Newsom’s dinner, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hair salon venture, or Dr. Deborah Birx’ Thanksgiving trip.
Winston Churchill famously moved through the streets of London while the Nazis (real Nazis) bombarded relentlessly. Generals MacArthur and Patton were seen close to the front lines while bullets were flying overhead. The military leaders serving during the Revolutionary War were leading the charge, swords held high. True leaders sacrifice along with those that follow. They have skin in the game!
But modern-day politicians do nothing of the kind. They issue tyrannical COVID mandates which they regularly violate for one thin reason or another but expect their subjects to follow. They do this while collecting an uninterrupted paycheck and generous benefits just as their salaried constituents miss theirs.
Clinical depression has reached heights not seen in 100 years, unemployment has decimated families, and the suicide rate has escalated. The risk associated with social isolation and loneliness far exceeds the risk of COVID. In the meantime, tyrannical governors continue to mislead, exaggerate, and flat out lie about the current situation along with a complicit media. The credibility of our elected leaders has reached an all-time low in no small way because they have no skin in the game — they have made themselves immune to their own restrictions.
We are told to follow the science. What they mean is follow the scientists that agrees with them. Dissenting scientists, regardless of their credentials, are censured, silenced, and fired from their posts while they are berated by a biased 4th estate and by a prejudiced academia. This centralization of power in so many sectors of government is frightening along with the accompanying crushing of descent. The entrenched and at times authoritarian ruling political class is eerily similar to how things work in Communist China.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is now following the former Soviet Union edict: “The future is known, it is the past that is always changing.” The WHO has now changed their past while assuming they know the future. In June 2020, the WHO described herd immunity as “when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection.” As of November 2020 that passage has been erased from their history and replaced by “...a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached...not by exposing them to it (virus).”
I am not optimistic that the freedoms and separation of powers enshrined in our Constitution will be available to future generations unless we awaken the revolutionary spirit that threw tea into Boston Harbor or that followed a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of Independence. Our Revolutionary leaders recognized that the fault with the ruling class of England started with the fact that they saw the events in the colonies intellectually, but without skin in the game they couldn’t solve the problems they had helped to create.