While preparing for my vacation I went to the shelves where the unread books are kept. I dug through the books to pick out the ones that would be best suited for the trip. I came across the book Pale Rider by Laura Spinney which is about the Spanish Flu of 1918. I thought that this would be an excellent time to read this one as I could probably learn something about what we have been going through the last year. It took just 25 pages to become enlightened.
If you listen to our friends, the Democrats, they would have you believe that our current pandemic changed everything, and we should simply adapt to a “new normal” reality. That is their overarching argument for their two humongous spending bills and policy proposals – specifically HR1 which wants to nationalize our election laws – along with chucking the Senate filibuster. The other point they make is we should follow the science as Dr. Fauci makes his continued undefined explanations for further restrictions and more mask wearing.
Spinney uses the beginning of her book to recount the history of pandemics and influenzas. The story includes historical medical figures like Hippocrates and Galen. Running through the development of the spread of diseases that caused epidemics, it became crystal clear which factors expose human populations to the spread of infection.
The best way for epidemics to spread and become a pandemic such as the one we are currently experiencing is to have people packed into tight quarters. That is a large part of the reason New York City was such a COVID disaster a year ago – it has a lot of people living in very vertical spaces. The public policies you do not want to have is actively seeking more people and then encouraging them to live close together.
Yet, those are the policies that Democrats have had for years. Every indication is they have not spent a second thinking about potentially reorienting their policies to mitigate the chances of another pandemic.
Ever since the 1965 Immigration Act, the United States has had an explosion in population largely from immigrants. Our population swelled from 193 million to 324 million in fifty years from 1965 with about half of that growth coming from immigration. We will soon get an official count from the Census of how many people are living here. That will not include a substantial number of people living here illegally.
The first thing President Biden did when confronted with a surge of people at our Southern border (driven by his loose rhetoric) is eliminate all those policies put in place to halt the flow of the surge. This is the man who while campaigning told an audience we could easily handle another couple million people. That was then and this is now; does that make sense anymore? Should we be reevaluating our immigration policy and follow the science of spreading our population and limiting it to confront the chance of another pandemic?
If Democrats’ intent was not clear before, look at the refugee policy situation. Mr. Biden announces he plans to keep with Trump’s 15,000 refugee policy. His party erupts causing him to immediately back down and increase the limit.
This is not a statement against immigrants. This is just a statement of facts about how pandemics spread, and they spread most easily through large populations living in close quarters. Packing more people into our country needs a much closer look.
The other part of their plans is that they have created policies throughout the country to combat what they refer to as “urban sprawl.” They think this harms the environment and they want people living in tighter quarters.
In Los Angeles, officials want to have ground floor retail on many commercial streets with residential floors above. Otherwise, everyone living above a Starbucks or nail salon. They are also creating policies in California to have zoning that has high rise residential near subway stops, particularly around the new Los Angeles subway. That way everyone would stay in their neighborhood with no need for cars.
Biden’s infrastructure bill would fund billions for urban mass transit. They want to cram more people into tight spaces to have them take mass transit and abandon their vehicles. They want to turn other cities into mini–Manhattans and have them vertically stack people on top of each other.
Other than the fact that it is a good bet Americans are not going to go for these policies after what we have endured the last year, one would think it is a good time to take a second and third look at these urban planning policies.
Thinning and spreading the population is the best way to counter another pandemic. Americans have figured this out for themselves. The question is, when will the Democrats wake up to the new reality and adjust their plans before letting millions more into our country and wasting money on urban plans and mass transit no one will use?