Downtown Las Vegas, NM. Photo by Andy Kingsbury.
Located in the northeast of this enormous state, San Miguel County has only seventeen thousand inhabitants, most of them widely scattered across desert, mountains and plains. It is not a tourist center, and people don’t have the means to travel widely.
But these are not the only reason for the county’s health. City officials passed an ordinance last May, requiring wearing face masks, as well as a curfew preventing gatherings from 10pm till dawn.
Las Vegas mayor Louie Trujillo said people there are “doing back flips” as the good news but added, “We have to keep the momentum going. We don’t want people to be lax.”
San Miguel Commission Chairwoman added, “We’re a poor county. We’re not rich. But we’re rich in heart. We help each other the best we can, and hopefully we can continue to do what we’ve been doing so far and get to the green so we can open up our community.” The restrictions in place are causing many of the small, locally-owned businesses to close permanently.
The mayor added that he’d had very few complaints about the shutdown, and the parents of teenagers told him they were glad the curfew kept their children at home at night.
But here in Santa Fe, we are definitely in the red. As in all retirement communities, our wealthy transplants can afford to travel, eat out, and may feel they have a right to see their family and friends, and the devil take the hindmost. Which he is doing with our enormous escalation of infections.
He is ably helped by tourists from nearby states, especially Texans, who are said to call our Sangre de Cristos “Texas mountains.” A man recently emailed the Santa Fe New Meixcan, cursing out the town for what he considered behavior infringing on his inborn rights. He was asked in a restaurant—one of the few not yet closed down—to wear a mask when he was not eating.
Hard to imagine that this country was able to put up with the restrictions imposed by the federal government during World War II; December 7th, which President Roosevelt called “a day that will live in infamy,” was the day in 1942 of the Japanese attack on U.S. battleships lined up like sitting ducks at the docks in Pearl Harbor on Hawaii. Roosevelt’s declaration of war came soon after with rationing of gasoline, meat, even shoes.
What has happened since to weaken our moral fiber and make some of us unwilling to sacrifice?
If we can call wearing a mask sacrifice…
With climate disruption coming fast and furious, it seems likely that much more will be expected of us than wearing masks.
Here in KY (as well as other states) the issue of mask wearing has become political to the extreme. There is an oppositional defiant disorder going around that has also reached pandemic levels. It is this disorder that is causing needless deaths. Nurses report that there are people dying of COVID-19 who still don’t believe it is real. They beg for a magic pill to make them better because it “can’t be covid because it is not real”. Nothing can be said nor any action taken to convince these people otherwise. No matter what they say or do, they cannot bend reality into a shape that reflects their worldview. It is the most astonishing phenomenon I have ever witnessed. In the end, these people will be broken by unyielding realities and it is extremely unfortunate that they will also drag other people to their deaths, too.