St. Louis, Missouri, consistently makes everyone’s top 10 lists for worst cities in the United States. The reasons given include crime, lack of opportunity, and dilapidated neighborhoods. Having grown up in the city, and with most of my family still living there, I can add to that list unreliable city services, terrible roads, cronyism, and less than ideal weather.
[Cities People Can’t Flee Fast Enough: St. Louis Number 4]
Mayors can’t do anything about the weather, of course, but St. Louis’s current mayor, Lyda Krewson, seems dissatisfied with just placing in the top 10. She wants to be The Number One Worst Place to Live in America.
She’s making good progress.
Krewson’s latest weapon to drive people and businesses out of the Gateway City is Coronavirus.
Mayor Krewson begrudgingly allowed some small businesses to open, but she announced this concession with a macabre tweet seemingly designed to depress an already depressed populace. Here it is:
Tomorrow, @STLCityGov & @SaintLouCo will begin gradually permitting some businesses to open back up.
— Lyda Krewson (@LydaKrewson) May 17, 2020
But make no mistake. This is not permission to party. Nor is this cause for celebration.#COVID19 is still very serious... and we must continue to fight it as such.
Did you get that, St. Louis? You are not to have fun. Don’t you dare celebrate being permitted to make a living. Instead, bow down to your sovereign mayor, and she may just grant permission to smile for seven minutes. In the privacy of your own home, of course. With drapes closed and only among consenting adults.
No one would be surprised if Mayor Krewson distributed harakiri knives to residents, emblazoned with her campaign logo.
Why is St. Louis so bad? Because it elects cruel, joyless, tyrants to lord over its residents like Hitler at a bar mitzvah.
Krewson and her propaganda ministry will, of course, claim “we’re only trying to save lives.” She’ll shout “science,” as if she has any idea what “science” is. (It’s not what the people who pretend to worship it think it is.) But all of their arguments will be nonsense.
There is no evidence lockdowns work for this particular virus. There is no evidence a vaccine can be found, proven safe and effective, and distributed before the country, and possibly the world, falls into economic depression. There is no evidence Lyda Krewson gives a whit aobut anyone’s life but her own, as evidenced by the fact that more people were shot in St. Louis last weekend than were diagnosed with Coronavirus.
What Lyda Krewson is is a power freak. She craves power over people. Not just normal, democratic political power, but emotional and psychological control. Lyda Krewson wants to dictate your emotions, and she said so in her tweet. Thou shalt not celebrate! Nor shalt thou party. Expressions of positive emotion will be prosecuted.
St. Louis is a once-great city. One hundred years ago, during the Spanish Flu epidemic, St. Louis was still one of the 10 largest cities in the United States. My family has been here (or near here) since the middle 1800s. My great grandfather, for whom I was named, came out of retirement to help people during that epidemic.
St. Louis is the place I returned to after 9+ years in the Navy. I didnt' have to, but I missed the Blues and the Cardinals and looked forward to (in 1995) the Rams. I wanted my kids to grow up where I did. I wanted them to know Grant’s Farm and brewery tours and the Cardinal Express Bi-State bus to ball games. I wanted them, perhaps, to graduate from Bishop DuBourg High School like I did and attend the Hibernian Society’s Dog Town Parade every St. Patrick’s Day, work be damned. I take no joy in reporting the wretched state of the city where I was born, where I experienced my first Communion, my first kiss, and my first Stanley Cup.
I want St. Louis to be a place where kids in New York and Los Angeles hope to live one day. I want to see St. Louis’s skyline filled with cranes, as companies rush to build new headquarters in the heart of the continent. I want St. Louis to be the envy of America, as it was in my imagination as a kid in high school.
But, thanks to a series of failed mayors and terrible aldermanic boards (all Democrats, by the way), St. Louis is on the ventilator, coughing blood, and denied the presence of close family. St. Louis is the epitome of Coronavirus: not its actual effect, but the hyperventilated response it induces.
The Spanish Flu and Coronavirus share a common trait. The most severe cases, the ones that end in death or serious scarring of the lungs, result, not from the virus itself, but from the body’s overreaction to the virus. The immune system attacks with such ferocity that it does the virus’s work for it.
Lyda Krewson and many other Democrat mayors and governors are doing the same thing as an over-stimulated immune response: they’re killing their own cities and states by overreacting.
St. Louis could still pull out of its death spiral, but the people of St. Louis will need to say “enough,” first to the mayor’s Hitleresque dictates, then to the long, miserable, failed line of Democrat leadership that took the city from the 10 Best list to the 10 Worst list in just 80 years.