Opinion/Editorial

YOU WILL NOT BE LEFT ALONE…PERIOD!

TRACERS. They are still coming, like a hoard of mosquitos in the night. By the time you hear them humming around you, it will be too late to take protective measures. Get a Faraday Bag from Amazon. They only cost about twenty bucks. Put your cell phone in that bag at home, and as you drive around. Nobody will be able to tell where you are while your phone is in that bag. You will not, of course, be able to receive calls or make calls while the phone remains in the bag, and that’s a pretty big deal. We all live around our cell phones. But the tracers will come, like enforced testing for you to be allowed into the workplace, and that whole coming nightmare is going to be a pretty prejudicially series of occurrences.

Once again, you can be selected, by fellow workers or competitors or whomever. Tracers will gain enormous power to force anyone they choose to be quarantined. Being labeled a person who has been in contact, no matter how allegedly, with somebody who tests positive for the virus, means you get to set aside for two weeks of self-quarantine at home, or wherever if you don’t have a proper home. It also means that, for two critical weeks, you will be “out of play” when it comes to making ends meet, or keeping a job, and more. Get the Faraday bag and think about how to use it. Things have not gone critical yet, but they soon may. If this breaks the way I think it is going to then tracers will become like the TSA guards at the airport; marginally paid, undereducated, barely trained, but with plenty of power and attitude.

Hawaii, and specifically the island of Oahu, is important to the discussion about surveillance and tracing, even though you are not there. Hawaii held a prominent position in the Chicago Tribune newspaper on Sunday morning last. The Tribune’s article about how Hawaii has imposed and enforced a quarantine program for all arriving visitors was celebrated in the article. The article’s slant was all about civilian citizen sleuths finding out about visitors and then pursuing them to watch and report any violations of the two-week quarantine order placed upon all visitors to the islands. These vigilante investigators look the person (allegedly violating) up on the Internet to find criminal history, social platform attendance and comments, as well as anything else they can discover to publish so they can publicly denigrate violators or perceived violators. How bad can things get where we all live? That bad, if this tracer movement really takes hold and gets underway in a similar way here. Should the people visiting to the islands be treated this way? That’s an argument that will resound down through the ages, but the reality of this kind of behavior is so destructive in the present, and on into the future, that it must be published. The public must act against this kind of Brown Shirt Hitler Youth kind of behavior. The only way to do it is to begin investigating the backgrounds and social communications of the people doing the tracing, tracking, and investigating. He who is without sin….kind of a thing.

Let’s find out who these vigilantes are and who these tracers are, and then publish information about them! This behavior by the leadership, and some of the citizenry in Hawaii, is going to play havoc with any recovery out there. Hawaii needs money. All states, entities, and individuals do. It is money that will eventually cause deep pain in the islands, as the public falls out of love with the place, and the people, and even the culture. And then the money goes and stays away. Lake Geneva has a bifurcated problem not dissimilar from that of Hawaii. People love to visit, and they pay scads of cash in many ways to do so. Lake Geneva residents love the money, but not necessarily the tourists who bring it. Getting over not liking the downside of tourism is vital in attracting and keeping the money. It’s a trade-off, but without the money, Lake Geneva goes back to being the lonely playground of a few billionaires, and they don’t play together well, or with anybody else for that matter. Hawaii is unknowingly changing its motto from the “land of aloha” to the “land of goodbye,” and most of the people who live there have little idea of what is happening, with respect to their future well-being. The silent death toll is caused by the nation’s response to this virus is going to be monumental and it’s going to become more evident as this summer moves into full heated bloom.

~James Strauss