The coronavirus pandemic is certainly real and appropriate actions were probably taken to level out the spread of the disease so that hospitals and emergency treatment equipment in hospitals wouldn’t be overextended.

But can you imagine what the response would have been just a few years ago to a government-ordered shutdown of normal economic activity across America because of a disease?

Back when America was peopled by more independentpeople an order to shut down businesses would likely have been ignored, although Americans accepted restraints on their economic freedom during World War II to aid the war effort.

“Non-essential to whom?” they probably would have roared about such a term being applied to their livelihood in peacetime and marched to work.

The actions of some state and local leaders across the nation in ordering Draconian closing restrictions on their particular environ indicate they were far too eager to exert their authority. California, Virginia, Michigan and New York governors come to mind as being excessively eager to enact authoritarian rules on their citizens.

The leftists who have eyed measures for years to control the common folk in America who have this crazy idea that their lives are as important as the really important people (the elite who have all the answers – yes, that’s sarcasm).

The coronavirus outbreak provided them with the perfect opportunity to determine if the general population has been dumbed down via major media and state education propaganda enough to accept controls turning them into worker drudges for the state.

Leftists figure they’ve got the big population centers under their thumb. Now it’s time to grab the guns from those rednecks who continue to present a problem in the rest of the country.

Columnist Dennis Prager asks an interesting question: “If half of the country’s deaths were in Montana, would New York shut down?”

Then he points out that as of Sunday, April 19, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in America, 18,690 of them in the New York metropolitan area.

Prager observes:

“What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52% of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21% of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48%).

“Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina – two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people – had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

“Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?”

Prager adds:

“The media is New York-based and New York-centered. New York is America. The rest of the country, with the partial exception of Los Angeles (also a media center) and Silicon Valley, is an afterthought.

“Having grown up and attended college and graduate school in New York, and having lived in three of the city’s five boroughs, I know how accurate the most famous New Yorker magazine cover ever published was. The cover’s illustration depicted a New Yorker’s map of America: New York City, the George Washington Bridge and then San Francisco. The rest of the country essentially didn’t exist.”

It has been observed repeatedly that people of the type Prager mentions believe food comes from grocery stores. They just walk into the store and there it is – packaged and ready to eat.

They are unaware (or don’t care) that someone actually had to grow that food and prepare it for them.

Prager relates how New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman inadvertently reveals the New York-centric view of America when he wrote opposing opening up any state in America:

“Every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask?”

“In the 40 years I have lived in the second-largest city in America, I have never ridden on the subway or any other intraurban train or bus,” Prager says. “In fact, it is common for New Yorkers to look at Los Angeles with disdain for our “car culture.” Like the vast majority of Americans everywhere outside of New York City, in Los Angeles, most of us get to work, visit family and friends, and go to social and cultural events by car – currently the life-saving way to travel – not by bus or subway, the New Yorker way of getting around.

“But Friedman is a New Yorker, and because his fellow New Yorkers walk past one another on crowded streets and travel in crammed buses and subway cars, South Dakotans should be denied the ability to make a living.”

People living in cramped quarters in a dirty, corrupt city feeling superior to the rest of us is not that unusual. Washington, D.C., has become a clone.