Governor: Should you issue a lockdown order similar to the one in New Jersey amounting to a ban on one-man protests, I will (if able and well) exit my home, walk to a nearby intersection and “illegally” demonstrate alone.
Related: Sununu – No Stay At Home Order Yet, In New Hampshire
I will announce the time and location in advance, video-broadcast this innocuous act, issue a public request for all able New Hampshirites to do the same…and invite you to arrest me. If forbidden from engaging in tiny-group outdoor trade, I will attempt something similar in that domain, fully consistent with social distancing.
Having entered no building other than my home since March 13, I am loyally over following your limitation-of-gatherings command, probably better than anyone in your office. But traveling alone, especially on foot, poses no transmission danger to the public.
If you decide the right to walk and hold a political sign is non-essential, you may have to put your troops where your mouth is. That right is more essential this New Hampshire Spring than at any time in our lives. My suspicion is that you are better than the power-grabbers of other states and are in harmony with NH traditions of avoiding the more draconian, poverty-friendly measures they impose during crises.
But there is a declining likelihood that people like me, or even half the freedoms we had last month, will still safely exist in the United States of Easily Scared People a year from now. World wars follow the kind of trade and civic restrictions people like you are creating. We can dream we are wrong. But like the wounding of freedom and safety which followed 9/11, all seem to bear the color of a great, long-planned move by authority against individual humanity.
If that which we cherish is to face elimination at your hands, and we like the Great War draft resisters are to face feverish deaths in germy gulags anyway, we might as well resist now on our own terms and perhaps be remembered. It is better than waiting for you to come to us…and be forgotten the moment your scythe falls.
