Coronavirus fight: Don’t be surprised if Hilton Head residents decide to saw off the bridges | Opinion
Despite your hunches (based, no doubt, on the mindsets and reaction times of some elected officials in this state), I’m (nearly) certain that none of our current chosen leaders was around in 1918.
Botox is effective; however, there is nothing on the market (yet) that can erase the wrinkles one earned while fighting against a woman’s right to vote (one assumes) or watching tens of millions of people die of the Spanish flu.
Which means this coronavirus pandemic is — as much as it is for you, me and the rest of the world — a true first for our crowd of vote-winners.
Generally speaking, I like to offer an abundance of grace to firsts.
Seconds, though?
Well, you’ll need to back up a bit for that reaction.
Last week, we — as a clumsy bunch of deniers, realists and panickers — and our noble leaders got to practice as a team.
This week, however, we need to show up on the field, because the season started without us a long time ago, and the game is already in progress.
As any Beaufort County restaurant owner will tell you, old ways of doing business are just not going to work right now.
We need creativity, boldness and plain old leadership from our elected officials.
The obsequiousness, timidity, secrecy, blindness, deafness and limpness that some of them have proved capable of needs to be, much like our ability to park at our own beaches, put on hold.
Just for now. They can return to their regularly scheduled shoelace tripping and lunch yukking later, when people aren’t threatening to saw off the bridges to Hilton Head so New Yorkers can’t sneak on the island.
I am, at heart, a Libertarian.
Also, I just bought a really nice new bike.
And I’m currently re-reading “1984.”
Those seem like non sequiturs, but they’re important facts for you to know before I say this next thing.
We have two pains to choose from at this point: the kind that comes and goes with surgery and prescribed recovery; or the kind we ignore and wince through until surgery is no longer an option and a grueling end-of-life awaits us.
If being ordered to stay at home — if allowing government to temporarily restrict my freedom, if limiting my joyous bike riding and if playing into my deeply held fears about us already being Oceania — means we save lives and have a better chance at quickly ending this strange and most certainly bankrupting ordeal, then we ought to do it.
Overwhelmingly (and surprisingly), the public seems to want this — in some cases, seems to be begging for it.
The politicians, however, seem too scared to step out of whatever conga line they’ve been dancing in, or too certain that waiting-and-seeing will yield dividends because Big Brother said so.
As I said, there seem to be two choices here.
And both — an overreach or an under-reach — represent a government sealing the fate of its people.
That is our reality right now as I see it.
Last week, Hilton Head Island’s mayor bizarrely told vacationers not to cancel their plans while at the very same time announcing that beaches would be closed to, let’s face it, locals who aren’t staying in timeshares or hotels that have beach access or are within walking distance of a beach.
Not a great look, but again, this is a new crisis with new challenges, and last week was our practice round.
This week, McCann still seems to be gripping the waist of whoever is in front of him in the old conga line — the chamber? our governor? secret manatee adviser? fear? — looking left and looking right to see whether someone else will make the call for non-essential businesses to shut down and people to stay in their homes.
Is it because he’s too afraid of the headache that will no doubt follow the decision about which businesses get to be considered essential and which nonessential?
Hilton Head is, after all, a land of self-appointed VIPs, all of whom want a special card that grants them exceptions to the rules.
It seems the rest of us in Beaufort County will have to wait until Gov. Henry McMaster weans himself off that sweet Washington D.C. ego elixir he’s been happily lapping up for the past three years before we get any sort of enforceable order to keep people at home — which means we should expect this to happen some time around never.
(Independent political thought in South Carolina is never rewarded, and we all know our pols like their rewards, even during a pandemic.)
But Hilton Head still has a fighting chance.
Let’s take a look at what we have here:
First, lots and lots of beloved grandparents live on Hilton Head and, forgive me for not being a sociopath, we younger residents have a moral obligation to protect them. No matter how many statistical minutes someone may have left on this earth, life is still worth living.
Second, the island is the economic heart of this county. Those beloved grandparents, let’s not forget, are investors in the Hilton Head lifestyle. They create, maintain and contribute to the environment that so many hundreds of thousands want to visit each year.
Third, the island is self-contained and therefore the easiest and most logical municipality in this county to seal off.
Fourth, for years islanders have been telling us they hate having to go to “Bluffghanistan.” Well, hey, here’s their chance for a break on that.
To save this county’s economic future, the mayor and Town Council should stop waiting for political miracles to happen in Columbia and immediately vote on an ordinance to keep people away from the island and urge residents to stay in their homes for the next two weeks.
They should also demand specific, concrete answers from Hilton Head Hospital about its preparedness and how many beds are currently occupied by those with covid-19.
Mayor McCann and council member Bill Harkins’ easy acceptance of corporate arrogance in the face of this crisis is embarrassing to watch and also dangerous.
No more shrugging and tip-toeing, boys.
No more waiting and seeing because we’ve already waited and we’ve already seen.
It’s time to get out of that conga line and join the rest of us.
In case you haven’t noticed, the party has been over for a while now.
