Florida is a paradise of freedom

We have been denied our freedom. We have been deprived of the ability to make our own decisions about how we choose to live and what activities we choose to engage in. We have given up our rights to self-determination and we are at risk of never getting them back.

It becomes clear how much we've deprived of when we are given the opportunity to observe and experience life as we once lived it. Life like that still exists in the great state of Florida. Real life is happening in Florida, and it is glorious.

Arriving in Orlando from the great oppressive north was a culture-shock. Businesses, shops, and restaurants were all open, and while social distancing and masking were in effect, people could still gather. Floridians have it made in many ways, and they know it. They look at us northerners from our lockdown wastelands and smile, "welcome back to life," they say.

People are so much happier here—they have freedom, they are grateful for it, and they remind us that freedom must not be relinquished for any reason, even a quick moving pandemic with a 99 percent survival rate.

Florida's common sense approach puts people first and doesn't succumb to fear. It allows individuals to make their own decisions and determinations about how they want to live their lives. It makes those of us who have been living with constant restrictions realize just what we've given up in the quest for perpetual safety.

Governor Ron DeSantis kept his state open when other big American states shuttered their economies, schools, and told people to, as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti notoriously said, "cancel everything." DeSantis has been a vocal opponent of what he calls "lockdowners," those who use the crisis to steal American's freedoms and tell us it's for our own good. It isn't.

The numbers prove it out. Florida stands at 28th place in the number of deaths per capita, and for a state with 21 percent of their population in the most vulnerable category—over 65—that’s really saying something.

If Florida is so great, and it is, why are so many other places refusing to follow their model? Governors in California, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington state, Quebec, Ontario, and the UK are so wedded to the idea that the only way to solve the problem of COVID contagion is to force human beings to bend their own will to the governments. When we don't comply, we are arrested, fined, shamed, and in one way or another forced into compliance.

This is not how we are meant to live. Human beings do not thrive in confinement. Even putting aside the incredible hypocrisies of these leaders, even ignoring for the moment their own inability to comply with their executive, non-legislated, ordinances, it is so essential that we demand our rights back, and demand them now.

We realized in Florida, sitting outside at a restaurant, toasting the warm sun and cool breezes with new friends, just how much we had been deprived of our adulthood. The government restrictions are turning us into a race of children who ask permission or simply assume that they are not allowed to do as they please.

Our governments are turning us from men and women into little girls and boys who are compliant, reliant on government and incapable of forming their own opinions or trusting their own decisions. It has simply got to stop.

There is no reason that a curfew should be in place on adults, as it is currently in Quebec where all citizens must be in their homes at 8 pm and are barred from leaving again until morning. There is no reason that a government should have the authority to shut down businesses and take away the ability to earn a living, as they have in New York where so many restaurants have closed never to reopen, where the cultural engine of the city has been mothballed, and where school children languish on screens instead of receiving a proper education.

What Florida is doing is right. The way Florida has handled the coronavirus, despite constant criticism from the Democratic left, is far superior to the way it has been handled by New York, California and the other lockdown states and provinces.

We can't all move to Florida, but we can demand our rights back. We must demand our rights back. We must take them. Open up.