WHO Says the Pandemic is Over, Now that the Powers That Be Used it to Wreck Everything

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the official end of the “global emergency” over the Panic, but I fear the real emergency is just beginning, and not just here in Massachusetts.

You can always start something whenever you want – whether it’s an argument, a brawl or even a war – but once it gets going, you never know when it’s going to end, or how, or even who is going to end it.

COVID was a convenient way to get rid of Donald Trump. That’s a fact. Jane Fonda said it was “God’s gift to the left.”

Well, he’s gone, and so is so much else. Hey, all you people still wearing masks – are you happy now?

Locally, to take just one example, consider the state budget. When the Panic was ginned up, Massachusetts was spending $40 billion a year – way, way too much obviously.

Three years later, the state budget is $55 billion. Anyone think the taxpayers are getting anything more for all that extra cash?

Of course, most of it was federal funny money, just being rolled off the printing presses 24/7. But now the Panic dough is drying up.

The hackerama at the State House just announced last month’s tax revenue numbers. They were down 31 percent from a year earlier, 23 percent below the expected level.

Granted, the payroll patriots still grabbed an obscene $4.78 billion from working classes. But the problem is that the non-working classes have gotten used to living high on the hog with all the spikes in welfare and “moratoriums” on paying for anything from rent to student loans to public-transportation fares.

After the bleak news, the advocates for the indolent immediately began screaming about the very modest tax cuts Gov. Maura Healey has proposed, saying that the money shouldn’t go to the “ultra-wealthy.”

Ultra-wealthy being defined as anyone who must get up on Monday morning and go to work. Key word: work, as opposed to a “job,” especially a job the public sector. In those cases, the relationship between a “job” and “work” is tenuous at best.

The money is needed for “prioritizing investments.” The synonym for investments, as we all know by now, is welfare.

Still, it’s odd that the welfare-industrial complex would be turning, however slightly, on Healey. It seems like just last month (it was) that she was announcing her plans for “upgrading climate resiliency plans through an equity basis.”

Again, the synonym for all that BS is “more welfare.” And that welfare will be doled out on an “equity basis,” meaning no handouts for you, only for the protected classes.

Strangely, though, none of this increasing dysfunction seems to resonate with the general public. Perhaps because they’re too busy figuring out how to get out of this benighted Commonwealth.

Which is another product of the Panic. For a long time now, working Americans have been trying to leave the blue states, but these last three years have just accelerated the process.

And we’re starting to see the baleful results. The societal deterioration is no longer confined to the ruined cities, the Democrats’ beloved “gateway communities” overrun with illegal aliens, welfare dependency, drugs, illegitimacy etc.

Now the dysfunction is starting to spread into the suburbs and beyond.

Look at what’s going on in places like Canton, Holbrook, Methuen. The wheels are coming off, or already have. It’s like South Boston after busing started in the 1970s, and the middle class checked out.

Suddenly most residents in Southie were either on actual welfare or public-sector welfare – “Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority” et al.

The Bulgers didn’t gain total control of Southie until the town’s middle-classes fled to places like, yes, Holbrook. But now so many people who can are cashing out of Massachusetts altogether, before it’s too late, and not just because of the millionaires’ tax either.

Did you see that the Christmas Tree Shops have filed for bankruptcy? Whether you liked them or not, could you ever have imagined that happening?

I just got back to Wellesley from Florida. Two of the banks along the main drag – Washington Street – failed while I was away and were seized by the feds. Two! It’s like living in the old movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

To get past the failed banks, I drive by both the coffee shop I used to walk to every morning, shut down in the early days of the Panic, as well as a great Brockton-based bakery, ditto.

Who hasn’t lost a favorite restaurant, or small shop, since the announcement of the 15-day lockdown to “flatten the curve?”

They say success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan. I think we now know what category the Panic falls into, don’t we?

Dr. Anthony Fauci testily says he didn’t shut down any schools. Randi Weingarten, the teachers’ union boss, is even more shameless. She says she tried to keep them open.

Meanwhile, by every measure, test scores for American students have collapsed. But the important thing is, Weingarten’s dues-paying members got two-year vacations. It was all for the children, of course.

Even the WHO, that wholly-owned subsidiary of the Red Chinese, has been turning on its masters, accusing them of obfuscating on the real origins of the virus, as if we didn’t know. The only question is, was its release deliberate?

Meanwhile, the governor who presided over the catastrophe now has a job in Indiana paying $3.5 million a year. His dear pal the mayor of Boston has likewise fled the wreckage, getting a similar pay package running the NHL Players Association.

You think Charlie Parker and Marty Walsh are worried about the shuttered storefronts and the plunging achievement-test scores? Hell no, they did well by doing, well, by doing us in.

But now, the “global emergency” is over. So is everything else – at least in Massachusetts.