After two solid years of COVID restrictions, many of us have reached a breaking point.  Witness the mass exodus to other states from sunny California.  Who wouldn't want to get out of here, away from this strangling, prison-like "reality"?

Malaise is now spreading throughout the country, as a direct result of Biden's mass migration.  How do you know that your chosen destination hasn't been set upon by a horde of unknown, unemployed migrants?  This makes moving elsewhere less attractive.  You can't know what you'll find when you get there, but it might be just as bad — or if clandestine flights continue, will be soon.  Moving to the south of Texas or Arizona is certainly no longer attractive.  You must pity the people stuck dealing with the relentless and dangerous influx.

Locally, as of yesterday, I've become an Untouchable.  I can no longer eat in a restaurant in any of the communities surrounding my home, or legally enter my gym, attend a concert, go to a museum, or do anything that enriches life beyond the bare bones of going shopping for food or goods or taking a walk outdoors.  Why?  Because I refuse to carry or show a "vaccine passport" or share my "status."

Locally, life's miseries keep piling up, beyond the COVID BS.  I'm angry, worn down by living in such disharmony.  Around here, despite 10% sales tax, sky-high income tax and property taxes, we have terrible schools with an openly CRT curriculum, children masked for no reason, and, if a suit hadn't just been won against it, they'd be forced to take the jab.  In my town, 97% of them already have, with parents oblivious to the potential harm.  What's going to be the long-term result?  How much chronic illness and death will it cause?  It makes my heart ache to think about it.

On the everyday level, we are surrounded by chronic misery.  Leave home, encounter bums, garbage, and tents tucked into every crevice of every filthy, potholed, decaying underpass.  I use the word bum purposefully.  These are not just downtrodden, "homeless" victims of our high property values.  They are addicts, the mentally ill, the violent.  They're takers who aren't motivated to better themselves when the state will pay them to fester, have learned to game the system, and have been enabled to stay pickled on drugs and check out.  They take no pride in their own humanity.  They beg on every street corner, every highway exit.  This despite taking government largesse the rest of us must supply with our high taxes.

Image: The streets of San Francisco.  YouTube screen grab.

Billions are spent "on" the homeless, and from at least some reports, perhaps 60% of that money goes in the pockets of program administrators who handily game the system.  We get $350K public toilets that become shooting galleries and "navigation centers" nobody wants to stay in.  We enable, and bums flock to our state.

Meanwhile, it seems that everyone in government conspires to make productive citizens' daily lives more miserable.  It may sound petty, complaining about small problems, but when you heap one thing on top of another, it wears you down.  Metering lights (thanks, power-hungry traffic engineers) are a prime example.  Last week, I spent 40 minutes stop-start-stop-start every 12 seconds for a long stretch of street, just to get onto the freeway.  Ostensibly installed to keep the highway from backing up, metering lights have little obvious good effect, but they turn a simple trip home from the grocery into slow-drip torture.  Commuters have it even worse!  Of course, as we sit and waste fuel on this misguided "fix," all along the verge, we have tents and piles of garbage.

Meanwhile, our pols make the rules and don't follow a single one.  We who live here are well aware that Nancy Pelosi gets to insider trade herself to a great fortune, but if one of us did, he'd be jailed.  We are all looking at the picture of our overbearing, control-freak governor, unmasked at a stadium where masks are required of the rest of us.  The list goes on, curtailed only by word-count restrictions.

They have ways to keep us in line.  Why else the twisted J6 narrative and the prisoners' plight?  It's a blatant warning to all of us, in this über-political atmosphere, that unconstitutional imprisonment, without bail or trial, could be anyone's fate.  Watch what you do or say!  You could be next!

We are heading precipitously toward becoming a society that is as repressive and over-controlled as any communist regime.  Force everyone to have a digital vaccine card, and they have won control.  They'll be able to identify — and eventually weed out — those of us who are "non-compliant."  The gamble, that they can get it done before the midterms...we shall see!  Hopefully, although we seem to be losing the battle right now, we can still grind slowly toward winning the war.