CENTRALIZED POWER VERSUS GOVERNING: WHY THE NEXT FIVE DAYS IS NOT THE TIME FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

This is directed to my friends in Western Illinois, suffering, as am I,  from the enforced lack of commerce. Most of what I say is probably applicable to about anyplace in Illinois, south of Interstate 80

You are angry. Let's be honest. You are also fearful. Many of you began with a distrust of the governor and have assigned several dozen kinds of bad faith to a shutdown order. While I feel your pain, insults, and body shaming is not made things any better for us.

Let's focus on why this is all so upsetting. Most of us recognize that the state has, within its police power, the right and obligation to take steps to ensure the general welfare. Most of us acknowledge that our state is currently a hotbed of infection and that the rate of infection is still rising. Yet my home county is just a few days from meeting the CDC requirements for initial reopening. So we are angry because we can't work or, in some cases, earn.

The previous paragraphs cover the obvious part. There is something else. Most people have not been able to articulate it. Our country, and thus our state, are founded upon opposition to centralized power. Now stay with me here: everything that has been done and ordered in Illinois has come from the executive branch, whether that is IDPH or the governor himself, it is all the executive branch. Neither the governor nor his principal lawyer is a stupid man. When he issued the order that went beyond the initial 30 days, while feeling he was keeping Illinois and safe, The Governor knew he was on thin legal ice. As soon as these little brushfire lawsuits, like Bailey's, popped up, the governor went to the third branch, the judiciary, to try and get a supervisory order. Since the legislature was unavailable to him, this was his attempt to share or, decentralize, the exercise of state power. I am sure it took the Illinois supreme court justices about 15 seconds to figure they did not want any part of that.

So the power remained in that repugnant state, centralized. Everything in our souls as Americans tells us to fight centralized power. Civil disobedience and protest are time-honored ways of fighting centralized control. But those techniques are only deployed by smart people when there is no hope in the near term that power will be decentralized.  That is not the case here.

That brings us to: "what makes sense on this Friday, May 15?" The game has changed. The legislature is coming to town next Wednesday.  What do you suppose they are hearing from their business and employee constituents? How many of them do you think actually believe they, or their predecessors, have given the governor legislative authority for a shutdown beyond 30 days?

By and large, Republican and Democrat, those lawmakers want what you want. They want commerce restored. They want the economy revived. But, being reasonable people, they would prefer to do that without running the risk of overwhelming medical facilities.

In other words, they WANT TO HELP YOU!  But you have to show them it will be OK

For just a minute, try to get entirely out of your own head and walk a mile in Those legislators' shoes. Are they more likely to "loosen things up," if they see people mingling, sharing confined space and not distancing or if the behaviors and proposals they have seen involve both commerce and safety? My take is they are far more likely to enact a plan with variances and phased return to trade if they believe the majority of citizens can interact safely and responsibly, avoiding cross-contamination.

So we make the current situation work to our advantage by, even in an act of civil disobedience, distancing and protecting against droplet projection. Even if one is a hard-core denier/hoaxer, it is easy to see that this precaution compliance for the next few days shows the legislature that loosening up is not dangerous. Remember, by the end of next week, the governor you all love to hate, is no longer going to be driving this bus.

At the risk of repeating myself, every business that can do so should create a "phase 3 safety plan", write it up, with diagrams, with photographs hack, throw in a drawn picture. Wrap that all up and send it to your county's health department as a request for a "variance." I can just about promise you that some enterprising legislator is going to show up on the general assembly floor with a handful of reasonable, responsible safety plans that can be enacted right now without harming the general welfare.

Now let's look at the other way: "How could we take this opportunity and comprehensively screw it up?" That's easy. All we have to do is demonstrate to the legislature that we do not believe there is any disease threat at all, that we can crowd into close quarters, indoors, touch each other, not cover coughs and do all that openly and notoriously. The more pictures of partiers hanging onto each other, the more counterproductive the message. The message? That our citizens do not have the discipline to reopen while observing basic safety protocols. That's the one we don't want to send.  And that is how we screw up this opportunity.

Please, understand I anticipate: "masks and distancing our bullshit," the disease is gone from here," and the ever-popular "you are just telling us to cave in to a dictator!"

I am doing none of the above. I am telling you that the lawmaking power is about to go back to where it is supposed to be – to lawmakers. Lawmakers are going to make decisions based on objective evidence. If the objective evidence is that we cannot behave in a moderately disease – defensive manner for a short while upon opening commerce, that lawmakers will be more hesitant to reopen business. I am suggesting a response to a legislative problem. While your personal feelings about masks, distancing, the governor's waist size, the governor's wife, the governor's motives are probably interesting; they are not responsive to what I am presenting here. What I have been interested in is getting my small business colleagues back up and running. The two-pronged strategy above has the best chance of doing that. Re-creating the Edmund Pettis Bridge does not.

At least think about it