I’m very fortunate to call Texas my home, for many reasons. I’ll get to that in a moment.

In early January, I heard about the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in the wet markets of Wuhan, China. Like many a news story out of the Middle Kingdom, it barely registered in my peripheral attention, probably as it did with most Americans.

But as the days passed, the news came into sharper and more detailed focus. Most Americans probably were unaware of it until a month later, with President Trump having shut down immigration from China and the infected cruise ships being stranded offshore. Within a news cycle or two, the word coronavirus was everywhere.

Flash forward to the past week. The public patience for political pronouncements during the lockdown has grown threadbare. In places, gaping holes in the social contract have appeared. The overreaction of authorities to people simply going about their business while making the conscious choice to forego the use of masks and gloves is unconscionable.

Draconian measures are not relegated solely to the police and politicos. We’ve now become a nation of busybodies — the popular term “Karens” is used as a pejorative to label them — and we are turning on strangers and neighbors, alike, calling 9-1-1 to report one mostly imagined infraction or “threat” after another.

The totally unwarranted killing of George Floyd by now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been both fired and arrested on 3rd degree murder charges, and the subsequent rioting, is symptomatic of both the extreme authoritarianism on the part of local and state governments and the pent-up dissatisfaction, disdain, and anger on the part of large swathes of the American public towards those who abuse their authority. By all accounts, Floyd’s arrest had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was, however, exacerbated by the tensions that have grown during this viral event.

There are so many examples of "Karens" — I'm loathe to use that term because I've known so many wonderful Karens in my life — that all you have to do is search for the term on YouTube to find dozens, if not hundreds, of videos showing just how much we have become the Town Snitches. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, a few weeks ago, encouraged this very behavior among Californians. . . just as the Stazi did in East Germany.

Simply despicable.

As a result of all these controlling busybodies, people have been shunned, beaten, publicly shamed, body-slammed, lost their jobs, been revealed to be racist or simply jerks, and have even been killed. And to make things even more confusing, “Karens” show up on the Left and the Right. Enough already!

Let’s all take a deep breath. Getting upset over these twinkies is not worth it.

Where was I? Oh, yes. There are — as I see it — two possible paths we can take forward as a country.

Either, we can get back to work and rebuild the economy, putting our masks and gloves in the junk drawer of our lives, and star to renew the social fabric, reinvent the way we work, and rebuild the huge number of small businesses that have either suspended, or ended entirely, operations. This path also leads — for a short time, anyway — to an influx of political leaders who pledge to minimize the impact of government in all our lives. God knows the current crop have vastly overreached their authority, simply because they can.

The now 40 million workers who have lost their lives during this pandemic deserve that.

Or, we can continue the lockdown for several months — or until there is a vaccine or, even, a cure, if you believe some “experts” — further deepening our dependency on government to the point where so many of us decide that it makes less sense to go back to work than to latch on to the government's teat.

As for my good fortune at being a lifelong Texan (with a few forays to “foreign” states) — it, apparently, comes down to the fact that Texas Governor Greg Abbott didn’t extend the lockdown any more than necessary. My life and the lives of my fellow Texans has been tolerable during this minimal lockdown but, begrudgingly, a necessary precaution. I believe that had I been living in New York, California, or Michigan, I’d either be dead from the hand of the government for resisting their authoritarian abuses, or I’d be leading a band of rebels to overthrow these petty tyrants.

A word of advice to politicians both inside and outside our state border — Don’t Mess with Texas.

— Lawrence Standifer Stevens