Opening tourist attractions and the Sturgis Rally means business as usual for summertime Black Hills. People have fun, and some here make lots of money. Just as it should be. But the people will be coming from other states and countries. A few will have the coronavirus. That’s all it might take to make our serene location on the map into a virus hotspot.
Should we welcome the opportunity to experience herd immunity in the Black Hills? Some may think so, and they may be right, but others say that the fittest will survive if they bunker down. It all boils down to avoiding congestion of any kind, mask or not.
Only the unfit (and doomed), they say, will expose themselves unnecessarily in order to party and mingle for its own sake. Little may be gained except for a hangover—and then possibly the virus itself. Those that stay away from crowds of any kind may be the survivors. Avoiding going out during the Sturgis Rally is a start. Simply plan ahead to bunker down (stay close to home) during this period.
Plan to prepare meals at home since restaurants will be full of visitors. Get groceries well before the Rally. Use common sense and creativity when moving, for example, through the Byzantine aisles in Walmart. No one is forcing customers into the few designated pedestrian traffic ways in the store. I can walk from one end of Walmart to another simply by choosing a parallel, but narrower, aisle that runs nearby. It’s surprising how far these solitary “trails” will take you. It’s a bit like a mouse in a labyrinth, being quickly able to turn another way if the aisle is clogged.
Some refuse to wear masks as a political statement against MSM’s and Democratic Party’s incessant television announcements to do so—that is, coronavirus advice posing as a commercial, pounding the message again and again into the psyche.
The fittest will take an independent stance. They will wear a mask just as a hedge, just in case, since it can’t hurt anything to do so when crowds might be encountered during tourist season. Better yet, they say, use your knowledge of the Black Hills to avoid places where tourists are likely to be lured.
In short, the fittest will pass their genes through their families onto the next generation. Those who like to party and avoid a constructive lifestyle will be at the mercy of natural selection. When God made the world, who is to say that Darwin wasn’t a later scientific apostle, along with innumerable others who will discover how God designed the world in the millennia to come? Of course, the New Testament God is the same as (continuous with) the Old Testament God. Jehovah and Jesus are the same. Jesus, being eternal, was in the Old Testament, as God, not just born later in the New.
Perhaps the coronavirus is a religious catalyst to allow people to take stock of their lives and their Christian faith. If so, the darker God of the Old Testament might even have been supportively interpreted by writers like Jack London in The Call of the Wild (1903) who argued to later generations that those who survive, at the top, perhaps as heroes, won’t surrender to television-based propaganda. Rather, they are independently willing to cultivate their own self-reliance and common sense.
Let the fools perish who recklessly allow hormones to lead them to spring break and the Buffalo Chip Campground and all other crowd magnet events, including living in urban centers like New York City. So what if they’ve been chosen to naturally deselect? We’re all destined to die, some earlier, some later. It’s part of nature and natural selection.
