KY faces a terrible COVID Christmas, scary New Year. But ‘freedom fighters’ bury their heads.
Darren Hardy is in a bind.
He’s the finance manager at a Chevrolet dealership in Manchester, and thanks to COVID-19 and general worries about the world, people are not buying many cars. Like 40-50 percent less than usual.
Hardy, who was laid off between March and May of this year, said he’s gotten through thanks to the federal COVID-19 CARES Act, which helped him pay bills, along with suspending his student loan payments until Dec. 31. But now, he’s still not making much money, and the roughly $300 in loan payments could break him. He owes close to $40,000 altogether.
“I don’t where it’s going to come from,” he said. “People aren’t buying cars, they’re scared and rightfully so. It’s a very, very stressful situation. It’s all coming home to roost.”
Hardy is one of 575,000 Kentuckians who owe $18.7 billion in student loans, according to the Kentucky Center on Economic Policy. He works in Manchester but lives in Owsley County, one of the poorest counties in the country. He sees people having an even harder time than he is, people who will be stuck once other state and federal programs, like rental assistance and unemployment payments dry up at the end of the year.
A third of Kentuckians are struggling to meet basic needs like food, heat or rent as the holidays approach, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. At the same time, Kentucky’s COVID-19 rates are skyrocketing, despite Gov. Andy Beshear’s pleas to wear masks and new restrictions on schools, restaurants and bars.
Meanwhile, here’s what the rest of our elected officials are up to these days:
Mitch McConnell, the most powerful elected official in Washington, has been too busy abetting by silence a tragicomic coup led by “Sweaty” Rudy Guiliani to worry about hundreds of thousands of his fellow Kentuckians who are facing a terrible Christmas and an even scarier New Year. McConnell could stop blaming Democrats for a lack of COVID relief and actually get something done, but scoring political points is much less work and way more fun.
(Darren Hardy, by the way, has offered to take McConnell on a tour to show him real Kentucky in the poorest counties in the country. “How does Kentucky get no help from the most powerful man in Washington?” he asked.)
Daniel Cameron, botcher of grand juries and loser of state Supreme Court fights, is now trying to regain his credibility with a federal lawsuit to reopen Christian schools. He already lost a major case at the state Supreme Court, which decided unanimously that Beshear had those emergency powers. (I also have questions about the private school restrictions, when their COVID-19 numbers have stayed relatively low, but this is really not about religious freedom.)
The Republican caucus members of the General Assembly are squawking about ‘freedom,’ and planning how to take away those emergency powers from Beshear, even though his actions are the only reason that Kentucky’s rates are still lower than most of our neighbors. What’s their big plan to help with COVID-19, you ask? They don’t have one, but freedom.
Other freedom fighters in Kentucky are keeping restaurants open and refusing to wear masks, even as the biggest hospital in the state, the University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital announced Tuesday that it would close some operating rooms to make space for COVID patients, flooding in from all the counties where people refuse to wear masks. Later that afternoon, two families from Northern Kentucky sued the governor for “criminalizing” family dinners.
The only good news is that the grown-ups are finally going to be in charge in Washington, D.C. with a real plan to stop COVID-19, possible forgiveness of student debt, and a possible relief act. But you know what’s coming. McConnell and his Republican ilk, having ignored the national debt to give tax breaks to rich people, have now decided it’s a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM again.
Speaking of serious people, maybe some of these freedom fighters should listen to Dr. Mike Daugherty, a Republican doctor.
“It appears necessary to inform some of my fellow Republicans that COVID-19 is not a political football,” he wrote in a letter to the editor last week. “Rather, it is a deadly virus. Criticizing Gov. Andy Beshear for making difficult decisions based upon sound scientific data ... is blatantly ludicrous. So, critics, keep your heads firmly in the sand. At least that way you won’t be exhaling aerosol particles, infecting others.”
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 10:40 AM.
