Stop cringing in fear, let's get back to work

Dear Editor:

Orange County has created the Orange County Economic Recovery Task Force “to reopen the county as quickly and safely as possible,” according to a report by the West Orange Times & Observer Community Editor, Amy Quesinberry, in your April 30 edition. 

“We want to reopen Orange County as fast as possible,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings announced. “We’re asking the community to have the patience.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis is working with his statewide Re-Open Task Force Industry Working Group on Tourism, Construction, Real Estate, Recreation, Retail and Transportation to get people “back to work and back to some semblance of normalcy.”

Also tackling pandemic reopening issues is a statewide executive committee. It includes state and local officials plus members “from some of the state’s largest companies.”

All of this study and soul-searching is in addition to the countless other national, state, county and local groups now grappling — equally assiduously, of course — with the myriad facets of “reopening” on the heels of what is known as the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, at this writing, mounting evidence continues to indicate the true seriousness of the pandemic has been deliberately overblown by individuals and organizations seeking to exploit the situation for selfish, greedy, purely partisan, anti-American purposes. Shame! 

Finally, I imagine that — at least in the case of Florida — by the time conclusions, recommendations and actions have been reached by the multiplicity of task forces — governmental or otherwise — perhaps half of Florida’s current population of more than 20 million people simply will have died of old age rather than from the effects of the pandemic.

Why don’t we just stop cringing in fear in our homes and “man up,” as the current challenge goes, to get fully back to work in our communities? (Perhaps we even could discard the ugly, wet, stinking, filthy, smothering face masks.) We must act very quickly if we hope fully to restore the unparalleled prosperity and freedom we had achieved working together throughout the past several years. 

As earlier Americans did in other challenging times in our past, we, too, can brush aside today’s enemies of our republic and yet again preserve our nation’s marvelous, unique greatness. I’ll close with the following words from the masthead of the West Orange Times & Observer: 

“If we are to build a better world, we must remember that the guiding principle is this — a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.”
— Friedrich Hayek, “Road to Serfdom,” 1944 

Donald F. Fannin
Ocoee