You know how the Cleveland Browns inevitably implode every NFL season? Or how
night follows day and then day follows night? Some things are such a given that you
could put you could put your mortgage on it and hit a bar afterwards for a relaxing beer
or two. Well, there’s a new stone-cold certainty in town. And that’s that failed human,
let alone failed politician, NYC Mayor Eric Adams has an uncanny ability to continually
screw up pretty much everything that he claps his eyes on. Like a reverse King Midas,
everything he touches turns to crap rather than gold.
COVID-19 vaccine mandates are controversial things at the very best of times. Public
heath versus individual liberty is a fine tightrope to teeter across, even for the most
adept politician. Given that Adams has all the political tightrope ability of a drunken
octopus, we end up with yet another King of Stop and Frisk mess to have to get our
incredulous heads around. While Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for performers and
the city’s sports teams just in time for regular play to resume, he also came up with the
genius (and that’s genius with a huge side serving of irony) idea that city workers should
continue to have to abide by the vaccine mandate, failing which there could be the very
real risk that they could lose their job.
NYC is a lot of things, to a lot of people. However, at the core of the Big Apple’s
philosophy is that everyone is on the same, even, playing field. Ridiculous
discrepancies in wealth and status are the preserve of the likes of Trump, and we all
know how much time NYC has for that particular New Yorker. Equality and giving every
one a fair go are etched into the city’s DNA like nothing else comparable in the rest of
the United States.
So it is then that Adams Alice in Wonderland approach to the
vaccine mandate has so quickly be seen as the utter nonsense that it is.
FDNY unions have been especially quick to pounce on this latest Adams screw up.
Rightly so, they have pressed the point that if performers and athletes are free to
choose whether to vaccinate or not, then why should thousands of city workers not be
at that same liberty. While we are no pandemic specialists, it’s not too hard to figure out
that the COVID-19 virus, in all of its mutations, is going to make no discrimination
whatsoever between an NYC firefighter and an NYC athlete.
Of course, true to form, Adams tries to make this a matter of economic concern. His
flimsy argument is that lifting the vaccine mandate for those few of a more famous ilk
will rake in more dollars for the city’s coffers, than the thousands and thousands and
city’s public servants who keep the whole thing ticking over.
And those public city
servants, just like the FDNY, do so without any desire to clamor for the fame and
fortune that performers and athletes have the benefit of achieving. It’s either one rule
for one and one for another, or all for one and one for all, and behaving like adults and
not petulant children. Over 1,400 FDNY firefighters have already been dismissed to
date because of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. More are likely to come. And the
same is true of other public employment sectors across the city. Yet basketball players
get a free pass?
What exactly is so hard about that that Eric Adams cannot comprehend while the vast
majority of New Yorkers, and the rest of the country come to that, can?
Part of it would
appear to be that Adams believes that he has some kind of special insight that none of
his underling constituents happen to share? This is classic “do as I say, not do as I do”
and it is very, very telling of the man that currently unjustly occupies the office of the
mayor.
The fact is, he has not only no particular insight into anything, but he also has
an absence of political acumen, empathy and, for good measure, historical awareness.
That is why his choices are inevitably awful and allows for us to place our mortgage on
the fact that he will get the next thing stone cold wrong too. As sure as night follows
day.