DOYLE MURPHY
Honestly, we're just plain sick of this guy.
Welcome back to the Big Mad, the RFT's weekly roundup of righteous rage! Because we know your time is short and your anger is hot:
Sick of Schmitt’s Shit: Eric Schmitt’s ongoing and wholly cynical war against the basic tenets of science and human decency reached a remarkable new low this week when the man who has been using the Office of the Missouri Attorney General as campaign headquarters for his senate run requested that parents snitch on schools that still have mask mandates in place (even going so far as to suggest they send pictures of children to the government, which seems, uh, intrusive). Honestly, Eric makes this column so often we’re getting bored of writing about him, so we’ll keep this succinct: Fuck this disingenuous and sorry excuse for a so-called “public servant,” and fuck the way he’s consistently used his office not for the betterment of Missourians, but to advance his own ambitions. We deserve better.
Primed for Disaster: There's plenty of mad to go around in the wake of the unprecedented December tornado which killed at least 90, including six in Edwardsville when an Amazon warehouse collapsed there. Where to begin? First, there is Amazon itself. The company has been re-introducing a pre-COVID policy forbidding employees to carry smartphones with them on the job. In the event of a natural disaster, not having your phone also means not getting alerts and not being able to communicate with loved ones. The mad we felt towards Amazon only swelled with news that the company's founder, and world's second-richest man, spent the morning after the tornado celebrating a celebrity space launch before issuing his condolences. Then came the revelation that the warehouses themselves were woefully inadequate to resist a tornado. As bad as Amazon looks in all this, they didn't cause the tornado. Tornadoes are a fact of life in our part of the world, but up until very recently, a tornado of this magnitude in December was unheard of. The sad reality is that tornadoes will only get worse, and tornado season may become year-round.
COVID Consequences: A school district in the northwest corner of Missouri started its Christmas break a week early. Dealing with a spike in COVID-19 cases and exposures among staff and students, the school board of South Nodaway R-IV voted on Monday to cancel the rest of the semester. “It is our hope that the additional time away from school will promote wellness and recovery for those staff, students and community members dealing with illness and allow them to celebrate the holiday with their families,” schools superintendent Dustin Skoglund wrote Tuesday in a letter to parents. Monday's and Tuesday's classes had already been canceled because they didn't have enough healthy adults to stay open. Hours before the vote on the rest of the semester, Missouri state Senator Dan Hegeman, who represents that area, published his latest weekly newsletter, supporting efforts to crack down on public health orders designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. He pointed out that Eric Schmitt is actively going after school districts still imposing mask mandates. Hegeman took no issue with that, noting that a Cole County judge had ruled against health departments’ orders (but omitting that Schmitt, ostensibly representing the state in the case, was technically on the losing side). “Yes, it is imperative to ‘follow the science,’ but it’s also important to realize we cannot be kept safe from everything,” Hegeman writes. “We cannot live in a bubble and be protected by the government at all times. Instead, we take the information we have and live our lives the best way we can. We have to trust in God, as well as our friends and neighbors, in order to continue to live our lives in the best way possible.” In Barnard, at South Nodaway schools, that now means canceling classes and hoping they have enough healthy people to reopen next year.
Hop On In: A PR firm says its research shows that Missouri's total beer-drinking over the festive season would fill 171 Olympic-sized swimming pools, good enough to make Missouri the third-most drinkingest state in terms of holiday-timed hypothetical pool volume. This got us thinking. Not about beer, mind you, but a far safer substance that Missourians seem far less interested in putting in their body. See, with just 52 percent of our population vaccinated, Missouri has the eleventh-lowest vaccine rate in the country, with about 2.9 million people still missing their jabs. If all those people took a .3 milliliter Pfizer dose, those millions of missing shots would fill about 230 gallons of vaccine, which ... actually wouldn't look that impressive in an Olympic-standard 600,000-gallon pool. Then again, you don’t need any gimmicky math metaphors to know that vaccines work. Missouri still has a long way to swim before we can really get festive again, but when that day comes: Sure, we’ll drink a pool or two.
