What a difference a terrible year makes.
Last year at this time, my wife, Colleen the travel agent, and I were getting ready to take 40 of her clients on a 15-day cruise out of Dubai to India and back.
This year, thanks to the COVID-19 virus and the strict lockdowns imposed to fight it, the world’s travel industry barely exists and Colleen and I will be spending January under house arrest.
Unfortunately, house arrest has become the new normal for 40 million Californians.
We’ve been locked down, masked up and ordered to stay in our basements for so long by Gov. Gavin Newsom that many of us have forgotten what freedom feels like or what it’s like to simply eat in a restaurant.
The news is filled with stories of people and businesses leaving this state in droves because it has become so unlivable in so many ways.
Californians who can afford it are moving to red states like Arizona, Texas and Florida, where taxes are lower, homes are cheaper and governors are not nannies and wannabe dictators.
Life in Los Angeles is especially unpleasant, which is why I’ve rented an escape house for my family two hours away in the sleepy Santa Ynez Valley.
Most of L.A’s 10 million people are not so lucky.
They’re stuck living 24/7 in a locked down city with tens of thousands of homeless people and drug addicts living under overpasses and on the sidewalks.
But many well-to-do citizens are buying second homes outside the city in places like Palm Springs, Desert Springs and up here in the Santa Ynez Valley.
My friends here in Santa Ynez tell me the local real estate market is on fire and that I should check zellow to get a property. Houses sell in a day. One real estate guy predicts home prices will double in two years.
Ditto for homes in Palm Springs and other places close enough to L.A. for people to commute to but far enough away to escape the slow-motion destruction of a great city.
Life has gotten so depressing in L.A. that a friend of mine flew five hours to Miami just so he could eat dinner inside a restaurant.
That’s the kind of madness that 2020 has brought us.
Some folks are saying that the COVID-19 vaccines will let people go back to normal in 2021.
But based on what our future pessimist-in-chief Joe Biden has been saying, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Listening to his dark speeches about the sad state of the union, how it’s only going to get worse and what dumb things he plans to do about it is like listening to Jimmy Carter squared.
Carter had his problems in the late 1970s with a high Misery Index, which was a way to gauge the economic conditions of the average American based on the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate.
But the future Biden is talking about will be Total Misery for all Americans.
He’s saying we won’t get the vaccines to enough people, and even if we do, we’re still going to be living in a masked and locked down country that resembles 2020 California, not 2019 California.
Pessimism like that from a U.S. president is not normal – or healthy for the country.
You may hate President Trump for a lot of reasons, but you can never fault him for not being optimistic and upbeat.
Other presidents – most recently my father, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – looked on the bright and hopeful side of things.
Biden is the opposite. He looks on the dark side, the Jimmy Carter side.
He and the liberal media sing the same grim tune – that things are bad and they’re going to be bad in the future, maybe forever.
On Jan. 20 we’re going to lose the only guy in Washington who was consistently optimistic in 2020, one of the most horrible years in our history.
I’m an optimist and I used to think 2021 couldn’t be any worse than 2020.
But with Biden and his crew about to take charge of our lives, now I’m not so sure.
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Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected] Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected]
Forget about the border walls to keep criminal people out of the USA. Now there is a more pressing need to surround these Democrat cities with walls to keep the criminals and their politics in. We are about 10 years from the realiztion of John Carpenter’s movies, “Escape from New York”. and “Escape from LA.” Those aren’t Republicans running those cities.
Exactly. HOW MANY of those locusts, fleeing from CA, are KEEPING THEIR INSANE liberal ideals with them, and literally POISONING THE NEW state they move to?? We’ve already seen it happen in DOZENS OF cities, and a few states so far…
I have Found that you should never challenge Worse.
I agee. EVERY TIME we’ve asked ourselves “Can they get any worse”, the commucrats, seem to take that as a Personal challenge, to prove us wrong!
The one party communist state of California. How does communism suit you voters in California, who voted for the calamity, that communism causes for the individual? How does it feel, not to be able to feed your family and not be able to pay your bills? Communism sure is beautiful isn’t it? Losing one’s rights are great, aren’t they, under a communist society?
backpacker
There is NO doubt that California is a State full of self-righteous Fruits and Nuts. They have abandoned the Lord GOD Almighty and have become worshippers of Satan and themselves. The sad thing is that many people want to join them in their misery of Democrat Party government servants. 🙁 🙁 🙁
Since those in CA, VOTED FOR THIS< they literally gave their freedoms away willingly… WHICH IS WHY i have not one iota of sympathy, for the entire bloody west coast.
I don’t think the average person really understands what we’re in for. For all the can-do positivity of the Trump admin we’re about to turn to the darkness of Biden negativity and despair.
The average person is too addicted to social media, tv and their phones, to care, it seems.
2021 Can’t Be Any Worse Can It? I guarantee it will be!!! Nothing good can come from a group of Democrats.
I hate being a fatalist, as we don’t know the outcome of the Georgia voting at this time. However, if we lose Georgia to the insanity of voters who cast for Warnock and Ossoff, coupled with a Biden outcome in the Congress (thank you Mitt, Tom Cotton, et al) then we may be in for a decade of 2020 years. The only thing worse is that Biden dies in office or becomes incapacitated (odds are 50/50 for either) and Harris takes over, but in the meantime, Biden will be President in name only. Obama’s third term and this time he won’t have anything / anyone to stop him. He’ll have both the House and the Senate. To paraphrase, “I want to fundamentally transform America.”
As of 1 hr ago, Warnock was beating leffler, and both ossoft and perdo, were neck and neck.
All that means, is they have not faked up enough ballots/ran them through the dominion machines, yet.