Fiction 

"SHOOT MACHINE GUNS - LOCK AND LOAD MIAMI!" advertized the banner waving behind the plane flying over Miami Beach, foretelling what was to come of the impatience over the coronavirus orders promulgated by antisocial socialist Authority officials Carl Ynez, Jimmy Morelli, and Don Gelb.

The Authority had gone too far with its orders to wear face coverings. The latest order for Miami Beach was especially severe, requiring couples not only to wear masks while copulating, but to cover themselves with sheets with one hole in them as well. And reopening restaurants required diners to wear masks. No more than four people at a time could remove them to place food in their mouths. The waiters served as enforcers, and an enforcement charge was added to the checks

Guns were in fact selling like hotcakes in those hotspot days, and it would not be long until Ynez, Morelli and Gelb would be machine-gunned down in their masks while on an inspection tour of the beach in an unarmored car after a maskless protester along the way was shot in the face by a frustrated police officer, who was in turn dragged to the beach and drowned.

The rebellion against antisocial socialism in order to live or die free and achieve herd immunity resulted, in addition to the deaths of the Authority officials mentioned, the deaths of 174 Maskless, 52 National Guardsmen, 17 Beach Rescue officers, 2 Park Rangers, 1 police officer, 4 Maskateers standing in line at Trader Joe's, and 2 visiting virologists who were defenestrated from the fourth floor of an office building.

Many of the enforcers believed the masks were virtually useless and thought the orders were ridiculous, yet their jobs depended on blind obedience to the Authority. As for Authority, obedience was everything.

The main beef of the Masketeers was that they could not go outside without being infected by maskless people. Some of the Maskateers agreed that the mask rule was ridiculous; they only complained out of jealousy and cowardice because they were afraid to flout an order by the Authority.

The Authority politicians insisted that thousands of lives had been saved by obedience to the rules as they filled the trunks of people who had cars and money for gas with free food. Yet nearly 200 Masketeers who had cowered behind their keyboards and toilet paper at home were found dead of the virus in their dwellings. Their doors were accordingly marked with different colored X's for removal of their corpses. The dead included the president of a luxury South Pointe condominium association whose members devoted several hours a day to watching the surround with binoculars and calling 911 to report violations of martial law.

Lawyers at that time denied there was any such thing as martial law because it is unconstitutional, therefore the orders must be a legitimate exercise of the police power.

Later studies would show that the emergency orders cost more lives than they had saved, by herding people out of restaurants into grocery stores staffed by underpaid workers, out of parks and beaches to exercise in narrow walkways, and other such absurdities.

The Greatest Great Depression ensued. Notwithstanding the rise in suicides and spousal abuse, the people were somewhat healthier than before once herd immunity was achieved.

The incompetent Federal Authority had attempted to stimulate people with its unlimited supply of money. People withdrew cash when banks started to fail because people were not paying their debts. Toilet paper was going for $10,000 a roll, and many were those who stocked their bathrooms with money (referred to as filthy lucre by Christians and as stercus by Romans) instead of toilet paper given its scarcity and value as a hedge on inflation and exchange currency.

WE have survived the coronavirus and, even worse, antisocial socialism, and now it is our task to make the world great again.