Discerning Whitewater

Personal note: This seems to be the purpose of this blog, for the time being and moving forward. I am just tired of being bullied.

Yesterday County Board Supervisor Ryan Simons posted on Facebook:

Jerry Grant is my supervisor in Whitewater. I posted to Facebook this notice. Then I called Jerry. Jerry is a super nice guy. I enjoyed talking to him, despite our differences. Jerry told me he is stuck at Fairhaven and called into the meeting Tuesday. He wasn’t necessarily aware of the mask ordinance being discussed at the Human Services Committee meeting and told me he is not on that committee. He then told me he strongly supported the use of masks all the time. I chuckled when Jerry told me that he suspected Simons was responsible for this information.

I can appreciate Jerry’s concern. Being stuck at Fairhaven with this COVID stuff and being high risk (age) has probably not been enjoyable.

As a point of information, below is the current COVID deaths in Wisconsin per age (Wisconsin DHS):

This is an interesting table and I will follow up on this later.

So I called Ryan Simons. Simons ultimately told me that he needed to see all the information but felt strongly that these decisions need to be made at a more personal level. I had a discussion with Simons over Grant’s comment about Simons “meddling” (my word). My feedback to Simons is that Whitewater (being no different than a lot of communities) has a lot of old timers that don’t like to be bucked.

I also called Nancy Russell. She got back to me this morning. We had a pleasant conversation and she told me that this discussion is unlikely to get out of committee. She also told me she would vote “no” if there was a vote. She described it as “unenforceable”.

I applaud Simons. It is clear that this call for masks was pushed back with a decent amount of pushback. It is interesting to me that Russell brought up the single letter (per Simon’s post) and took action on it.

To follow up on the COVID chart… let’s put this into perspective. While I could not find the exact numbers, two percent of the 827 COVID deaths in Wisconsin have been under the age of forty. That’s roughly fifteen people. We don’t have any further information on their pre-existing conditions or anything of the such.

Let that sink in. How many jobs lost? For roughly fifteen deaths under the age of forty.

And, seriously …. zero percent … let me reiterate …. ZERO PERCENT under the age of twenty…

Can you tell me why we should not open the schools one hundred percent in the fall?

And I went on Lake Geneva News’ website…. nothing to be found on this mask issue. They are still infighting over the harbor guy that quit of over “politics”, and of course, a plug for Evers and his fight against the “lame duck session”. Gag me with a spoon already.

Personal note: this is why I call this Discerning Whitewater. We all have the same information available to us. We all need to have a discussion and figure this out ourselves. Be involved. And love your neighbor.