Happy Mother’s Day Governor Mills!
A shout out to a Successful Nanny State
Living in Maine these days is like attending a six-year old’s birthday party.
Along with the usual chaos, there is a small group of truly obnoxious brats having a temper tantrum over in the corner, screaming that they want their ice cream and cake RIGHT NOW!!! Then there are a few overly verbal six-year old’s in the den trying to convince the dad that he needs to MAKE the mom serve the ice cream and cake RIGHT NOW! And the rest of us are just trying to participate in the event. Presiding over all of this mayhem is Governor Janet Mills.
The adult in the room.
Like most states in this union, Maine is unique. We are a New England state (read Yankee), with a mostly rural and trending toward elderly population. Some of our rural counties have characteristics of the rustbelt. The paper making industries have effectively collapsed over the last 25 years, leaving some hollowed out town centers and a lot of poverty. But the Portland area is a hotbed of biotech labs and corporate digital payment systems. Portland also has a reputation as a foodie mecca and has an overabundance of craft beer and liquor.
The pandemic caused Governor Mills to declare a civil emergency on March 15th and the state has been in some form of lock down ever since. The outlook is grim. Tourism is still the biggest industry here in Vacationland and if we are to keep our curve flat, we may need to force tourists from out of state to quarantine for 14 days, effectively killing the entire summer season.
But there is really good news.
Idexx, one of a few publicly traded companies in Maine, is known for in-clinic laboratory analyzers for dogs and cats, products to measure microbiological parameters in water and products to detect diseases in livestock and poultry. On Friday, they were granted an emergency authorization for the use of a human COVID-19 test kit.
And Maine is lined up to get the tests.
Governor Mills announced, “The state is purchasing enough test kits to run at least 5,000 tests per week for the foreseeable future.” With a population of 1.2 million, that is enough tests to realize a contact tracing system similar to the system that has been so successful in South Korea.
How did we pull this off? A lot of it was luck. But the Governor can certainly take a bow for her tenacity and the creative working of her state network to make this a reality. Congratulations Governor Mills!
Other than bragging rights, why am I writing this essay?
I want to point out that a sign of true leadership is, as Kipling said: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.”
And I also want to highlight the vast majority of Mainers who took the pandemic seriously and who are doing their civic duty without wining and complaining. I wish to remind everyone that the right-wing wackos, the anti-vaxers and the gun toting 2nd amendment absolutists do not represent America. They make great footage on the nightly news, but they are a minuscule slice of the citizenry.
There is a litigious clique In Maine who have sued the Governor in Federal court. They want the judge to rule that her actions are unconstitutional. Included in this group is a construction company (considered essential), a wedding disc jockey (dancing!?), a tour operator (busload of people!?) and a securities consultant (don’t you have a phone? Is your email quarantined?). I can only conclude that this gaggle of posers are only in court for political reasons.
To bolster my position, let’s compare the pandemic in Maine and New Brunswick Canada. These neighbors have similar geography, populations and business makeup. The Canadians are a much more interconnected citizenry with an ethic that honors collective communitarian action. New Brunswick shut the borders (including the bridge and the ferry to Prince Edward Island — the only way off the island) after the first case was detected. Asked to explain how New Brunswick kept their numbers down, Stephanie Robichaud, CEO of the New Brunswick Health Council said, “The population was a really big factor in the sense that people were very quick to adhere to the directions given by the government, and from the government perspective they were also very quick to align decisions with the public health folks”.
New Brunswick has had 120 cases and no deaths.
America is a nation of fiercely independent individualists, often to our detriment. I am not looking for lockstep, Hitler Youth style adherence to prescribed social norms, but dammit folks, can’t we work together on this?
Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day Governor Mills! I hope your kids fed you a mimosa and homemade waffles this morning. That would be with Maine gown blueberries and Maine maple syrup of course. You deserve it!!
