This week while dining at a McDonald’s in South Burlington, Vermont, I went to the men’s room — and for a split second thought I’d entered a wormhole to the 1990s.
Did you ever go to a dance club that was illuminated by black-light bulbs? You know, the ones that glow purple-blue and make dirt and dandruff stand out like Christmas tree lights on your shirt?
My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks.
That’s what it looked like. It was so dim I could barely navigate to the sink. I glanced up at the ceiling fixtures and sure enough, the bulbs were all dim blue. Why?
The answer will tell you all you need to know about how far my state has fallen.
Sugar crash
Consider this a companion piece to my recent article about sugar heiress Electra Havemeyer Webb and the priceless collection of American art, architecture, and industry she bequeathed to the people of the Green Mountain State.
I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Webb’s 39-acre park of wonders is an island of civility and charm losing its shoreline to blight, criminality, and despair. The same can be said of the other remaining pockets of old Vermont still hanging on.
At first, that men’s room was more puzzling than depressing. I’ve never seen a McDonald’s with a “sci-fi dystopia” decor before.
Then it hit me: This must be one of the gratingly permanent neurotic hangers-on from the days of COVID. Of course!
If such a conclusion would have never occurred to you, you must live in a red state. Or at least one of the relatively saner blue states of the northern plains.
If so, let me explain what those of us in deep Democrat territory lived through during COVID.
New England breakdown
Here in New England, the entire region went clinically insane. Everything shut down. Elderly men wearing masks outdoors on city streets screamed (yes, vocally screamed), “WHERE’S YOUR MASK?!” at people like me who went barefaced on Main Street in January.
People were thrown out of urgent care waiting rooms for not being vaccinated. A doctor implied she would report me to the state health board because I would not promise her that I would obey the governor’s self-quarantine order simply because I visited my family at Christmas.
My business partner and I were thrown out of a popular chain music supply store by three stoop-shouldered men in their 20s because we refused to wear masks. Then the restaurant across the street threw us out for the same reason, while mothers actually clutched their children to their bosom and stared at us as if we were muggers.
Yes, I know this sounds like something out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but I’m telling the truth. All of this really happened, and almost everyone went along with it.
Germ warfare
Today, six years later, the neurosis of that era has become the “new normal.” While the incidence has decreased, you still see people every day wearing masks outdoors on the street or alone in their cars. The post office in South Burlington still has not taken down its jury-rigged plexiglass barriers between the counter worker and the customer. The all-caps sign ordering you to STAND HERE is still there.
So naturally I thought the bulbs in the McDonald’s were meant to emit some kind of special germ-killing wavelength. Doesn’t that seem like something the geniuses who came up with all-day face diapers and “six feet apart” would suggest?
I drove 45 minutes home to the outskirts of Montpelier believing I’d figured it out. And then I did a little research.
The dim blue bulbs are not there to banish germs. They are installed to frustrate IV drug users by shining a light that makes it impossible to locate a blue vein under the skin. They are there to stop junkies from making the bathroom their private opium den or — should they overdose — their public deathbed.
“Officials in Philadelphia are handing out blue light bulbs because the glow supposedly masks the blue-tinted lines of veins — making it harder for intravenous drug users to find a vein,” National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep intoned in 2019. That’s right, a full seven years ago.
You can find quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this phenomenon starting in about 2018. CBS News covered it in 2018, and so did Fortune magazine.
RELATED: How an NYC socialite’s riches preserve America’s beautiful, bustling past
Electra Havemeyer Webb. Slim Aarons/Getty Images; Background: Shelburne Museum
‘Symbolic violence’
And, from what I can tell, most of the more critical follow-up coverage only second-guessed this “important harm reduction measure” because it might make shooting up drugs more dangerous for the poor junkies. I couldn’t find any coverage that even mentioned the more important effect.
That more important effect is the degradation of civil society for normal, respectable people. The capitulation to the tyranny of junkies, criminals, and vagrants. We are a society that will not say: “No. You cannot make a place like McDonalds, which used to be a treat for children, into a no-go zone that arranges itself around the habits of low-lifes without doing a thing to make children and families feel welcome.”
Look at how an Inverse article criticized the blue lights. The article headline called the practice “symbolic violence.”
“But there are some huge problems with this approach,” author Peter Hess wrote. “Research has shown that drug users will still try to inject drugs in a blue-lit bathroom, even if it means they could accidentally miss their vein, which increases the risk of infection or soft tissue damage.”
Stand and fight
Pardon me for not giving a tinker’s damn if some addict gets soft-tissue damage. I’m part of the majority class of normal, productive citizens. We matter too. It is us and our families who pay the price for this, quite literally through taxes confiscated from us to give “safe injection spaces” for people who ought to be in a psychiatric ward. We’re paying a social and morale tax, too, as the world adds bumper cushions for the worst among us while telling law-abiding people to suck it up or get out.
This dystopia-in-a-bathroom story is just one symptom of an ongoing decline in areas governed by Democrats, progressives, and communists.
Burlington, Vermont, once a glittering city on the shores of Lake Champlain, is losing businesses in the tourist district because the city’s progressive mayor and her city council cry crocodile tears for the “unsheltered” community and refuse to hire enough police to crack down on open prostitution and drug crime.
My town, Montpelier, is barely holding on. The 19th-century Victorian Main Street is still there, but its charm is becoming blurrier and harder to see through the accumulation of graffiti, rutted streets, and open homeless encampments and drug dens in the alleys.
Whenever one writes an article like this, the most common reaction is, “Why don’t you just move, then?” My response: “Why don’t you stand and fight for the town you love?”
