I haven’t been posting much during the pandemic. The main reason is that my library has been mostly closed to the public since March. Though the wi-fi remained active (and someone was thoughtful enough to take the lock off the outlet), the front stoop is a hard and uncomfortable place to be sitting with a laptop. Especially when it’s only 30-40 F (That’s something like -2 to +4 for you folks on the Centigrade scale). Plus, the signal is a lot weaker just outside the door than it is inside the library.
After an initial failure at a local park, a second attempt proved the park wi-fi to be more stable, plus I can sit at a picnic table. Through summer, I even had access to the restrooms, but they locked them up for the season the first week of October (though people are still stopping in their cars to try to use them). Now, there’s only two picnic tables you can sit at–the ones they position at the ends of the rows of end-standing tables so they don’t tip over like a bunch of dominoes.
But the big problem with using the City of Shawano wi-fi is that they use the Fortinet firewall, which they have set to block just about everything it can, including “alternative medicine” and “advocacy organizations.” Which means my Green Medicine Info emails have been building up for six months, because I can’t link to the site to read the articles.
There was a petition calling for a “second opinion” of all these lockdown and mask mandates that I couldn’t sign because it was blocked. And last night I first heard about a petition to recall Governor Tony Evers for his unconstitutioinal “safer at home” orders and mask mandates. The last straw for a lot of people was his relative inaction during the Kenosha riots, which destroyed a lot of businesses and had agitators coming in from out of state.
Apparently, this effort started in August. The news story last night was that the petition, due today, October 27, hadn’t gotten enough signatures. Was I unaware of this petition because of the lockdown-caused change in my internet access? How many others in the state are in my position, cut off from uncensored news because of restrictions in their internet access?
The only on-line accessible petition that I could seem to find was on change.org, a site which I am also blocked form accessing.
Before the lockdowns, I was on-line 5-7 hours a day. Because of the lockdowns, my on-line time has been reduced to about 4 hours at the park (because it’s farther away, because I wait for my morning coffee to come through before I go off to no-potty-land, and because that’s about my limit for typing barehanded in near-freezing temperatures), or about 90 minutes at the library (where I’m sitting on the bubble-gum littered and doggy-peed concrete).
I was living on the fringe before. Now, the powers that be are shoving me right off the edge in the name of “saving” American lives. What other voices are being completely unheard?
wendygoerl 