By Jo Jorgensen

As a gardener, I could not believe my ears when I heard that Gretchen Whitmer was telling Michiganders they couldn’t buy seeds at their local stores. Especially given that seeds are used to grow vegetables, a great resource to help stay healthy during a pandemic. As is the case in many government edicts, it didn’t even make sense on the face of it. Make one trip to the store to buy seeds that could supply weeks’, if not month’s worth of vegetables, or make several trips to the grocery store to get vegetables grown by others. Wouldn’t it make sense, if you were issuing a stay-at-home order, to instead ask people to grow vegetables to cut back on trips to the grocery stores? I doubt I’m the only one who’s made a special trip to the grocery store because a recipe calls for cilantro.

She might argue that there were many unknowns about the virus, but early on it was clear that the virus was hurting the elderly more than the rest of the population. it was also clear that the virus was more detrimental to those who were obese or not healthy (again, making the seed prohibition seem like nonsense). During interviews on the 2020 campaign trail, I was pointing out that the virus clearly had a low transmission rate in young adults and children, and yet she was still enforcing lockdown rules well into 2021. The lockdown laws kept people from supporting their families, shut down decades-old family businesses, put grade schoolers behind in reading and math, and brought an increase in teenage drug use and suicides.

Had Governor Whitmer followed her own stay-at-home and mask orders, she could
almost be forgiven, but she shares the same hypocrisy we’ve seen from many politicians.

The thinking that “some are more equal than others,” and she certainly thought she was more
equal than the rest of us. Along with Gavin Newsom and London Breed, well-publicized
California politicians ignore their own rules, I guess she didn’t think the viruses could be
transmitted to her since she violated her own social distancing rules at a restaurant.

While many of us were kept from seeing family members even in our own states, she
flew several states away to visit her father, once again ignoring her state’s own quarantine
guidelines. Yes, family is important, which is why any American should not have been kept from
seeing their loved ones. And like other laws enacted by tone-deaf politicians, they don’t
suffer the full consequences. Governor Whitmer can still perform many tasks remotely, and
even if she couldn’t, she’d still get paid her salary. Many others aren’t so fortunate. Not
everyone has a job that can be performed on Zoom.

Unfortunately, any embarrassment she had over the COVID hypocrisies didn’t keep her
from showing that, once again, she believes that she’s above the rules, even if the rules are her
own. She recently sent out a TikTok video from her device after Michigan banned TikTok from
state-owned devices. Hey, Governor Whitmer, if posting TikTok videos is such a good idea, why
don’t you let anyone else in your government do it? I don’t think she’ll have an answer for that,

or the many future times she breaks her own rules. Those in power just don’t think they should
have to live as the rest of us do.

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