It was a year ago today that officials of the State of California and the County of Napa issued the shelter-in-place order that prohibited us from opening our gallery's doors, a condition that would come to be extended indefinitely. The forced closure posed a threat to our lives a threat that would worsen with each passing day of the lockdown, as there can be no art gallery without art buyers, no artists without art sales, no art without artists, no consumption without production, no life without livelihood, no being without doing. No us without ours.

Penned it in July, 2017. It's as true, and even more important today. "Check your emotions: if you find that your hatred of the left or of the right is more strongly felt than your love for individualism, and if your life is your standard of value,
1/ consider reexamining your premises and your approach. If your political thoughts, words, and actions are essentially reactive, driven primarily and most often by emotions of loathing or fear—you've conceded to playing your enemy's game, and by his rules.
2/

"Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. ... a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.
1/ "You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life we wish to live.
2/

We were right to reopen the gallery when we did. Our survival depended on it. "Nearly half of California Wine Country businesses closed in the coronavirus pandemic won’t reopen, says Yelp"
#notdyingisnotliving northbaybusinessjournal.com/article/indust… "Based on the number of business owners who checked “closed” on their Yelp pages, about 3,000 San Francisco Bay Area businesses closed permanently from March 1 to July 10 as a result of the government shelter-in-place orders during the coronavirus pandemic. ...

"Observe the snarling, hysterical hatred with which they greet any suggestion that sacrifice is not necessary ..."
We've observed it -- we've been the target of it -- from the day we announced we were reopening the gallery. We’ve observed it from neighbors, complete strangers, even from formerly close friends. Altruism's moral standard of sacrifice runs much deeper and wider in the culture than many realize or most would want to admit openly.

"When we say that we hold individual rights to be inalienable, we must mean just that. Inalienable means that which we may not take away, suspend, infringe, restrict or violate—not ever, not at any time, not for any purpose whatsoever. "You cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in cold weather and on every second Tuesday,” just as you cannot say that “man has inalienable rights except in an emergency,” or “man’s rights cannot be violated except for a good purpose.”

The root problem is that altruists have no problem with this. To the altruist, sacrifice is good, and the more sacrifice to the "greater good," the better. ''The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.''~Ayn Rand wsj.com/articles/covid… via @WSJ "Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt. More precisely: reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; reason does not permit him to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal.

"A society shaped by collectivism, in which the only effective means of survival is the group or the state, leads many to feel that the ideas and the personal independence appropriate to an individualist era are no longer possible or relevant. " A society shaped by irrationalism--a society dominated by incomprehensible crisis and inexplicable injustice and the constant eruptions of a senseless, nihilist culture--leads many to feel that the world cannot be understood, i.e., that their own mind is inadequate,

"The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." Ayn Rand had identified the fact in 1943, through The Fountainhead's Howard Roark. How much greater the orgy today. How much higher the mountain of the sacrificed. The pandemic has provided a perfect stage and setting for the altruists, for those animated and driven by altruism's standard of morality. The pandemic is practically a heaven-sent opportunity to demand and justify the sacrifice of anyone and anything to "the greater good"

I love it. I'm signing each one. The first proof of "No Sea Was Ever Sailed" is in, and I couldn't be more pleased. Printed on sturdy, high-quality watercolor paper, 16" x 20," great for framing, gifting. cordair.com/artists/cordai… No Sea Was Ever Sailed

No sea was ever sailed
By fear of drowning in the deep.
No bridge was ever built
By huddled souls in castle’s keep.
No cloud slipped ‘neath the wing
Of one who dared not leave the ground.
No daunting height was scaled
Without a test of holds unsound.

#FDA, get out of the way. "Existing drug may downgrade COVID threat to common cold level — Jerusalem study" timesofisrael.com/existing-drug-… via @TimesofIsrael My point in sharing this isn't to assume or promote that this particular treatment is going to work. My comment "FDA, get out of the way" is to attempt to draw more attention to the fact that without government intervention,

110,000 reasons we decided to re-open when we did, on 5/4. We will not be among the sacrificed. "Researchers at Harvard...estimated that nearly 110,000 small businesses across the country had decided to shut down permanently between early March & early May"nytimes.com/2020/07/13/bus… @Anastasia_esq @PacificLegal

"The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. ... "There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. ...

In a speech entitled, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July," Frederick Douglass described our nation's founders thus: “They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’

Dianne Durante stands by every word of her 2017 essay on the removal and/or destruction of public sculptures, as I stand behind every word of my guest essay on same, excerpted and linked in Dianne's. diannedurantewriter.com/archives/12621… From mine: "In art as in religion, an individual’s values reflect his most deeply held personal ideas and convictions. Our response to art reflects what we each personally consider to be important, right, and good. Politically, in any matter concerning art,

"'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them... Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light,

"Washington had no smashing, stunning victories. He was not a military genius, and his tactical and strategic maneuvers were not the sort that awed men. Military glory was not the source of his reputation. Something else was involved. Washington's genius, his greatness, lay in his character. He was, as Chateubriand said, a 'hero of unprecedented kind.' There had never been a great man like Washington before. Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he

You want your world back? Go get it. They're not just going to hand it back over when they're done with it (as if there'd be anything left). Consider securing it better next time. But it will take the right ideas, the right principles, not mere political power. That's their game. "The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of *reason*: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement."

As I responded on FB about this: "There's not much about our current judicial system that couldn't bear significant improvement. Qualified immunity, shielding by police unions, the unending litany of laws and regulations that have little or no basis

https://twitter.com/guypbenson/status/1270816443676807168

in the protection of individual rights, including drug laws - there is much that needs serious attention, review, and reform. But the genuine & well-placed concerns & anger of many are being hijacked by those with a much deeper, broader, more destructive and consequential agenda.

A significant swath of the population of what was once the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has slipped into an orgy of self-sacrifice, an endless rite of quivering, autoerotic self-asphyxiation. But it is not enough, evidently, for those cloaking themselves in the flag of Altruism to sacrifice their own lives and values, their own well-being and happiness, for the undefinable, insatiable "greater good" of the Collective.

1/ "Essential" ~ to whom and for what? (what is "essential" being a kind and category of value.)

"“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value *to whom* and *for what*? 2/ It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible." ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged