by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
It's that time of year again, the armpit of summer when "bikers" and their "old ladies" climb onto their Harley Hawgs and head to Sturgis, South Dakota, for ten days or so of beer-drinking and pot-smoking social intercourse. There will be concerts, and vendors, and vomit on the sidewalks - all in the name of good old American freedom!
Most of the year Sturgis is a town of around 7,000 people, actually a good-sized community for rural South Dakota, but during the week of the rally the population explodes. Last year the community made an effort to tamp down the activity out of a fear of the COVID pandemic, but around 460,000 largely maskless goobers crammed into the town anyway. This year, with the far more contagious "delta variant" running wild across the nation, estimates of how many will attend begin at over 700,000.
The population of the entire state of South Dakota is just 884,000.
A popular tee-shirt at last year's rally read, "Screw COVID, I Went to Sturgis!" Some locals who would like to see the event brought under control and more tightly regulated admit that the rally runs the town and not the other way around.
The Sturgis "rally" is currently in it's eighty-first year and draws participants from across the United States as well as some international locations. When the rally comes to an end this weekend, all of those participants will be returning home and taking their souvenirs with them - some of which will undoubtedly be viral in nature.
Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota will be attending some of the activities in Sturgis this week, and she plans to participate in a charity ride. Noem, who poses as openly defiant of any government restrictions related to stopping the spread of COVID, should perhaps look at using some of the money generated by the charity ride to purchase more ventilators for the state's hospitals. Just a thought - for a governor who doesn't do much thinking.
The Sturgis Rally is a superspreader event, and it poses a serious health risk and even death to untold numbers of people who have never even been to South Dakota. But it is an economic boon to Sturgis and surrounding communities, and it also serves as an angry fist in the air to what some see as government trying to limit their freedoms.
So once again sound medical advice goes unheeded, and a loud group of malcontents maintain their freedom to keep spreading the contagion - and a few people make some money - and some politicians get noticed.
That's life - and death - in the United States in the summer of 2021.
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