Note (27APR2020): In projected phases, governors of some States are beginning to remove restrictions hastily imposed in a vain attempt to prevent COVID-19 from spreading throughout the population. What is the stated endpoint of Phase One? Undefined.
Of those stricken with actual illness or testing positive for hosting SARS-CoV-2 not merely having developed antibodies from contact with the virus, deaths amount to 1:200, perhaps as few as 1:1000. Of those actually stricken, a substantial percentage are aged, 2-million of whom exist at horrific cost to the nation in the 45,000 rather ghoulish institutions reeking of stale urine and impending death and staffed by 1.2-million personnel.
“We want the best for mom!” demand millions of voting families. Unstated is the clause, “as long as someone else pays.”
What will the response be when the consequence of implementing Phase One is a surge in new cases? A resumption of unsustainable quarantining?
We American citizens now stand on the banks of the River Styx, to where we have allowed power-hungry politicians and self-serving bureaucrats to lead us. Unless stopped, they are preparing to order us across its black waters into the netherworld from which no great nation returns.
Whom to blame? Us ourselves. You and me.
“As for man, his days are as grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;
And the place thereof knoweth it no more.” -Psalms 103:15
We Americans are living in an age of increasing maternalistic matriarchy. No one is supposed to die, fall ill, become injured, or suffer. Embedded in this twisted interpretation of humanitarianism is the destruction of the whole to save an often unworthy part. Currently, we are witnessing that twisted interpretation in action.
Should misfortune strike, someone else, no matter how free of liability, has to pay. Individually, typically at the greedy hands of avaricious lawyers, merchants of misery. Societally, at the power-hungry hands of politicians and self-serving hands of bureaucrats — robbers of the productive, the young, and the yet-to-be-born.
In the context of COVID-19, a plague seemingly puny by historical standards at this point, maternal matriarchy is taking its toll, exemplifying why no matriarchy ever has been successful for any society of any importance. How? By sacrificing the young, the healthy, and the strong for the benefit of the enfeebled old, the chronically ill, and the constitutionally weak — voters all. Biologically, such sacrifice is contrary to the laws of Nature and the well-being of the species. Economically, it forfeits the financial futures of the young to save momentarily a few, often miserable, life-years of the old. Such is the obscenity into which the term “humanitarianism” has devolved.
“If Nature is cruel, why should I be kind.” -attributed to Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
As in some other matters, Hitler was wrong. Nature is neither cruel nor kind. Nature is indifferent. Nature cares only about survival and reproduction. The former through natural selection of small variations; the latter being its by-product.
So, what to do? Given that death is preördained at the moment of conception, do we Americans allow the enfeebled old, the chronically ill, and the constitutionally weak to die, so that we can rescue our wrecked economy for the young, the healthy, and the strong? Nature would say, Yes. What do we say?
“I try the reins,
Even to give every man according to his ways,
According to the fruit of his doings.” -Jeremiah 17:10
Context and consequences. Historians and God will judge us by the consequences of our behavior in the context of this plague. No matter which we choose, some will die; others will suffer. Biobehavioral scientists would say that we find ourselves in an avoidance:avoidance conflict. Which choice will result in the greatest good for the greatest number, and who will comprise that greatest number?
Whatever the choice, this, too, shall pass. In its aftermath, what? Pursuit of debt, defeat, and depravity as survivors continue to plod the Path to Perdition? Alternatively, a rerouting onto the Road to Resurrection Road — resurrection of traditional American ideals and values consonant with the vision of the Founding Fathers? If the latter, how to find that road?
The recent call-to-action novel, Retribution Fever, provides a detailed map. It is a map not based upon the kind of personal opinion reflecting arrogant ignorance and upon abstract ideology divorced from reality under which we currently labor but based upon that which we Americans, thus far, have forsaken — the Scientific Method as applied to human behavior.