It is long past time for this nation to wake up to the realities of the pandemic and the damage caused by the gross overreaction. I am reminded of the Bob Dylan lyric from his song When You Gonna Wake Up?, in which Dylan asks, “When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain”. Of course, Dylan adapted this from Revelation 3, but the question still stands. When will we, as a society wake up and repair and strengthen what is left of what we have so casually shredded?
The first thing we need to do is to acknowledge that the damage predicted by the pandemic was never going to be as bad as the authorities claimed. Most of the forced lockdowns occurred after the media picked up on the overhyped Imperial College study which predicted up to 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. The assumptions underlying this report were changing as it was issued so that people, far from doing nothing, were responding to a changed situation. There are those who, at the time, argued this was a flawed model, but it served a sensationalist press and a power seeking government to ignore those who urged caution in the face of hysteria. In any event everyone should have been skeptical of the source of this prediction, given the poor track record of their previous predictions. This was repeated by the dire warnings that accompanied the “surge” in the sunbelt. A minor wave did come…and go without the dire consequences predicted. Additionally, this ripple occurred without the same draconian lockdowns.
In the end, the skeptics were correct; the result was a far less deadly result than 2.2 million victims. While one should not minimize the nearly 200K deaths that have occurred, as a percentage of those actually infected, it puts the death rate toward the high end of a bad flu season. We would also have been wise to listen to those who thought that shutdowns were a poor response in any event. In fact, as this piece shows, the goofy, almost medieval notion of a lockdown was an insipid study done 14 years ago that reads like a bad high school term paper.
Humanity has long known that the only real way to “defeat” a disease is via herd immunity. This can be achieved organically by people getting and surviving the disease or by way of a medical hack known as a vaccine. There is simply no other way to get to a point where a disease is no longer a large threat to society. Our ability to develop this herd immunity is, in fact, humanity’s superpower. It is why we are still here and one of the reasons how we managed first to rise to the top of the food chain and then to exit the food chain altogether. There are those who say that this is too risky, but the risk is in delaying the arrival of herd immunity. We know enough about this virus to protect those at greatest risk until this immunity arrives and can therefore do a good job of minimizing the deaths that accompany the virus, all without crushing society.
We therefore need to wake up to the fact that the overreaction has indeed crushed society more quickly than a Marxist in power. We need not spend a lot of time on this, the societal carnage is obvious. Unemployment at a decades high, economic activity dropping faster than it ever has before. Then, of course, there is the ancillary damage done to society; the certain rise in “deaths of despair”. These would include drug overdoses from addicts without their support network; stress induced heart attacks and strokes due to the financial stress that has been imposed; we will certainly see a rise in suicides as it tends to move in lock step with the unemployment rate. Also, the deaths that will occur because of undiagnosed ailments; undiagnosed because the tests were deemed “nonessential”. Then there is the massive economic cost that will be paid for decades to come. There is no need to keep going with this sad litany, except to repeat that in not considering the likely impact of these policies on others we have abandoned the basic human requirement to look at the other before we act. I have not even yet mentioned the enormous cost to our liberty by allowing the government to take so much power over our lives; this may yet be the beginning of the final chapter of a complete slide into authoritarianism.
Certainly, though, we can make the claim that this extraordinary cost produced some good, right? No, not really at all. There was never much real science behind the ideology of lockdowns to begin with. More than that it appears that the virus follows much the same pattern wherever it goes. This piece outlines this phenomenon; across 50 geographical jurisdictions (and a multiplicity of policy responses) the virus curve looks about the same. What this tell us is that regardless of the pain inflicted the outcome didn’t change. Not even the vaunted masks and their accompanying mandated use matter, as these graphs show:
A good summation of the available evidence for the efficacy of these types of health mandates is here. The truly sad thing is that most of these mandates were and still are supported by large majorities of the public as a part of the larger phenomenon of the erosion of our foundation of freedom. Yes, it is way past time that we woke up to all of this sad reality.
Only by waking up can we come to our senses and start to repair what has been shattered. There, as in all things, is always hope. We still can, as Revelation 3:2 says “wake up and strengthen what remains”. We still have things we can build upon. We still have a mostly free press that can criticize the government as they see fit. We still have a freer economy (or at least as free) as not, so that there is still enough flexibility to recover from the shattering of all commercial relationships. We can still repair, albeit with a fair amount of pain, the nation’s finances. We can reform the entitlement programs to not cut off those already dependent upon them while still not mortgaging the future. We can reclaim our civil rights as well. Nothing is beyond repair. Nothing is beyond repair, that is, if we have the will to change. The will and the faith. We must believe that God wants and has in fact given us the Kingdom. If our belief in that is sure, then it is up to us to act on that belief and to claim the Kingdom. We can claim the Kingdom for ourselves and at the same time produce and provide a better world for all of God’s children.
Since it seems that no one else is willing to step forward and push back against what the government has unrighteously done, it must fall onto God’s people to lead. Let us be the ones who reclaim our civil, political and economic freedom; not just for ourselves but for everyone. We can either let this sad dream devolve into a vicious nightmare or we can wake up strengthen what remains and start to live as the flourishing, peaceful human community God always intended us to be.
Praise Be to God
