To my friends:
This coronavirus is a real thing. It is highly infectious, and it is perilous to those who are "immunity-compromised" (i.e., those over sixty and those who have pre-existing conditions -- like me).
We all have to take precautions for our own sake, and for the sake of others -- particularly the vulnerable others who are around us. For the time being, everyone has to wash their hands, as it turns out that soap is better than alcohol-based sanitizer in managing the virus.
And for us who are compromised, we need to stay put. As in stay off airplanes and cruise ships, and maybe stick to being homebodies in general.
This outbreak not a fake thing. It is not a phantom conjured up by the Deep State.
I am puzzled as to why goodhearted people think this. Is it right to permit partisan politics to determine one's medical behavior?
And do Christians ever have the right to engage in conspiracy thinking at all -- like the Deep State, or Q-Theory? Are you aware that conspiracies have, for centuries or thousands of years, clustered in the margins of society and have advertised alternative narratives?
Conspiracies and alternative narratives have the luster of offering a shortcut to wisdom and power. It is as though they enable you to say to your commonplace friends, "Ah, but I know better. Here's what's really going on."
But how is that knowledge "better"? All claims of "what's really going on" are just as doubtful as common opinion, if not more so.
There was confidence, in the old days, that the earth was flat and at the center of the universe. But when the time came, and better information was to be had, the old opinion was held for political reasons, not truth. It was a sin to reject the news of Copernicus and Galileo.
In an outbreak, my friend, a Deep State opinion, if it demands dismissal of reasonable precautions, can become accessory to homicide.
In this case, thinking that the coronavirus is fake news is easy. It lets you think that there's nothing to be worried about.
I wish that were so. But it's not. We have to do something good. We cannot wish away the darkness of the world by theory.
Christians have only one theory they hold regarding the history of the world, and that is the Mystery of the Cross. For us, there is no other mystery, there is no conspiracy at all, for everything has been "shouted from the housetops." If we hold to the conspiracy theories that are rife on the web and talk radio, then we are guilty of "submission to the elemental spirits of the world" (Colossians 2.20).
So let's do the right thing. Let's take these minimal and reasonable precautions. Let's demand that our politicians, from local to state to federal, from representative to senator to president, stop immediately the thinking of political expediency and begin thinking of robust crisis management (as advised by the CDC). Let scientists and the experts do their job.
The earth is not flat. The virus is not an anti-Trump mechanism. Let's stop this nonsense, for God's sake.
And for the sake of the little ones.
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