Covid and California: a Picture of our Future?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/17/21

            A serious but comparatively brief struggle with Covid, thanks to a great doctor and a nurse, was for me just as mental as it was physical. The physical struggle wasn’t easy. Chills, nausea, constant twitching pain and perspiring throughout the night never are.

Even so, it wasn’t the physical side of the struggle that made me toss and turn at night. Medicine eventually assuaged that. Nor was it worry. It was the steady pondering of what Covid, or the handling thereof, is doing to us. The hectoring and condescension from medical experts has been bad enough but, more importantly, political leaders have injected us with fear, violated our constitutional freedoms, and weakened the rugged American spirit of which the typical 20-year-old knows so little. It wasn’t this way with polio.

My earliest knowledge of the children killer came from my parents, the radio, and daily newspapers. The Truman administration addressed polio though “shelter in place” was unheard of. Quarantining was urged and some shutdowns existed, but consult any studies of polio from 1949 to 1952 (its peak year) and you’ll find that the terrifying disease was managed primarily through a private system of health professionals and parental responsibility. Caution was advised by Truman himself, but especially by local medical leaders everywhere. Not everything was run from D.C. back then.

In 1950 when a younger brother of mine contracted diphtheria, my family was quarantined by the county health department. For neither diphtheria nor polio, however, were widespread lockdowns required. A cloud of concern hung over the nation, but the closing down of the economy, the destruction of livelihoods, and restraints on public worship were also unheard of.

With Covid, political leaders have essentially followed a society-wide plan of lockdowns.  During the 4-year polio epidemic individual liberty, free enterprise, and livelihoods survived. This cannot be said of our management of Covid. Dashed is still the word for many Americans’ lives. Our solution has been unabashed socialism. Before handing out stimulus checks, it would have been wise to consider the bad things that a stimulus can stimulate. By many accounts hospitals are having a banner year, thanks to the CARES Act.

 Covid has been tragic, but neither wellness nor renewed faith in government will ever flow from unilateral decrees, restriction of personal movement, or blatant attacks on freedom of worship. I fear a changed America and a new age of tyranny far more than I fear disease, death, or dying.

A changed America – one given to fear and acquiescence – is dawning primarily because we have listened only to celebrity medical experts (repeatedly) while ignoring the 50,000 medical doctors and researchers who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. Penned in October of 2020 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts this declaration advised strategy far less suppressive than that of the celebrity experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci. It was co-authored by medical scientists and epidemiologists from Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, not exactly conspiratorial fringe institutions. If you’ve never heard of the Declaration, it could be because CNN, MSNBC, and the liberal national newspapers cancelled it, only one example of suppressed news these days.

As with Covid and medicine, so with immigration and California. Both have been used as political tools. From the end of WWII to 1992 Californians voted for only one Democratic president. In 1980 California produced a very conservative president, Ronald Reagan. Despite his conservatism Reagan ignited, surely unwittingly, California’s movement from a conservative to a liberal state. By signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Reagan afforded amnesty and a path to citizenship to 3 million illegals. Who’da thunk that RR himself just two years later would sign  another law requiring hospitals to give free care regardless of immigration status?

Of course illegals came and California changed just as, to the joy of Democrats, the nation is changing now. Idyllic California is no more. According to National Review magazine an exodus is occurring because “California is a mess economically, socially, educationally, and culturally.” Should we not ask why? The answer is governance and the evil aims and methods behind it. Just as the answer for Covid has been centralism and control, so has the governance of California, for two decades now.

My nights of troubled pondering centered not on our collective pain and suffering from Covid but on the acquiescence of American citizens to things most un-American: tyrannical governors, arbitrary rules and mandates, and the scary, increasing, mistaken belief that Big Brother knows best.

Sickness is far easier to overcome than tyranny, and tyranny is what we seem to be falling for. The good news is that within two years voters just might demand a great correction. Let us so pray. What we call America is at stake.

 

Roger Hines

4/15/21

 

 

 

                                                             Easter Revisited

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/3/21

No, the word Easter, though mentioned in the New Testament, is not really a Christian term. Like the Christmas tree, Easter eggs are of no Christian origin or significance. The ancient Druids of the British Isles worshiped trees, a practice that was a far cry from what the babe in the Bethlehem manger would eventually teach. Even so many Christians adorn trees at Christmas and marvel at their beauty.

 Tales of the origins of the word Easter are numerous though most lexicographers follow the account of the Anglo-Saxons whose deity, Eastre, was the goddess of spring and fertility. Whether our word Easter comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Eastre” or the Greek work “Pascha” (meaning Passover) is still debated. But no reason for despair. Although Christianity has chiefly been cradled and given to the world by Europe and North America, those two continents have also never contested the pagan names of the days of the week. For just a few examples, Sunday and Monday were named for the sun and the moon; Tuesday for the one-handed god Tiu; Wednesday for Woden; Thursday for the god of war Thor; and Friday for the pagan goddess Fria. Even Saturday has its origins in the mythological god Saturn and the licenscious festival, Saturnalia, that honored him. No respectable Christian, Jew, or Muslim would have been found at a Saturnalia festival. 

Suffice it to say that our words, customs, and even the names of celebrations we hold dear are often mixed with monotheistic, polytheistic, and pagan terms and narratives. Such is the nature of language. Life is stubborn, even the life of words. Life wants to continue, hence the life of pagan words that have spilled over into various religions, sometimes causing confusion or leading people to question their faith.

That confusion or questioning need not be fatal. When it comes to the Christian celebration of Easter, let us just say that Easter morphed its way into Christianity and does not constitute a grafting. Think of Santa Claus. Most Westerners love the old guy but many Christians do regret that because of the way we extol him, Santa has taken a great deal attention off of the One whose birth is being celebrated.

Easter is quite different from Christmas, though Biblically they both center on miracles. One miracle was that a virgin bore a child; the other miracle regarded what happened to this child and why.

The great faith that came from this child is today the world’s largest religion with over 2 billion adherents. Those 2 billion are divided into Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox which obviously leads to the conclusion that Christians do a lot of disagreeing with each other. Most of that disagreeing is not over essentials of the faith. Those essentials all regard the person of Christ. They are His virgin birth, sinless life, atoning death, and literal resurrection.

All of my life I’ve heard that whenever you get two Baptists together, you’ll have three opinions. How not, what with American Baptists, National Baptists, Southern Baptists, Regular Baptists, and several others? Consider United Methodists, Wesleyan Methodists, etc. Lutherans are divided into almost as many groups as Baptists. The same is true of Pentecostals.  Even the Orthodox have their divisions as well. Not so the Catholics who are immensely hierarchical.

What does unite Christians is the deeply consoling fact of Jesus’ resurrection. An Apostle and a converted journalist have best argued the truth of the resurrection event. The Apostle put it this way: “If Christ be not raised then is our preaching in vain and our faith is also vain and you are yet in your sins.”

The journalist put it this way, referring to the Apostle: “Nobody knowingly and willingly dies for a lie. Apart from the resurrection there’s no good reason why skeptics such as Paul would have been converted and died for their faith.”

The Apostle Paul had been a terrorist who oversaw the persecution and murder of Christians. The journalist was the Yale-educated Chicago Tribune legal editor and atheist Lee Strobel. Strobel was sent to Kentucky to learn about those “hillbillies” who were arguing that creationism should be taught in their kids’ school. Instead of finding crazy, close-minded Christians, Strobel found kind Christian people who were even willing to hear him out when he ask for time to give his views. Both the “hillbillies” and the joyful spirit of his Christian wife led Strobel to study Scripture and denounce his atheism, believe in Christ, and write several books on Christian faith.

It was his deep study of the resurrection that brought him conclusively to Christian faith. Strobel says, “The resurrection truly changes everything.”

Easter, then, cries out that old Death is not the end. Give Paul or the many books of Strobel a reading.

 

Roger Hines

3/31/21