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
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