It is five days into the New Year. I am trying not to be disappointed by the expected nation and world-wide realities which I surely understood to be following from the last one. More than that, I am trying to sort out how I will adapt to the constant braying of human conflict and pride in the ability to determine the things of life, and death without reference to God in whose hands our lives actually reside.
Today is the run-off election for Senators in Georgia. As I write, with early return percentages in, it appears that the Democrat candidates are in the lead. A lot of people will be delighted to the tips of their toes about that. Others will feel, in the marrows of their beings, that a noble, but still very young (in terms of the span of history) part of the civilization, once known as the United States of America, imperfect but better than all others, will fall.
Los Angeles citizens, among citizens of many other places, have been told that Covid is everywhere. There is a "risk of exposure whenever you leave your home" quoth the LA Times. Barbara Ferrer says, "It is everywhere;, looking for a willing host". But isn't Covid finding its way into households, which I assume means where we are, indoors? I only know what I hear. I don't know what is true of what I hear any more.
Vaccines were to be the saving grace, but now we have heard that no, vaccines don't mean we can "get back to normal". Half the population believes that anyone who thinks there is something wrong with this approach--to stop EVERYTHING--is a moral imperative, although what is moral has long ago been rendered a matter of relativity, determined not by principle but by power. The other half's opinion is irrelevant because the first half has determined what "the science" is and is not and seeks to silence any objection, or alternatives. Someone says you can't stop a whole society in order to prevent illness and death. And he is trounced as a denier of Covid.
We have everything to fear, including fear itself. Nice to know that the world has caught up with my life long world view. Now I am in the mainstream. I have tried to fight the fears imposed from without, accompanying those within. I completely understand the power of propaganda. How it works on you. I don't believe that our leaders have a clue how this particular virus is spreading. Frankly, I am now in the camp that believes this whole virus was manufactured, and released, accidentally or on purpose. And so it is unique in the way it spreads. I have also found myself in the camp that believes there are people, some very not nice people, much like the not very nice people of the far and recent past, who are using this real virus, among other real viruses and bacterias, to control and deprive the rest of us.
But it is going on a year and we are, notwithstanding that leaders and their followers insist that it is for our good, and we are effectively imprisoned for a felony we commit by merely going outside. No trial. Someone, "they" all got together and convicted us of something that used to be called living.
Yeah. Five days into the New Year, I am feeling pretty down. I am looking only to one place, one Person. God Almighty. Because everything and everyone else feels hopeless.
One practical thing I have to do, aside from prayer, which never comes easily, is to absent myself from much of the news, or as much as I can without becoming an information luddite. I keep trying.
We are dying, and not only from Covid-19.
My downstairs neighbor is making the best of it. He is barbecuing on his tiny patio, attached to his apartment, which looks exactly like my own, which he is, like me, like all of us, exorted not to leave. For how long? Until we flatten the curve toward death, that can never, ultimately, be flattened by the human hand. So a long time indeed.
BTW. I think my neighbor just missed starting a fire. Smoke was gathering in my working dining room. I went downstairs. He said it was the barbecue was off. I mentioned the flame and the smoke that I could see coming from the closed hood.
Surely, it is no safer at home.
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