Some there are who like this govt. taking control idea. Bad cess to them. Woe for all of us.
Some years back I heard a long-ago news woman tossing off this, when the China miracle was in the news and we were struggling thru our new-normal Obama-time doldrums: “What do they have that we don’t have?” she asked at table. I rolled my eyes to another, who smiled.
Saint Charles Borromeo led a procession in prayer to mitigate the plague in Milan in 1576, caring for upwards of seventy thousand dying and starving people. Death meant nothing to him, save an opening to Paradise. For all his mystical intuitions, he also enjoyed playing billiards, and when asked what he would do if he had only fifteen minutes more to live, he responded, “Keep playing billiards.”
One of the Church’s youngest saints, Dominic Savio, told Saint John Bosco that if the Holy Angel blew his trumpet for the end of all things while he was on the playground, he would just keep on playing.
That is how we should want to play each day of our lives, in a friendship with God that will not find Heaven unfamiliar. In 1857, fourteen-year-old Dominic’s last earthly words were: “Oh, what wonderful things I see!”
A saint is one who can stand at the eternal gates and say, “Hello. I am home.”
The extraordinary shutdown, if continued, will have harmful consequences that go far beyond the economy. A short period of decisive action to buy time to prepare may be prudent. But ongoing measures of mass mobilization are likely to do severe damage to our society.
The Wall Street Journal editorial “Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown” warns of the economic consequences of a prolonged lockdown. We could be heading toward a drastic decline in GDP. This will dislocate the lives of tens of millions and exact human costs, not just economic ones.
Already, federal officials are gearing up to spend one trillion dollars. Central banks have committed nearly two trillion dollars to stabilize markets. These extraordinary measures indicate how perilous the situation has become.
Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China.
This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.
Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.
. . . in his Journal of the Plague Year, he pictured a city ‘filled with “the shrieks of Women and Children,” blazing comets, and ghosts walking upon gravestones.’
And we today, in our Day of the Virus?
Our experience of dread, of the uncanny forcing some of us back into our homes, and many of us into our alienated inner lives, is a little different.
The pandemic of 2020 projects its power over us in real time, but unless we’re directly affected—or infected—it comes across to us in means primarily visual and textual.
Eerie panoramas of deserted airports and Instagrammable tourist sites; close-ups of surgical masks in turquoise green and powder blue; images of figures in hazmat suits cleaning up our endless material spill.
Financial markets paused their slide Thursday, but no one should think this rolling economic calamity is over.
If this government-ordered shutdown continues for much more than another week or two, the human cost of job losses and bankruptcies will exceed what most Americans imagine.
This won’t be popular to read in some quarters, but federal and state officials need to start adjusting their anti-virus strategy now to avoid an economic recession that will dwarf the harm from 2008-2009.
The United States has sanctioned several Chinese companies involved in shipping Iranian oil and financing terrorism, the State Department announced on Wednesday. The measures taken against seven interlinked companies include three mainland China-based firms, three Hong Kong-based, and one from South Africa.
These companies were “engaging in a significant transaction for the purchase, acquisition, sale, transport, or marketing of petrochemical products from Iran,” the State Department said.
Bad guys slowed down for a while. Vigilance at the State Dept., good.
But even if she weren’t lying, who cares? For over 1000 years, we have referred to epidemics and pandemics by their point of origin.
In any event, Weijia Jiang [the reporter] is a fraud. It is not the place of reporters to act as jailer, intimidating people out of speaking their minds.
Right.
And then:
Besides, “Kung Flu” is funny! And you don’t boss around a free people about how they may speak about a foreign plague that is killing them.
Blithe Spirit 