The goal is not to “beat” the virus, because it can’t be beaten. The goal is to find the optimal path to living with it. sullydish writes
Photo: Melissa Hom “There is no wealth but life,” the great critic John Ruskin once wrote. You can hear that faith in the words of Andrew Cuomo, whose Catholic upbringing still clearly reverberates in his soul. “If it’s the public health versus the economy, the only choice is public health,” Cuomo tweeted. “You cannot put a value on human life. You do the right thing. That’s what Pop taught us.
But then you look at the unemployment numbers, and gulp. There are costs to this collective exercise in empathy and compassion. You contemplate the rising chances of a long and devastating global depression. You look ahead to months and months more of quarantine, empty streets, crippled businesses, shrinking retirement savings, and rising poverty. And you realize that our choice for life over wealth is a little more complicated.
If we’re lucky and we find out more people have already gotten COVID-19 without the worst symptoms than we now believe, then the return to semi-normal could come more quickly. If we’re luckier still, we could get a breakthrough in treatments as doctors and nurses understand this disease better and we buy some time. At best, we could get the virus to peak at a level that does not overwhelm our medical system and manage economically until a vaccine is available. At best.
In an apparent attempt to defend a president who clearly dismissed and for too long ignored the greatest threat to the U.S. since 9/11, they’ve decided to embrace what they once called the “culture of death.” The correct response to COVID-19, many pastors have declared, is to let it rip. Social distancing is acting like “pansies,” as one put it.
The churchwarden at the small village church where we still follow the 1662 Prayer Book, read the King James Bible, and sing proper Anglican hymns wanted to continue. He pointed out to the Church authorities that there really aren’t very many of us, and that even now we mostly manage to worship while at least seven feet away from one another, and sometimes farther. Not a chance … Such a thing has not happened in England for 800 years, since the days of Bad King John.
Yes, Christians should not cower in constant fear of death. But we don’t have to embrace it either. I’m trying to think of a version of the Gospels where Jesus meets a leper and tells him not to worry, he’s going to die some day anyway, and make the best of it; or when he tells Martha and Mary to suck it up, and accept that Lazarus is dead, and move on. He didn’t. In fact, he risked and lost his own life by raising Lazarus from the dead.
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