Author’s note: This is the fourth (and last) in a series of articles on the perspective gained from the coronavirus, meditations from a generation’s first experience of sheltering in place.
People are saying we have to embrace a “new normal,” crying out that the coronavirus has changed us—forever. That’s the story, and you’re dumb, or evil, or both if you don’t buy it.
But is it true?
Does the glove fit?
Only two ways this is true: either this virus is worse than any before it; or, we are progressing into an incompetence deeper than any generation before us.
It doesn’t take long in a history book to find out the first isn’t true.
It takes even less time to realize the second almost certainly is.
The data shows that we are the greatest country alive. We have the best healthcare, the best healthcare providers, the most talented entrepreneurs and non-profit problem-solvers out there. Just look at the international traffic into our country for our specialists and our economy. When we encounter problems, we find solutions. We put men on the moon, became energy independent, fought dictators and traded young American lives for peace.
But we hardly ever hear this side of the story on the national scale.
There is a silent enemy deeper than an infection. It digs into the host’s entire being, spreading faster than any airborne illness. Some call it the mob mentality, but you may know it as regular, household empathy.
It is the belief that objective truth is less valuable than subjective emotion. It is the blind commitment to feelings instead of thoughts.
Empathy, the bastard child of sympathy, demands we identify with the lowest and weakest, disregarding the demands of a real world, a struggling, growing future generation. Instead of sympathizing with our country’s problems by standing on hard ground and reaching out with the solution, we must leap into the abyss with them, otherwise we are cold and uncaring.
This worm has weaseled into our collective psyche rather recently, uprooting the value of objective Truth with the subjective experience and opinion of people. It’s an editor, planted in our brains so we begin statements with “I feel”, to soften the blow of expressing our opinion to someone who may be in opposition.
Even if the mob is factually wrong, they win, because they have a Trojan horse in our cranium telling us how to play the game.
An example is the many arguments you’ve heard and seen debating the opening of the economy as an emotional debate between the value of life and the value of money. The mob tells us human life is priceless, and the mob would have us destroy the economy for the sake of a single life, throwing out the counterbalancing value of civil society, a functioning economy and military and government and infrastructure.
Unless we detach from reality and whole-heartedly embody the weakest, we are pigs.
Having all the appearance of the moral high ground, the mob just manipulates for their own ends, never once admitting that life is made possible by the solid ground of reality.
No one is immune to this, no matter the ideology. Even Christians, whose faith and ideology is built on emptying oneself to Christ, engage in the manipulation. How many times have you seen God-fearing people out of their depth and yet so astoundingly convicted that they are on the Lord’s Side?
The mob sets the tone, and the majority of earnest Americans get in line, taking up their pitchforks and shovels and laying siege on every neighbor, co-worker, and friend who disagrees with their story—the story of the oppressed.
The fact is this: COVID-19 swept the legs of our culture’s influencers and made enemies of friends. No one profited but the mob.
Who is the real enemy to the prosperity of our great country?
What is the final lesson we must learn?
If we look at the evidence, of who really wore the glove that strangled the life out of us, I think we will find the glove doesn’t fit COVID-19.
But I bet you a 12-pack of toilet paper it fits the mob just right.