It is certainly not for a lack of subject matter that I have not posted anything for nearly 5 months. Nor have I at any time fallen even remotely ill during this period. In fact, I have not even had the slightest of colds. If anything, there has been too much to write and it has been difficult to know where to begin.
Tomorrow marks the resumption of work for me, and I am one of the lucky ones as many around the world have lost their jobs. I hope mine stays in my possession for a while yet but things have been changing so rapidly that nothing is certain. The plan was to write a number of posts during my 2 weeks of vacation, especially since I was confined to my residence this time around, but that never happened. Ordinarily I try to avoid using the computer entirely during my holidays, and I am glad to report that I used mine less, though not nearly as rarely as I would have had I been allowed what has become my ordinary vacation spot.
I did take in some reading, which I try to do during vacation, but not as much as I would when away either. In other words, I have not done particularly much, but perhaps that is the entire point of a vacation - taking leave of one's normal routines and relaxing a bit. Anyway, here goes...Hopefully for once I can keep it short.
Because I subscribe to quite a lot of feeds and get my information from a multitude of sources, I am generally much-earlier informed of current trends than most, and oftentimes I'll track a story for a while before it makes big news. As for what came to be known as Covid-19, I became aware of it sometime in December and began tracking it probably in the first week of January.
I thought it a serious thing, for a very simple reason: The Chinese communist party provably does not give a fig leaf about human life, but they were ready to shut one of their most productive cities off to stop the spread of a virus. "They can't have been doing it to save humans", I thought, so surely they must be facing something entirely devastating which if left unchecked can destroy their entire economy. "Whatever it is, it must be a whopper". By the way, I had never even heard of Wuhan before this debacle, not that I can remember anyway, which just shows how little we, or at least I, know about even large metropolises in China and other non-Western areas.
Now, on my website - which doesn't have as much original content as I would like, granted - you can find me finding positive points in virtually everything, and admiration without necessarily approval of even the most vile ideologies. You will not find, I am certain, any good word ever on communism, or even of its better-PR-handled ugly sister socialism. In other words, I cannot be assumed of having a deferential treatment to anything the communists do in any country, which is not to say that I support every anti-Chinese or anti-Cuban or even anti-Soviet propaganda piece, but that simply on sentiment, I dislike communism and socialism in their ends as well as their intentions.
So, the 'communist Chinese' - actually, more capitalists in business system but communist in social and political structures - clamped down hard on this thing. By the 17th of March, the date of my previous article, this 'disease' had spread to much of the world, which was in 'lockdown', as it came to be known, with the exception of Sweden and a few select others (I knew only of Sweden at the time, if memory serves me right). I am glad to report that Sweden did not shut down any more than it had on the 17th of March, for reasons which I cannot get into here, but to which I may well return to elucidate.
Much of the rest of the world, did shut down however, and remarkably, remains shut down. That I had not expected. So then the question becomes: If more or less the whole world has shut down, it must mean we have been facing an extremely serious illness. Well, you would think so, wouldn't you, and ordinarily you would be correct. However, this period has been as far from ordinary as anything anyone has ever experienced save for the Incarnation.
I did write this in my last post:
Another consideration is worth pondering: If the faithful can go without Mass for a month, and manage to occupy themselves with other pursuits, what is to bring them back to Church after that month?
Would that it would have been only a month! It lasted for months and is still going on, largely. In fact, many of the re-openings of NOChurch have been more scandalous than the Mass cancellations and church closings were in the first place! NOChurch has been in full suicide-mode. This is not a post on NOChurch, however, which deserves its own separate treatment. Suffice to write that the good in this is that Bergoglio has been speaking less and travelling not at all, so we have been spared of many of his overhead bombing raids.
When last I wrote, I could still write something like the following
Covid-19 Chinese coronavirus, which has spread like wildfire in Italy and has by now shut down much of the country
without wanting to put scare quotes on the words 'coronavirus' or 'spread'. Now, I am inclined to do this every time I write these words, but I would rather avoid having to type them so you will simply have to add them in as you read. I would hesitatingly have written "has by now shut down much of the country" while referring to the virus (read 'virus') but now I would avoid that kind of language entirely and write something akin...
