The Coronavirus saga continues. As an older friend of mine – a healthy and vigorous late-septuagenarian – put it to me recently, he’s not sick of the virus, but he’s sick of the virus. As are we all.

Doug Ford is warning of ‘enhanced measures’ to contain the spread of infection, whatever that ominous and Jacobian means. His experts – and his experts have claimed we have already ‘saved’ 100,000 lives by the measures already in place, and, presumably, we could save hundreds of thousands more lives, if even stricter measures are foisted upon us.

Frankly, I don’t know how they know that, and don’t think they can know that. How does one prove a highly complex effect B, from not doing action A? And given how much we don’t know, how many factors have been – deliberately or not – obfuscated, fudged, correlated, hidden under numerous other causes, who’s to make such outlandish predictions, and base draconian public policies upon them, with no end in sight?

Pull thyself, dear reader, from the panic-stricken images on the telly and internet on this memorial of Saint Isidore, and calmly read over this article here, amongst any others of its ilk, at least to gain a broader and more balanced perspective on this crisis.

One primary element in this is to avoid what I alluded to in that initial podcast, the formation of a police state, already incipient in our country, with weaponized, militarized dark sun-glassed officers – they all seem to have shaved or close-cropped heads, at least, those of the male persuasion – cruising around in their semi-armoured vehicles, already menacing enough.

Robert Peel, the founder of what we now know as modern policing in Britain in 1829, he famously declared, and as their name implies (police from ‘polis’, the city), ‘the police are the public, and the public are the police’, dressing them in civilian blue, as opposed to (then) militaristic red. The police were not to be against the public, but for them, one of them, with the assurance that civil liberties, our hard-fought rights and freedoms, would not only be respected, but protected. It was against hard-boiled criminals that the police were founded.

Yet, even before this crisis, with the multiplicity of idiotic, niggling laws across this nation issued by nannying legislators eager to stamp out every possible source of harm or risk – of course, excluding abortion and euthanasia, and all sorts of more recent evils. Yet, here they are, bringing the hammer down on not stopping for a full three seconds at stop signs; not wearing a bike helmet or seatbelt; coiffing an ale on your fishing boat on a remote lake; driving a few kilometres over the frustratingly slow speed limits on our highways that no one obeys, not least the officers themselves; vague ‘distracted driving’ laws that are enforced with subjective discretion (cell phone in your coffee holder? Charged with possible use). Police are increasingly seen not as our friends and fellow citizens, but a class apart, a brotherhood, cruising around quite literally looking for trouble.

Conspiratorial? Perhaps, but I’m sure many readers share my sentiments. The first thing one thinks of when a police car approaches on the highway is, ‘what am I doing wrong’, even if we’re doing nothing particularly wrong.

To give the police unprecedented powers to keep every citizen under house arrest is, quite literally, an evil, that far transcends any evil a virus could do – and the evil of this virus, taking the fancy coloured projection graphs with some degree of doubt, does not seem all that evil. After all, if an old coddled codger like Prince Charles can survive with a bit of bed rest, then, it seems, most can survive with the same, or less. And what evidence there is, says so for 99.9% of those ever afflicted with this virus – yet here we are, dismantling what is left of civilization – Western and otherwise.

Yet there is our tyrant-in-waiting Trudeau is threatening to bring in the military to help the understaffed police keep us all soon locked with our homes, or, as I wrote on behalf of all-too-many without even a home, inside their fetid, un-air-conditioned apartments. For how many armed personnel do you need to control every movement of every citizen in your nation? No wonder Trudeau not long ago expressed his admiration for the totalitarian regime of China, where they can ‘get things done’ with bothering with trifles such as democracy, parliaments, the rule of law, the rights of free citizens.

On an ironic note, today is the anniversary of the founding in Germany in 1925 of the SS, the Schutzstaffel – the ominously titled ‘Protection Squadron’. I’m not saying our police are the new SS, but the point is that once police are given powers over citizens they should never have, it’s real difficult to take them back. Once the police get used to tracking our every move, with all the technology now to do so, what’s to prompt them ever to stop? And who’s to say whatever the next crisis may be?  Another virus? A terror threat? Climate change?

It’s also difficult, nearly impossible, to take back draconian public policies, and the habits they engender. A people immersed in fear, not least fear of each other, is not a recipe for any healthy and flourishing society.

As I mentioned, we should beware the short and long term effects of enforced indoors isolation, on families, on single and lonely people, on children – so in need of the outdoors – on workers, on their mental and physical health, depression, lassitude – already setting in – economic collapse, insurmountable debt, socialized everything.

And this is before we get to the spiritual effects, the collapse of the Church – and more on that in a later post – the lack of the sacraments, the Eucharist, the Mass, Confession, even Baptism and Marriages have been forbidden in my own diocese for the foreseeable future, all when they could be done quite ‘safely’ with a good and healthy degree of ‘security’.

Ah well, as I wrote to someone this morning, we Catholics should take this for now in this Holy Week as penance for our sins, and atonement for the world, and use the time as best we might, in prayer, reading, reflection, music, exercise, even rest, along with fellowship as we are able. We can use this as a time to grow stronger, trusting in God and His providence, a purified Church and people.

I’m not sure how that will all play out, even in my own life, but we may trust, and keep up the good fight of the Faith, so that we may hold our heads high upon Christ’s return.

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