That's not all. In fact, this virus has already done so much good for humanity that I can scarcely count all the ways. Of course this has come at great cost but that's the point, isn't it? It was said that a naked virgin carrying a sack of gold could walk safely from one end of Genghis Khan's empire to other other. The Khan did not restore that much order during an earlier age of unrestricted, mindless evil by being a nice guy.
That's been the problem: to protect the good, to restore order -- nay, sanity -- to societies around the world would take an unyielding ruthlessness that only an absolute ruler with a global reach could wield. So while I warned in 2005 when I wrote about Ghengis Khan that the ball was in humanity's court if we didn't want to see something like him appear again, it seemed I was warning about the impossible happening.
Nothing is impossible in God's world.
This does not mean that societies have abandoned nihilism, but the false god of politics is an abeyance because the slower pace of society wrought by a virus is giving many millions of people time to reflect, to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Or I should say the Chinese government's response to a virus, which other governments have copied to one extent or another while many millions of citizens have cooperated in making an unprecedented defense plan work.
The road is still strewn with the gravest dangers but a virus has given the human race a fighting chance to survive what's ahead. It doesn't get more poetic.
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Well,
ReplyDeleteThat's good.
This virus and the reaction to it has caused a recession, probably a depression and hence war.
The War will not only kill more than the virus, or even the far deadlier Flu.
It will potentially kill more than WW2. Of course that's just a model, a projection.
Mine are as good as anyone else's.
PS: this was corporate media getting their bankster masters out of debt, that's what all the hype and panic was about.
I'm not by the way unemployed, or invested in the stock market.
I just understand well enough politics, economics and war.
The lockdown in America has now bankrupted and caged up helpless the shopkeepers - the real middle class - and it's the shopkeepers who make revolutions.
They are the people's natural sergeants, captains and lieutentants.
The lockdown isn't common sense. Common sense wouldn't have put the world in one big petri dish with the Huanan Fish and Meat Wet Market in Wuhan. Turns out that dusting raw fish and meat with fecal matter is a bad idea.
Good luck anyway.
B, I can just hear you in a foxhole: 'We're all gonna die we're all gonna die we're all gonna die.' Spreading cheer and hope wherever you alight.
ReplyDeleteNot all shopkeepers are "bankrupted and caged up helpless." Here is John Batchelor's summary of his talk with Small Business columnist Gene Marks last week:
"The beneficial results of this chaos are that we’re better prepared for the next emergency, and we’re working out how to work from home, and we’re no longer going to be dependent on one supplier. Furthermore, business owners now know that they need to have some cash on hand. Finally, some new businesses are emerging that are devoted to solving the problem that we’re seeing now. Telemedicine, telehealth, website tracking Wuhan virus data."
As for the helpless ones, many will get help, many will fall by the wayside. There's no blame in this unless you want to blame people for forgetting that there's no way to get comfy in hell.
There was a famous Tirthankara whose name I can't remember at the moment who lived how many centuries ago I can't remember either. Anyway, after trying everything to become enlightened over several lifetimes he finally took a stand in a forest and said, "I will not move until I have reached enlightenment in this very lifetime."
That explains the vines shown growing up the legs in a statue made of him how long ago I can't remember either. But there still exists a black and white photograph of the statue, which I saw in a book published several decades ago. And yes, he did attain enlightenment in that very life.
That is the kind of will a great many humans once possessed. If they said, 'I will do,' it was done. It was a kind of will that would seem a superpower to moderns.
Now humans no longer need that much willpower; the vast store of knowledge we've amassed and the technologies we developed make that much personal will largely unnecessary. But the lessening of willpower has meant the increase in weaknesses, such as lying out of fear, hypocrisy, and so on. It has also meant the more capable ones have to carry the rest.
That is the way things are. Instead of whining about what cannot be changed, find as many ways as you can to be useful and inspire others to try just a bit harder.
I should add, "by your own actions" inspire others.
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