The High Cost Of A Lack Of Balance And Wisdom

Yesterday evening, I was involved in one of those Zoom meetings that have taken over much of the culture.  You know the ones that Progressive Insurance pans in their ads.  One of the participants was a woman who works for a local hospital, thus has a pay check coming in.  She told of how she and her team had prepared 24 ICU rooms for Covid-19 patients last Friday, but by Tuesday 17 of those patients had died.  The woman was understandably upset and emotionally distraught.  Of course, she also expressed the belief that we should not open the economy.  Believe it or not, I understand her feelings; I do.

There is one problem with this woman's attitude however.  What she sees is 17 dead bodies.  What she doesn't see, however, is the larger number of people who are, or will lose their house, their ability to put food on the table, in some cases people with other medical conditions who won't get treated because of the focus on the virus to the exclusion of anything else.

Indeed, the fear I saw among many of the participants in this meeting both surprised and disgusted me.  These people have, it seems to me, been stampeded by the media.  Now, understand that I believe this virus is particularly nasty, but it is not unprecedented in lethality.  We have experience with pandemics, and what is needed is wisdom and balance.  Indeed, that is the point of an article at the American Thinker by Andrea Widburg entitled Leftist Tyranny To Combat The Wuhan Virus Is, In Part, A Failure of Imagination.

 Widburg:

Leftist governments have decided that their overriding goal is to prevent all future virus deaths. They don’t care that the American people were told to “lockdown” just to “flatten the curve.” That was a reasonable step months ago when hospitals in Wuhan and Italy were overwhelmed. With the curve flattened here, however, leftists mayors and governors across America are so focused on stopping any viral deaths in their jurisdictions (an impossible goal) that they are blind to the greater number of deaths their economy-killing policies will create.

This is the same thought pattern we see with the gun debate. Leftists are obsessively focused on the 33,000 or so annual gun deaths in America. Those are real, countable bodies that render leftists incapable of seeing the larger picture, which is that, as we know from a 2013 CDC study, defensive gun use saves 500,000 to 3 million lives annually.

We see this thought pattern again with abortion. Democrats’ little hearts bleed when they think of women suffering from unwanted pregnancies. However, they deliberately close their eyes to the babies aborted, defining them down as fetuses (not as cute as babies) or clumps of cells.

Going back to the Zoom meeting yesterday, I believe the level of fear I saw was created by a media that knows the facts, but deliberately only reports one side because death and destruction sells air time. Secondarily, they also think that by destroying the economy, they can get Trump supporters to turn against the man.  If the media reported the facts, I believe the petty tyrants who are attempting to take away our freedoms and liberties would lose a lot of support.  I suspect though that Trump supporters will see this for what it is.

Meanwhile, over at Townhall.com John Stossel talks about a different sort of fear. In his case, fear of failure was used to spur him on to greater achievement. Indirectly, Stossel points to the fact that work is enobeling. The process of work itself gives on a sense of dignity and worth.  While work brings the possibility of failure, it also gives one a satisfaction with his life and achievements. Stossel's article can be found at Youll Freeze In The Dark!

Over time, as people depend on handouts, they often feel that their lives are no longer within their control. They become passive. They don't push through obstacles. They wait for government help.

Social scientists call this "learned helplessness."

It's the struggle to overcome obstacles that that brings fulfillment.

When government programs "take care of us," they kill off some of the best of life and make us much less productive. They don't even make people happy. If we keep giving the state more power over our lives, we will freeze in the dark.