Courage in the Face of Coronavirus

 To say this virus and lock downs have created a lot of uncertainty would be an understatement. Daily through media, mainstream and social, we see video after video and article after article of how bad things are, how bad things could get, and how bad it has gotten in other places in the world.

On top of that we have governments releasing PSA’s accusing us of being murderers if we dare to leave our homes. All this generates a large amount of fear. Frankly if you are not afraid on some level I would think you were not human.

Yet in the presence of all this fear and uncertainty it is not how we feel that matters but how we act. Do you give in to your passions and allow the fear to dictate to you how you should behave? Or do you pick up your reason and struggle with those passions in order to live virtuously with courage?

Locked Down

To many of us the thought of being locked in our homes screams as a violation to our fundamental natural rights. No one can force us to stay home in a free country. This understandably could be seen simply as the excuse for petty tyrants to finally come out of the woodwork.

We also worry about once this is over and this line has been crossed, what is to stop something else simply being called an emergency and forcing us to stay home, say on an election day? In the face of these lock downs we must act with courage.

We need to understand that most Americans will not tolerate this for a long period of time. That our elected representatives will always have to run for reelection and that the true power of our Republic rests with the people. We will comply with these stay home orders but must courageously voice our opposition to them and demonstrate our dedication to that opposition once this pandemic winds down.

Reopening

We will reopen at some point and when we do it is understandable that people will be afraid to leave their homes and return to their lives. This is a natural feeling because we have been told that there is an invisible enemy lurking behind every tree, living on every surface that can not only infect and kill you but will infect and kill everyone you ever loved as well.

We need to understand that even for something as serious as the Coronavirus this feeling has been blown out of proportion by media outlets trying to sell ads and get click, by politicians trying to push pet projects through attached to relief bills, and by social media personalities trying to gain fame and attention.

Once we do start to open again we must act with courage, especially those of us who are young and relatively healthy. Go out to eat, go to the beach, and go out to our parks. While we should learn from this virus, we must not fundamentally alter our way of life. Once we do that we have made the choice to live out of fear and not from a place of courage.

Courage Itself

Courage is a virtue, one that in our modern risk adverse world we are rapidly losing. Too often do we allow mobs of people on Twitter to dictate to us what we should think or how we should behave.

But courage is not a virtue without limits. An excess of courage is foolhardiness and a deficiency of courage is cowardice. Yet to the cowardly the courageous seem foolhardy and to the foolhardy the courageous seem cowardly. So how do we judge if our actions are courageous, cowardly or foolhardy?

Our courage must serve our happiness. This is not the modern version of happiness, which is more closely related to pleasure than happiness. Instead happiness here means the positive feeling you get from doing something meaningful and good.

An example of this is as things open up and grocery stores get crowded again, you go grocery shopping for your grandparents and deliver the food to their house. The virtue of courage is a fine line and one that moves constantly. Something that is courageous one day could be foolhardy or cowardly the next day.

Practicing courage every day will etch that habit into your character and allow you to act with courage when called upon to do so in stressful situations. So I urge everyone to act with courage in the face of this terror known as Coronavirus. They do not call America the home of the brave for nothing, now is our chance to earn that title.

Coronavirus MUST be Temporary

We are all dealing with our lives being turned upside down by Coronavirus. Some of us are staying home unable to see our friends and family or engage in our regular activities. Others are still working but have altered our routine to try and prevent the spread of this virus while we carry out our essential duties.

I am extremely proud of the sacrifices we as Americans are making so that we can buy as much time as possible to get a handle on this pandemic. Most of us are staying home, practicing social distancing, wearing masks and washing our hands to the point they become cracked and dry. Not to mention the loss of jobs and financial burden.

We do this so that we do not overwhelm healthcare workers and facilities and give people who are severely impacted by this virus the best chances at survival. Yet how long can we be expected to make these sacrifices?

Cure Worse Than Disease

President Trump was attacked by the media for asking the question, at what point does the cure become worse than the disease? This lead prominent members of the mainstream media to call for a ban on the President’s daily updates under the justification that they were dangerous.

He was also accused of not caring about people dying and it was even suggested that Trump should be brought up on crimes against humanity. None of these accusations answered his question but simply served to deflect it and to score a political hit against the President as he grapples to deal with the chaos of this pandemic.

The hard fact is that death is part of life, be it from Coronavirus, a car crash, a flood, or old age. The idea that we are willing to do anything to save one life is not based in reality. Are we willing to put everything to the torch to save one life? And even if we do how long will that life be saved for? Does that one person’s one year of life outweigh the suffering of another person for a decade? Does it outweigh the suffering of 100 people for a decade? What about 1000 people?

Businesses have been destroyed, they will never come back from this shutdown. People who have given years of their lives to build their dream have had it snatched away from them. They will not be able to just turn their business back on.

The longer we remain shut down the more common this story will become. This crisis does not only threaten our economic future, it threatens to put our liberties on life support.

A Bad Apple a Day Keeps our Liberties Away

Most of us can understand that we must be willing to give up some of our liberties in order to allow the rest of our liberties to flourish. In times of crisis we also accept that short term sacrifice of our liberty may be needed in order to preserve those liberties in the long term and to allow us to pass those liberties on to future generations.

There are some people in positions of power who are more than happy sacrificing your liberties in order to protect you from yourself. These people operate under the delusion that because they are smart that they know how to run your life better than you do and they will grab any instant to prove this point and strengthen their position.

I ask that people do their best to comply with stay at home orders and social distancing not out of a benevolent spirit but out of self-interest and love of liberty. The formula for legislating by fear goes something like this.

Find one person doing something that on the surface appears dangerous or damaging. Call that person out and draw attention to them for what they are doing. Get people afraid and asking for something to be done. Then propose whatever legislation you desire on the grounds that if you oppose it you are a morally bad person who does not care of people are hurt or die.

Legislators of fear seek to punish people for the bad actions of one individual. They justify this punishment under the guise of working to protect you. Only they want to protect you from yourself. Subtext being, you are too stupid to run your own life and need someone smart, like a legislator of fear, to help you along.

For those of you up to date on your history, yes, this is the same reasoning slave holders used to argue why they needed to maintain slavery as a legal and moral institution. Making a small temporary sacrifice of your liberty is painful, frightening and dangerous but in the long term it will be less painful then having to defend those liberties against tyranny from the weak fortress of negative social opinion.

The State as Helicopter Mom

While we all must do our part the calls about the state getting further and further involved in our daily lives are not without merit. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to shut down religious facilities permanently if they did not comply with his stay at home mandate.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti encouraged people to snitch on their fellow citizens if they see them violating his “safer at home” order. Nancy Pelosi held up the Coronavirus relief bill because she wanted to add in money for things that had nothing to do with Coronavirus, such as stricter emission standards for airplanes and funding for PBS.

Those calling Donald Trump the next incarnation of Hitler and saying he will stop at nothing to gain power are now the same people calling him incompetent for not seizing broad powers in this time of crisis. They are essentially saying government can solve all these problems and more if only it had greater power and they were the ones in charge instead of Trump.

While we all are working hard and making tough sacrifices we also must be on guard against making what is understandable during a crisis the norm of everyday life. We must also protect ourselves against a constant state of crisis.

After seeing what can be done in the name of protecting you from a crisis, what is to stop those same people from declaring a crisis every election season? Or what is to stop them from simply declaring something a crisis in perpetuity?

Climate change could be called a crisis so under that heading shouldn’t government officials be able to assume broad powers in order to solve it? Except what is the end of climate change, isn’t the climate always changing? Would the end of the ‘crisis’ of climate change be a climate that does not ever change?

Yes humanity does have an impact on the climate, but to think that we have the power to ultimately control it or to even know what the best climate is supposed to be is a bit hubristic.

We should be willing to make sacrifices to be able to rise to the challenge of a crisis, but only if those sacrifices are made to preserve our liberty and way of life, not to fundamentally alter it.

Corona Time

Corona Virus is the only topic on people’s mind right now. My wife, who just had a baby and is stuck at home, has to ask people who call her to talk about something else because she just cannot stand having the same conversation over and over again.

Luckily for me not much has changed. I am thankful my workplace is still open (for now) and that I am able to work. I can still take my dogs for walks or go play fetch with them and I can still go to the grocery store.

To be honest my life has not changed a whole lot outside of not being able to take my wife to dinner occasionally. As I make my way through this pandemic I have noticed a few things.

Muh Rights

First issue I’d like to address is the people complaining that the government has no authority to make them stay in their home. To some extent I would agree with these people. But in times of crisis we can make the choice to temporarily give up parts of our liberty in order to mitigate some of the damage.

These people will say, “You should never give up any of your liberty!” To which I would say, you already give up parts of your liberty every day in order to make not only your life better but to make the lives of those in your community better. The sacrifice you are making of certain liberties in a time of crisis will go a long way in preventing damage and permanent loss of those liberties in the future.

It is this sacrifice, even a temporary one, that will be rewarded with trust within a society. Trust in a free society is the most important commodity we can possess. The more we trust our fellow citizens the less likely we will demand laws to regulate each other.

Do not squander your individual trust or the trust of your country in a misguided understanding of freedom and liberty.

The Blame Game

This is starting to creep into the conversation and will likely ramp up as this crisis continues. This crisis is not the fault of Donald Trump or the Deep State or Democrats or Republicans. With the rare exception no one really understood the magnitude of Coronavirus. We are in the middle of this crisis and still do not fully understand it.

 

This could not have been prevented with nationalized healthcare. This is obviously clear if you look at how counties like Italy (who have nationalized healthcare) are handling this pandemic. Have things been handled poorly, of course, the people handling them are human after all and hindsight is 20/20.

It is easy to blame someone else for the problems in the world. Doing so safely moves the responsibility for dealing with them (or creating the problem in the first place) off your shoulders and onto someone else.

If there is blame to be placed it should be placed on the government of China. They have lied about this virus since the beginning, suppressed information, and allowed it to spread once they became aware of how bad it could be.

It did not help that the World Health Organization (WHO), or as they have become known now the Chinese Health Organization, bought and spread those lies. We also did not help because we wanted to believe them because we did not want to face the reality of how bad things could get.

For right now we must put those criticisms off as they fall outside the time horizon in which we are dealing with. Right now the bulk of our focus should be around two things. Producing medical supplies to help deal with people who have contracted the virus and finding a way to end the lock down to get everyone back to work.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

One thing we need to watch out for is opportunistic people who are attempting to exploit fear and uncertainty to do things that under normal circumstances would not be done. I am not talking about the guy who bought all the toilet paper at Costco and is now trying to sell it on ebay for a profit (though if you are that guy, knock it off, what you are doing is still wrong).

I am talking about our representatives pushing through legislative items that have zero to do with solving the problem the legislation is trying to help with. About using the cover of crisis and media malfeasance to funnel money to pet projects or unrelated functions.

We do not need an increase in airplane fuel emission standards as part of our Coronavirus relief bill. We do not need to nationalize industries. Industry simply needs to be asked and they will step up. The number of companies shifting production from consumer goods to medical supplies increases daily.

If you think they could do it faster and better if they had to report to a bureaucrat before they made each choice then you seriously do not understand how business works. These companies are stepping up because they love this country and know it is in their best interest to do so. These business owners who are constantly vilified as greedy capitalist villains are the ones producing the sorely needed masks and gowns and ventilators that the government (over 3 different administrations) did not replenish.

At the end of the day we will get through this. The quarantine will be lifted, the virus will be defeated, and we can all move on. Yes we will have lots of work to do to repair the damage done by essentially halting the world economy, but in times like these patriotic Americans roll up their sleeves, clean up the mess, and press on.

It is tough and will get tougher but we have the strength, the courage and the determination to make it through this. We just have to take it one day at a time, help where we can, and avoid giving into the demons of our fouler nature. Each of us can make a difference in how this crisis turns out, we should try to do our best to mitigate as much suffering as possible.