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.

Blog and Life Update

It has been awhile since I have posted or updated my blog so I thought an update was in order.

I have had a lot going on in my life in the last couple of month and because of that I have neglected my blog more than usual. I was trying to post one post a month and about a year ago I was actually pretty successful at doing so.

The more I worked on the blog the better it got and the better I became as a blogger. Yet I started to get burned out. I mostly focused on writing about political topics, both national and local. At some point the political stuff just became boring.

It was the same old fighting and bickering, within and amongst parties, and I found myself thinking that there was something better I could be doing. I am not saying that politics is unimportant, only that I was less and less interested in it.

I had also started a YouTube channel where we did a weekly show talking about politics and news stories. I really enjoyed this and really loved working with and interacting with some really cool people who I would call friends today.

We gave the YouTube channel a go and did not grow very much. We understood it was a saturated market but we wanted to try. When we realized that the future of the YouTube channel was not bright and that we all did not have time to devote to it that believed we should have we decided to call it quits.

While that was going on my beautiful wife and I decided that we wanted to have a baby. It was not a choice we made lightly but one we reached whole-heartedly with as much clarity as you can have on such a choice.

February 8^th 2020 my daughter was born. Adjusting to a new sleep schedule and life with a third human in the house has been a challenge, but a very rewarding challenge. Needless to say it has left little time to blog between making dinner, working, walking dogs, and giving my wife the much needed break she deserves after a long day doing all that by herself.

And now Corona Virus. Thankfully I am still at work, my workplace has been deemed essential, and am able to earn a paycheck to support my family, for now. I am also thankful that my wife and I are relatively young and in good health. I am still able to get to the grocery store and to head out into the world and acquire essential items (formula for baby, medications for pets, etc).

While I have been on Facebook and social media recently, it is nowhere near the level that I used to be. I am thankful for this as it has allowed me to keep a level head about this pandemic and not to worry too much. Yes I am being cautious, I want to keep those I love safe and healthy, but I also understand that living life as a prisoner in our own homes and of our own fear is no life at all.

These stay at home measures are fine in a time of great crisis but they can never become a regular facet of American life. No, I don’t want people to die, but am I ready to give up my chance to live a life of freedom and liberty in order to buy a notion of security?

Between working, a new baby, and an unprecedented amount of hand washing I have found little time for blogging, or much of anything else. I am happy to report my baby is healthy, has shown a gift for smiling recently, and has already out grown her newborn clothes. As far as the blog goes, I will try to make more of an effort to update the blog on topics that I hope you and I both find interesting.

Hope you are all staying healthy and know that no matter how bad things might seem now, we will get through this and we will bounce back.

Cody Benson

Impeachment 2020

The impeachment seems insincere, pointless, and most of all boring. The evidence for this is largely in the disinterest in the impeachment itself on behalf of the average American. Ultimately nothing will get done other than a production of a few media soundbites, and a few politicians will create more of a name for themselves.

Insincere

The impeachment seems insincere largely due to the fact that several members of the Democratic Party said and ran on the fact that they wanted to impeach Trump. We heard from them Democrats that this is a somber and sober moment and that they took no joy in moving forward with articles of impeachment.

They want to make it seem like this was a decision they came to reluctantly only after long hours of research, investigation, and contemplation. When in reality they already decided they would impeach, they only needed to wait for a reason. When a good reason never provided itself, they decided to manufacture one.

When that did not work they manufactured another, than another. The punishment had been decided, they just needed a crime.

Pointless

The outcome was already known. The Democrats knew it, the Republicans knew it, and even my dogs knew it. The House would impeach and the Senate would not remove President Donald Trump from office.

Unless something extraordinary happens nothing will change that. Was the point to attempt to appease a loud radical minority within the Democratic Party? Was the point to try and smear President Trump ahead of the 2020 election?

If it was to appease the loud radical minority than it was the wrong move to make. If you actually win, they will claim victory, if you lose they will blame you and become louder and stronger than before.

Boring

 

I am someone who enjoys politics. I like listening to political discussions, talk radio, political podcasts, and talking with friends about news and politics. Yet I find this whole impeachment saga incredibly boring.

When it comes on the radio I’ll give it a listen, but after about 5 minutes I will switch over to country music. I am not the only one who feels this way either. Rarely will anything about the impeachment come up on my social media accounts.

The podcasts I listen to will talk about it in passing but will not spend a lot of time going over the details. Even the ratings for the TV coverage of the impeachment are not impressive. It would seem that the American people do not really care about this show.

They have seen it before, they know how it is going to end, and they have more important things to do with their time.

Impeachment is a serious process, but it has been cheapened to political theater. If anything was damaged during this process it is the gravity to which the impeachment process will be viewed going forward.

What happened to consent of the governed?

I am thankful that throughout my life my interaction with the administrative state has been confined to the routine. Obtaining a driver’s license, filing taxes, and filing my marriage license.

Recently I have had a friend get caught up in the administrative state. I won’t go into details but essentially it boils down to an administrator acting as judge and jury for the rules and regulations their administration created and executing those decisions.

These decisions impacted my friend’s personal life on a level to which the government was never meant to interfere. This administrative agency combines the powers of the judiciary, the legislature, and an executive, yet remains un-elected and largely unaccountable to the people.

Consent of the Governed

 

In the American system of government the consent of the governed is obtained through voting for representatives. These representatives are imbued with a part of the power of each individual person through an election.

These representatives, imbued with this power, create laws and administer various functions of the government. If the people believe their representative is doing a bad job, lacks sufficient character, or they generally do not like the person they are free to select a new representative when their term is up.

These representatives must repeatedly return to the people to renew this consent to represent them. This means that representatives are accountable to the people they represent and only have power in so far as it has been granted to them by the consent of the people.

The Loss of Consent

The administrative state does not operate with the consent of the governed. Instead they claim their authority from expertise. This allows administrators to remain insulated from the ‘dirty business’ of politics. This insulation from the consent of the governed was not produced by accident, but rather a key feature of the Progressive system of politics and administration.

 

The Progressives believed that if they could empower experts and remove them from having to deal with running for elections, then those experts would be able to make the right decisions and could use the power of the government to solve the problems of their time.

In order to achieve this, Progressives needed to reject the ideas of the Founders. Chiefly the ideas of the consent of the governed and the separation of powers. By ‘freeing’ experts from politics to focus on administration, they dispensed with the consent of the governed.

Unification of Powers

The Progressives believed that the separation of powers was both inefficient and irresponsible. They thought it was inefficient because it would take a long time to get anything done. They considered it irresponsible because it made it difficult for popular will to be translated into government action.

The solution was to combine the powers of government (legislative, judicial, and executive) into administrations headed up by experts (rational educated progressive people) who could use the power of government filtered through their expertise to solve the problems of a modern world.

We see this today in the various administrative agencies, who can make rules and regulations that have the power of laws, often are able to act as judges for disputes that arise due to those rules and regulations, and can take action to enforce rules and regulations or impose punishments on those who violate them.

At the same time the Progressives did away with the separation of powers, they focused on increasing democratization of politics. This was to amplify the power of public opinion (majority faction) in politics.

The paradox of this Progressive model of politics and administration is that while it increases the volume of public opinion in politics, it removes the power of that opinion from almost any influence it would have on administration.

Meaning the power of the administrative state is separated from the consent of the governed. Yes we get to vote for President and for Congress and for Governors but we do not get to vote for the head of the EPA. The people we vote for do not debate each other and create laws, the EPA simply produces them out of thin air.

We can voice our opinions louder and we have some impact on the administrative state but if the expert in charge of an administrative agency decides to ignore the will of the people, there is very little to almost zero recourse for the people. They do not require our consent to exercise all the powers of government, instead they claim their authority from their expertise.

Human Nature

This near worship of expertise denies something the founders understood clearly. That no matter how much of an expert any individual was, in the end they are still a human being. A human with all the same flaws, faults, interests, emotions, and capacity for good and evil as any other person.

This is why the separation of powers and the consent of the governed are so important. The consent of the governed allows the people to invest their power into another human being. They can take into account the nature of the person and decide if they are the right person to entrust with their representation. 

The separation of powers is important because it helps protect the rights of the individual (the greatest minority) and provides a tempering for the passions of the people as well as a restraint on the power of those who are entrusted with governing.

In order to have a representative government, meaning a government by the consent of the people, you must have a limited government. If the government is larger than the people than it is no longer representative of the people but represents those in government. It is not merely the size of the government that poses a problem but also the manner and structure of that government.

Our government by the consent of the governed is slipping away and instead of working to restore that limited form of government we have been more interested in fighting over who controls an ever increasingly powerful administrative state. Now is the time to make the choice, do we want the liberty to pick up the responsibility to solve the problems of our times ourselves or do we want to entrust our life, liberty and happiness into the hands of administrative experts?

The Intent behind the Question

I have seen this happen with greater frequency, particularly among Facebook groups. Someone will post an image, a screen shot, or a screen grab of a conversation. They will than make a comment and follow it up with a question.

More Than ‘Just a Question’

The question is not asked in good faith or with the aim to seek the true answer, but to provoke a specific response and feeling. Typically the response and feeling desired is anger and/or outrage. The purpose to provoke this response and feeling is polarization, which is a fancy way of saying division.

This is not to say the original poster rationally thought this out and made a choice to cause division, they probably do not even know this is what they are doing. In fact they are probably just as upset about what they are sharing as those who see it.

The truth is we all have things we do without thinking about it. We do not think about why we are doing it, what doing it will do for us now, and what sort of impact it will have in the future not only for ourselves but for those who we are connected.

The devious nature of these posts goes deeper. It hides its malicious nature behind a defense of, ‘I’m just asking a question.’ This allows the original poster an easy option out when confronted. This is the path of least resistance and feeds off our natural human nature to avoid pain and discomfort.

By avoiding this pain and discomfort we deny ourselves of an opportunity grow. We shut out having to go through the discomfort of being mindful of what we are doing and in doing so avoid the pain associated with being wrong.

Asking questions is generally a good thing as long as they are asked properly. By properly I do not mean questions people approve of, but questions seeking truth and understanding. Questions asked in good faith not questions asked seeking a specific answer or to provoke an emotion.

Responding

When you see this type of devious question being asked naturally you may get defensive and possibly angry. This is perfectly natural and simply means you are human. It is your body saying something is off about this.

If you recognize there is an agenda behind the question the impulse to pull away or to call out the asker is strong. These questions are a form of manipulation and no one enjoys being manipulated. Pulling away will only leave the person asking the question in an echo chamber and positively reinforce this form of manipulation.

Calling out the asker will only further entrench things creating more division. So how do you respond? You answer the question honestly and ask follow up questions seeking clarification. Remember the person asking the manipulative question probably does not know that they are trying to manipulate people.

More likely than not they felt an emotion and reacted without mindfulness. You responding in the same way will only make the matter worse. Be generous with your forgiveness because sometimes we all act not knowing what we do.

This is the best way to respond because sometimes you might be wrong. Responding by answering honestly and asking follow up questions leaves room for the fact that you might be misinterpreting the question. In my experience by doing this you will exchange sowing seeds of division for sowing seeds of respect.

It is by reaping this crop of respect that we can produce the more valuable product of unity.