Opus 2020-125: Fear Factor

A link from Don Surber to an ABC affiliate took me to a story linking the panic lockdown to an increasing suicide rate.  We are starting to see stories about the deaths caused by the response to the Chinavirus.  The damage is more than economic.  There are calls for an end to the nonsense.

While I agree wholeheartedly with the call to end the lockdown, I don’t think its end will bring the healing we want.  The problem is not the jackboot government officials and their draconian attempts to do what is best for us.  The problem is the amount of fear that has been generated and how that fear is eating away at the inner being of so many people.

Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the words that have been paraphrased so many times:  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  That is a bit of wisdom that is coming back to bite us.  I go to a store and see people wearing masks and gloves and carefully keeping their distance from everyone else.  I see fear everywhere.  I think that if all the pocket Nazis went away tomorrow we would still have millions of people cowering in their rooms, afraid to come out, knowing in their hearts that The Virus is going to get them.

If I had to lay this craven panic at someone’s feet I would pick the news media.  They have hyped, cherry-picked and outright lied in order to get people to look to them for direction.  I think the classic moment was the news conference where the cameras kept rolling and showed how the reporters all took off their masks and gathered together after they thought they were off the air.

I have no hope that they will ever repent of what they have done to the country.  There are a lot of people like this.  Most are relatively harmless because they never get the power to do much.  Others, like these media people and some politicians, are described many times in the Bible.  Here are just a few references from the Book of Proverbs.

(Pro 2:14 NAS77) Who delight in doing evil, And rejoice in the perversity of evil;

(Pro 4:16 NAS77) For they cannot sleep unless they do evil; And they are robbed of sleep unless they make someone stumble.

We need to learn to ignore them.  Take off your mask.  Take a deep breath.  Hug someone you love.  Will you catch a bug?  Possibly but your body is designed with those bugs in mind.

And use common sense.  Wash your hands, brush your teeth, don’t take rides from strangers, never vote for a Democrat and don’t believe anything you hear from the news. 

homo unius libri