Dave Griffey at Daffey Thoughts takes a look at the effort by Sam Rocha, Vox Nova alum, to tell the American people to shut up and obey their betters:
My former Patheos editor speaks
To the growing push back against encroachments on liberty and freedom in the Covid-19 era. He has a point. To a point. Grandstanding and using God to make political points isn’t right. Likewise, caring more about fishing or going to the ballgame than the health and well-being of our neighbors isn’t Christian. I do believe that caring for others and looking out for those most vulnerable is a noble and Christian ideal.With that said, it’s not hard to see that while there are extremes on the much mocked “Freedom!” side, there is also a growing abuse on the other. While concern about our neighbors is a noble venture, and there’s nothing wrong with being concerned about our own health, exploiting those things because we’re scared of losing our life more than anything in the world isn’t noble or Christian.The sudden silence across much of the modern Left regarding the plight of the poor in this time is telling. Oh, the press mentions it in the vaguest terms. We hear people say how it’s a shame. But if the progressive narrative that poverty leads to death has any merit, then all we’re doing is kicking death and suffering down the road in order to stop this now. Those who poopoo the idea that any freedom or liberty matters, for whatever reason they would do so, are selling birthrights for bowls of stew. It’s proof that we live in an era so spoiled by unrestrained freedom, and perhaps injected with some generational arrogance, that we can’t imagine losing our freedoms, or think of what that would mean if it happened.So yes. Those saying they don’t care, they want their ballgames and fishing trips whatever else be damned, are not right. But those who have said there is nothing but Covid-19, and they will sell anyone and anything to save ourselves – even if it means the deaths and suffering of millions of others down the road who had to suffer that we might live – are no better. They might be worse.
I’ll leave you with this. A seminary professor of mine once said that those who don’t worry about losing their freedoms are those who have never lived without them. After all, losing your freedom isn’t like getting a bad haircut. If you decide you don’t like it, it won’t just grow back.
Ah, Sam Rocha, ever at the service of the Leftist cause du jour. His post is an exercise in constructing a strawman and beating the stuffing out of it. The whole debate is whether the trampling on constitutional rights is justified by the Black Sniffles, something which Rocha simply takes for granted.
His whole rant against Braveheart Freedom is curious. The Scots were not seeking boundless freedom, but freedom from English rule. They made that clear some years after the death of William Wallace in the Declaration of Abroath:
“for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”
Judging from his post, I suspect that Rocha would have a hard time comprehending that sentiment. More’s the pity.
Update: Unsurprisingly Mark Shea gives the post by Rocha two thumbs up.
Back when Shea was sane, circa 2010, he condemned the Vox Nova crowd as “The Debate Club at Auschwitz” because of their never ending efforts to support pro-abort Leftist politicians. Shea has become what he had beheld. I was mistaken, it was 2009. Go here to read his post.
Obey!
Do these people have families to clothe, educate, feed and house?
They’re playing with fire and they don’t even know fire is hot.
Welcome to Venezuela.
They’re destroying the economy and wreaking havoc on people’s emotions and psychologies based on wildly exaggerated, ‘cooked’ statistics. Twenty-nine thousand [out of 330 million] deaths is a tragedy. Twenty-two million [out of 110 million employed] destroyed livelihoods is a statistic.
Name one accomplishment that the elites presented us in the past twenty years. You Can’t. They’re hugely, destructively wrong on this one, too.
To wit, NY Gov. Coomu was nationally wrong before. Execrable Clinton 1997 named him Capo di Tuti Capos di US HUD. His excessive pushing of low-to-moderate income home loans on FHA, FHLMC and FNMA massively contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis which crashed the economy in 2008. Now, he’s wrecking NYS. No wonder tens of thousands already emigrated from Coomu Land and many thousands more will bug out after things clear up.
But, their intentions are always ‘pure’ and shut up!
The screaming irony here is that the party of “science” can’t rely on any data to prove their totalitarian efforts have even mildly been worth it. They can’t point to a single life spared or any relevant slowing of the penetration of the virus across society. Are the outcomes in Sweden or Brazil, which didn’t shut down their economies, any different than here in the US where we did? The Left simply feels like it’s done something good. From an evidenced based perspective, their battle cry of “At least we flattened the curve!” is nothing more than wishful thinking, something they take on blind faith. As usual, they are the very caricature of what they despise.
@FatherofSeven: Amen. Great point on the irony here. For them it’s all about the feelz. And power. Always power.
To stray slightly from the topic, (my apologies, Don), one of the reasons I gave up the role I once cherished as head of the Inquiry segment of my parish RCIA program was the growing preponderance of people who argued with my explanations of Church teaching on morals, citing their “feelings.” “But I don’t FEEEEL there’s anything wrong when I sleep with my boyfriend.” “But it FEEELS right to abort a baby who would have a single Mom.” Etc. Etc. Resort to concepts such as immutable Truth revealed by God was increasingly met with blank stares. It was time for me to go.
Since Shea has been mentioned, one of his recent idiocies has been identifying having mass with murdering Catholics.
http://archive.is/XGEyX
There was another tweet where he said that he would make sure that Laura Ingraham suffered as a murderer due to her suggesting that Easter services could be conducted outside, with masks, and with at least six feet between all participants. But it looks like that tweet was too spicy even for twitter and got removed due to rule violations.
I would much rather be at Mass praying for a miracle (nobody here gets sick today) than to be at home, like I am, contemplating whether this is what it was like to be an Egyptian.
But more on the topic of the original post, I think a major tactical error has been framing this as primarily a question of freedom. It of course does have to do with freedom, but framing it primarily in this way causes the average person to view the matter as “we can have our freedoms, or we can save thousands and thousands of lives.”
What should be stressed is that the lockdown is also something that is costing us lives. Robbing millions of Americans of their income will lead to deaths. Preventing people from getting “elective” care (including vital preventative screening among other things) will lead to deaths. Bringing the economy to a halt, which will cause more and more disruptions to the supply chain for vital goods, will lead to deaths.
We should be hammering that point as much as we are hammering the point about freedoms.
“I would much rather be at Mass praying for a miracle (nobody here gets sick today) than to be at home”
That makes me think of the Pfizer commercial: “At at time when things are most uncertain, we turn to the most certain thing there is: Science.” That seems to be what Mark Shea is tweeting in that link. Don’t trust priests, trust doctors and scientists. And sadly, that seems to be the gist of our majority witness right now. Religion now belongs with the non-essentials as we get behind the one certain thing: science. I think the Faith is going to be paying for this for years, if not generations, to come.
Was Marx Che EVER actually “sane”? I’m not so sure…
I think he was sane. Now, not so much.
But is it insanity, or just the logical outcome of his multitude of false, leftist premises.
The most certain thing there isn’t science, it’s death. As in, we all owe God one. And neither science nor technology can change that.
That’s the subtext to the Freedom! versus IF IT SAVES JUST ONE LIFE! debate we’re having.
Jay, I have no idea why he’s become what he’s become, but I try to avoid his web pages at this point. They are literally platforms for blasphemy, heresy, intrinsic evils and sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance.. Right now, I saw there is a thread of comments not too subtly winking at the idea that all these conservatives worried about their freedoms could die of the virus. The good thing, so the thread speculates, is that this would alter the electorate and positively impact the November elections. Think on that. Can you imagine even Mark in 2005 allowing people to toy with the idea of ‘gee, if millions of those I don’t like die from this, we could win!’? I’m still amazed that people refer to Mark as an excellent apologist. Given the content of his posts and the comments he allows (or even defends), I want to ask what to them would be a bad apologist.
Michigan is a place that often demonstrates the extremes of political consciousness. It is laboratory of dissent. It is a place of race riots, building burning on Halloween, unionism, mass layoffs, Black power, priest unions, etc. Gretchen the Governator is a perfect fit for the Michigan mentality.
I lived there for my first 70 years and thought it all was very normal. It isn’t. It’s insane and a foreshadowing of America’s future.