by Nedra Sorenson
Guest Blog
I keep hearing that “the virus is the boss” – that it is the disease that has to dictate how life goes on…WHETHER life goes on. But that’s not what’s happening. The virus isn’t the boss here – FEAR is the boss. And the ones who are pushing the fear, the ones whose voices are the loudest, telling us how fearful we should be, are the LEAST fearful.
THEY are not worried that they haven’t gotten a paycheck for the last five weeks (because they’ve been voting themselves raises and non-deductible/no co-pay health care and Platinum Parachute pensions for years – all on the backs of American taxpayers).
THEY are not worried about overdue mortgages or not being able to make the rent on their business property (because their second home in the Hamptons or Napa Valley was paid for in cash and is now a huge tax write-off).
THEY are not worried about having to sit for hours in mile-long queues to get a cardboard box of groceries from the food bank (because they can snack on gourmet gelato kept nice and cold in their stainless steel Subzero freezer).
THEY can film themselves wallowing in a bubble bath in their oversized tub and say they are just like the rest of us. THEY can film their upper body workouts as they sit in their designer home office at their designer desk and tell us how important it is to stay inside while they can move around outdoors at will. THEY can set up hotlines for people to phone in “social distancing” violations by their neighbors while they sneak off to the gym.
I keep asking myself how many deaths have occurred from cancer in the last 40 days? How many from heart disease or diabetes? How many from plain, old everyday influenza? How many people died from accidents in the last month? How many lives were snuffed out by abortion since February?
Each death diminishes me because I am part of the main…yet death is a fact of life that we face every day. The fact, currently, is that we are NOT being held hostage by a disease (by the way with a 97-98% SURVIVAL rate!)…we are being held hostage by fear, fear that’s being promoted by those whose only real interest is in seizing crisis-produced power and holding on to it.
In the 1700’s there was this guy named George. He was rich and powerful…he was a tyrant. He used coercion and repression and fear to control his subjects. And the fledgling Americans – who had SO much to lose (but everything to gain) rose up and said “ENOUGH!”
Because freedom isn’t easy, people…liberty isn’t SAFE. Liberty is RISK. LIFE is risk. Every day we face and risk death…every day there is the possibility of losing everything. The question each person has to ask themselves is, IS IT WORTH THE RISK?
Do we live our lives in freedom, risking all we have for what we could have…or do we listen to the fear, give in to the fear and let our children and grandchildren struggle under the crushing weight of trillions of dollars in tax burden because we were too fearful to face the risk?
Do we leave future generations the knowledge that we were willing to be controlled, to believe the narrative that someone was only thinking of our health and safety, while the economic lifeblood of the world drained away?
Do we decide that Eliot was right…that this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper? The whimper of a fearful world, masked and cowering behind closed doors – while those in power lower their silk scarves from their faces to tell us how safe they are keeping us?
You can ask me, am I scared? Yes. I’m scared. But despite the fact that I’m in the at-risk demographic – elderly, with underlying health issues…I’m more scared for my neighbors, for my country, than the possibility of death by COVID-19…because NOBODY gets out of this alive.
In the end it’s HOW you live, not IF you’ll die.
