To give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a faint spirit... (Isaiah 61:3)
Surely the wrath of man shall praise you (Psalm 76:10).
Although I believe the coronavirus epidemic has been hysterically hyped beyond all reason (why are we running out of toilet paper??), this is not to say we should not be sensible and medically smart in terms of how we respond to it.
We should wash our hands regularly since there is no antidote for a virus and as yet no vaccine, look out for our neighbors in Christian love by staying home when we’re sick, and make our priority protecting the elderly, who are by far the most vulnerable among us. (The average age of individuals who die from corona is 81.) With these sensible precautions, there is no reason for everyone under the age of 70 who has no compromising health condition to be kept in quarantine.
But politicians who hate to see a crisis go to waste are quarantining 7.6 million people in their homes in San Francisco and thinking about quarantine 8 million people in their homes in New York City. These by and large are the people least in need of a quarantine. Quarantines should be reserved for assisted living facilities to make sure they have the respirators they need to care for their residents and to make sure that visitors are carefully screened for coughs and for fever. This would flatten the death curve quicker than anything else we could do.
This would be far more effective and far less expensive than shutting down the entire country to “protect” the folks who are least likely to get infected and die.
But on the other hand, the worldwide death toll is climbing toward 10,000 (approaching 100 in the U.S.) so we cannot cavalierly dismiss it. We are hearing dire predictions about the possible death toll. I read one projection today that 2.2 million will die in the U.S. alone, a number I believe to be wildly and irresponsibly exaggerated, a figure designed to create panic rather than peace.
But even if we assume the worst, it’s worth asking the question: can anything good come out of coronavirus? This is not to say the coronavirus a good thing, or that we should be unconcerned about the health of our fellow-citizens. No, the coronavirus is a bad thing. But can something good come out of this terrible thing?
I believe the answer is yes. My production team and I were discussing some of the drastic (in my view) actions that have been taken and were struck by some of the lasting and beneficial changes in our culture that could result. By the time authorities come to their senses and call off the worldwide shutdown, new habits will have been formed that may be difficult to break.
For instance, closing public schools will protect vulnerable young children from force-fed indoctrination into the absurd and anti-science environmental agenda. It will protect them from being brainwashed into normalizing sexual deviancy, gender confusion, and Drag Queen story hours. By forcing parents to home school their children at this time, big government nannies may discover that all they did was to give parents a chance to try home education and discover they liked it more than they thought.
When America moved from being primarily an agricultural economy to an urban one, one of the disastrous results was how it pulled fathers out of the home and away from their families for the workday. This may be the first step in reversing that trend.
By requiring businesses to have their employees work from home, fathers will be around their children more, will play a larger role in their children’s lives, and may even become a member of their little home school faculty.
With restaurants being shut down, we will have more families sitting down to share meals together, connecting over a family meal just like all of America used to do. There will be more time for parents to instruct their children in the teaching and admonition of the Lord, and more opportunity to model a life of faith before them. There’ll even be more time to take dogs for walks and play with them in the backyard.
Coronavirus might create a fantastic, once-in-a-generation opportunity to reverse some anti-family trends and move back toward the America we used to be. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
