But Then Again A Different Chronological Context

Funny I don't remember the swine flu or the bird flu or Sars having become the Armageddon of our days. I've just read too where a bishop has given dispensation for parishioners over sixty from attending Mass. It seems like we have come a long way from bishops of yesteryear going to the lions or the stake, or the gibbet, or the cross for not bowing the knee to the Emperor. But then when they did make that supreme sacrifice I don't believe it was an election year.

The Laxity of Libraries and My Rising Fear

I am at the library. No masks. No one wipes the keyboard letters I tap with my fingers that could possibly be harboring corona. I don't quite feel safe in such laxity. No doubt it is because of Trump. After all Trump seems to breed crises: collusion, climate, corona. I think I hear you scoff at such a paranoia. But you don't understand: To my very left only a few feet away are tutors teaching kids at untreated tables. This is not even to say that thousands and thousands of books on bookshelves I have no reason to suspect have been sterilized... page by page. Thus you can imagine my fear. I'm sure if they had holy founts here and conscientious UCCB administrators the founts would be dry and safe. But no, here in this secular fortress the measures for the preservation of our precarious mortalities is not looked after. Why, with every tap of any of the possibly infected twenty-six letters on the keyboard my fear rises as surely as the climate changing high tides. And now I look. The tutor is playing a card game with his student! They each touch the playing cards with such a nonchalance that is maddening in our present pandemic. Don't they understand the danger?

The Crisis Deserving My Fear

Well it is 67 degrees today, still weeks away from Spring. I must confess to not knowing how to direct my fear. First there is the fever of the planet: Global Warming. I'm thinking that the ocean must be rising to the point that even the Obama family may be making plans to emigrate from Martha's Vineyard pronto. And here in this lovely coastal community in which I live I wonder if my fear is best directed by keeping my eyes on the fortuitous high tides? Or perhaps it is this latest crisis, the Corona virus, which seems to have quite infected us with a foreboding fear unknown since the black death took hold of Europe in the Middle Ages. I am quite concerned. When I see the Church taking such measures, not at all Draconian, as closing churches, stopping public Masses in Rome and perhaps elsewhere, emptying holy water founts, disinfecting the pews, priests and deacons disinfecting themselves---and just a corollary: does the Host itself get infected by the disinfectant? In other words are we communicants more likely to take in strains of the disinfectant chemicals than a viral strain of this immigrant flu? And I wonder on a political aside, since we are fighting so hard to keep our borders open and free, can it be considered consistent that we wish, in this case, to keep our borders closed to a virus from a distant land? At any rate, I've got to find the proper crisis on which to spend my fear... perhaps the next crisis will even be more clearly the one on which to let my fears go wild

Will the Real Bully Please Stand Up

I seem to recall that Schumer accused the President many times of being a bully. Well. When I heard Schumer's rant at a Reproductive Rights Rally (what is one of these anyway?) he, Schumer, resembled the remark Thomas More made to Thomas Cromwell, "You threaten like a dockside bully."

To which Cromwell replied: "How should I threaten then?"

More: "Like a minister of State, with justice."

Cromwell: "Oh so justice is what you're threatened with?"

More: "Then I am not threatened."

(May Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh stand up like Thomas More to such Schumachian bullying).

What Crisis Gets the Bold Print?

I'm just wondering if anyone has made a comparison with how many die in the clinics of PP with how many die from Corona virus. I'm just wondering why the fear mongering media has not accentuated the one and put in bold print the other.