📄The Areopagus Update – March/April 2020
Writing in the March 12, 2020 edition of the Gospel Coalition website, managing editor Matt Smethurst notes the following: “It’s now clear that COVID-19 is a deadly serious global pandemic, and all necessary precautions should be taken. Still, C. S. Lewis’s words – written 72 years ago – ring with some relevance for us. Just replace ‘atomic bomb’ with ‘coronavirus:’”
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, [just] as you would have lived in the 16th century when the plague visited London almost every year,… or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motorcar accidents.’
“In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways…. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
“This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
– “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays.
Wise counsel, no doubt, from the man whom I consider to be the 20th century’s preeminent sage. But there is much more to be considered than simply faith-based resignation and prudent preparation.
In a March 9th editorial, FOX News host Tucker Carlson offered up a sensible and sober analysis of the coronavirus epidemic in which he explained not only the problem but the cause and the consequences of the disease. Note in particular these words by Carlson:
“One of the first things we must do is break our dependence on China for essential medical supplies. Last week, China’s official news service published a piece gloating that the country has brought coronavirus under control. The story says the rest of the world should apologize for criticizing China over the virus, and then drops this unsubtle warning: ‘If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products, and ban exports to the United States. If China announces that its drugs are for domestic use and bans exports, the United States will fall into the hell of a new coronavirus epidemic.’
“In other words, they’re threatening to kill us. And it’s not an empty threat. We really are that dependent on China, for masks and medical equipment and for basic medicines…. The people who made us this dependent on a hostile foreign power deserve to be punished. That won’t happen, of course.”
Carlson is referring, of course, to the likes of Obama, Bush, Clinton, and other establishment politicians who had neither the foresight nor the courage to confront Communist China. Now, it seems that we are reaping the whirlwind of what these so-called “leaders” have sown in their naive obsession with “globalism” and their efforts to build a “New World Order.”
Let us not forget – especially this coming November.
