Given the nature and origins of the current pandemic, it’s not without some degree of irony that the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ also signifies opportunity. While we ought to be wary before we reach conclusions just yet, there is some evidence suggesting some calculation on the part of the Chinese government regarding the current pandemic.
Regardless, it’s readily evident that the Chinese government suppressed vital data in the earliest phases of the COVID-19 outbreak and completely mishandled their response to the crisis.
Dangerous opportunities abound for more than just China though. The media continues to exploit the pandemic narrative while many on the Left aim to politicize COVID-19 to exhausting levels of subterfuge.
Worse, ‘shelter-in-place’ suggestions alongside social distancing and face masks are slowly mutating into orders enforceable by the rule of law. Potentially, we are facing an unavoidable battle between public health and our civil liberties.
Recently, ABC News reported that a former police officer was arrested for simply playing catch with his daughter in an empty park:
In an incident caught on video, a former Colorado State Patrol trooper said he was handcuffed in front of his 6-year old daughter on a near-empty softball field Sunday by Brighton police officers enforcing social distancing rules. The department apologized Tuesday afternoon, calling the incident an “overreach by our police officers.”
This week, protests erupted in Michigan over the current lockdown as well. According to the National Review:
Thousands of protestors, organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition under the hashtag #OperationGridlock, took to the capitol in Lansing on Wednesday to voice their disapproval of Whitmer’s rules, which include the closing of businesses selling hardware supplies and gardening seeds, and the banning of travel ‘between residences.’ While Whitmer said she respected the ‘right’ of the ‘small segment of the state’ to protest, she warned they could be furthering the lockdowns by refusing to social distance.
Rather than making any conciliatory efforts to assuage the growing anxiety and frustration over jobs and the economy among her constituency, Governor Whitmer offered only threats in response to the thousands of protestors that showed up at her doorstep. These sorts of callous dismissals by those in authority regarding our current course in this crisis is cause for vital concern for all of us.
Another kind of authoritarian threat looms on the dystopian horizon as well. Torn from the pages of ‘Brave New World,’ Google and Apple have teamed up to create a surveillance app in the supposed hopes of mitigating the spread of COVID-19. The implications are patently obvious with just how this may infringe upon our civil liberties. The Verge explains:
The goal of contact tracing apps is fairly simple. They’d log every phone within a certain range of a person, and if that person later tested positive for COVID-19, they could send an alert to each phone that had been nearby. Google and Apple turned to Bluetooth, which can monitor the other phones in your area without tracking your specific location.
Sure, you can simply opt-out of downloading or using the app. However, what if your employer demands that you utilize it to continue working? There are serious implications and issues regarding such surveillance including corporate and government overreach.
It’s been reasonable and necessary to abide by the many measures put in place to lessen the severity of the pandemic. It seems quite evident that they have worked so far. Unfortunately, there is an increasing insistence by many, especially on the Left, to dogmatically cede all decisions and authority to politicians with little reflection or critical evaluation.
Fear and anxiety are becoming the final arbitrators in these dangerous times, not reason or critical evaluation, and certainly not faith. This is beyond worrisome as the crisis drags on. Perhaps Aldous Huxley said it best in his famous aforementioned novel: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”