Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell—and its fall was great.
- Matthew 7:24-27, World English Bible
The words of the Scripture quoted above came to me this week as I pondered the progress of recent events worldwide and nationally. The quoted parable defines wisdom quite specifically - namely as the willingness to do the things commanded by Jesus. But it also points out a couple of other facts, namely, that everyone is building something, and that storms come from time to time to test every person's work. If a person's house gets knocked down by the storm, he can't blame it solely on the storm - he must also admit admit that he was a stupid builder.
Thus the coronavirus pandemic might be viewed as a storm of a certain kind, and the leaders of nations might be viewed as those whose house-building is being tested. In particular, two kinds of leaders are being tested:
- those who understand as the Proverbs say, that a king's glory is his people, and that the king had therefore better provide for the common good of his people so that his kingdom can be strong;
- and those who cannibalize their people in order to enrich themselves.
In the latter group we can put all of the politicians of the global far right who have become heads of state within the last four years, as well as their chief enabler, a certain Vladimir Putin. The interesting thing about these people is that they were able to raise a base of certain members of the common people to back them by convincing them that narcissism, greed and selfishness are good things and that by these things they would make their countries (and their base) great again. This then has been the character of the metaphorical "houses" they have built.
The current storm, however, is exposing a lot of shoddy workmanship, bad carpentry, and substandard building materials in these "houses". Consider that Angela Merkel's Germany is
weathering the coronavirus storm much better than the United States right now, because of two factors: a robust public health system, and a chancellor who tells the straight-up truth. Consider also the robust, clear-eyed responses of
South Korea and Singapore to the current crisis. And lastly, consider the response of
China, which after initially fumbling, took such steps as making testing free, removing
all payment requirements for new patients seeking care, and enforcing of self-quarantine. As a result, new cases of COVID-19 are now declining in China. Compare that with the response of a certain Mr. Donald Trump, which can only be described as
one long, continuous fumble. As a result of Trump's fumbling, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today below the level it held on the day when President Barack Obama left office. And coronavirus cases in the United States continue to climb.
Trump's initial response - namely to downplay the severity of the crisis while doing nothing to help the people of the United States - is remarkably similar to the response of Boris Johnson, the current prime minister of Britain, whose government decided that the best way to protect Britain was to
allow the virus to spread naturally in order to build up "herd immunity" among Britons. ("God save the Queen," you say?! How about "God help Britain!" With friends like these, who needs enemies?) Political pressure forced him to abandon this plan, but
its replacement still looks a lot like "doing nothing."
Russia, on the other hand, seems to have adopted a different approach. According to the World Health Organization, Russia has only
199 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection as of the time of this writing, with no confirmed deaths. Russia is therefore nearly perfect, the very thing every narcissist wants to be...except that a large number of Russian doctors are now saying that
the Putin government is forcing them to under-report cases of COVID-19, and that the Russian medical system is so decrepit that accurate assessments of the current situation in Russia are impossible. They are also pointing out the extremely limited number of test kits available, the inaccuracy of these kits, and the fact that they are all made by one Russian monopoly. There also seems to be a
sharp spike in cases of "community-acquired pneumonia" and "
community-acquired influenza", with entire hospital wards being emptied of other patients in order to accommodate the new cases. Maybe Putin's government doesn't know the difference between COVID-19 and other viruses, but it does know how to try, at least, to capitalize on an opportunity to weaken nations that are better than Russia - as witnessed by
an EU report stating that pro-Russian media outlets are sowing disinformation about the current pandemic in order to try to aggravate the public health crisis in the West. Nice to see what Putin's priorities actually are.
But it's not just heads of nations whose work is being tested by this storm. It's individuals and families as well. I am thinking of what our responses to a crisis say about our individual character. Of particular note is the extent to which each of us is addicted to mass media, including social media with its news feeds. And I am thinking of the mindset which I encountered when I was first exposed to the concepts of peak oil and resource depletion - the mindset which at the time was called prepping, but which I now call hoarding. It is a particularly dysfunctional kind of hoarding which makes people go to Winco and buy out all the Top Ramen, toilet paper, and beans they can get their hands on. And four times within the last nine months this behavior has appeared. The first three times, it was because the weather reporters on the news predicted heavy snow. Now, note - this happened in 2019 and early 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Yet people seem to forget that in 2008 it snowed for two weeks, and everyone managed to live without resorting to hoarding. People can be such...
people...sometimes... Is it possible that many of us have built our lives on a set of poisonous assumptions and bad moral choices? How is your house holding up in all this rain?
