et ceteras

Here we are a few weeks into spring, and it seems like every bit of news and commentary for at least a month has had something to do with Coronavirus.

This is a presidential election year, yet there have been no leading news stories about the election in seemingly forever. Joe Biden basically won the Democratic Party's nomination when Bernie Sanders dropped out four days ago, yet even that was not a banner headline.

Today is Easter, so thankfully Easter got the lion's share of attention today. But even so, much of that chatter revolved around the fact that Coronavirus compelled churches to stream their Easter services online rather than deliver them in person.

The virus is invisible but is impacts are very visible, and very palpable, wherever you turn. So I won't be able to keep thoughts about it out of this post, but I am going to try to keep them to a minimum because I/we need to think about something else.

Easter

The holiest day on the "Christian calendar" is today, so some random thoughts about it are in order.

The first Easter was of course preceded by the first Good Friday. There would be no resurrection to celebrate if there had not been those dark hours beginning with Christ's agony in Gethsemane and concluding with his execution on Golgotha. To truly appreciate what happened 2,000 years ago, it is crucial to remember that Jesus, though divine, was human at the time and was terrified of the torture he knew was coming -- so terrified that, while praying in Gethsemane, he pleaded for God the Father to spare him that fate which was his whole reason for having been born.

Nowhere is the feeling of his agony better captured that in the opening scene of The Passion of the Christ. The movie adds a brilliant touch by having Satan present, endeavoring to coax and deceive Jesus as he prays and summoning a snake to approach the prostrate Christ -- only to see Jesus stomp on the snake when he finally rises before his arrest, thus evoking a passage from way back in Genesis 3:15, in which God warned the serpent in Eden that at some future date one of Eve's descendants "will crush your head." You can watch the scene here.

Precisely how somebody dies from crucifixion is mostly an educated guess, seeing as how it was an ancient practice that took place long before mankind had any real medical knowledge. But those educated guesses seem spot-on and downright excruciating, as they highlight multiple tortures a person on a cross will endure before succumbing. This fairly brief article about the topic is worth a read (and yes I know crucifixion is still legal in Saudi Arabia, but it's seldom done there and it goes without saying that the Saudis don't dispatch physicians to the site to study the medical details).

Lastly, if you want to read about rational reasons to believe the resurrection occurred, go here or here (of course there are plenty of other articles on the topic, but the ones I linked to manage to be thorough without straying too far into the weeds).

Hockey

Hockey? What hockey? In the grand scheme of things, the 2019-20 NHL season getting suspended  by the Coronavirus isn't all that important. Not with some people losing their lives to the virus and many others losing their livelihoods to it.

But the season's suspension bothers me, especially since it is looking ever more likely that it will turn into an outright cancellation. The Tampa Bay Lightning were looking like a true Stanley Cup contender possessed with an ingredient that was missing last spring, and all of a sudden the opportunity before them evaporated. Like Keyser Soze, it was just gone, and it doesn't look like it's coming back this year.

I know fans of other teams can say the same, but the Lightning are my team. All I can think about is how the contracts of Patrick Maroon, Kevin Shattenkirk, Anthony Cirelli, Erik Cernak, Mikhail Sergachev, Jan Rutta, and others all expire in 11 weeks, and how the team will only have $7 million under the salary cap next season to re-sign them all... and how that's only if the salary cap doesn't decrease next season, but it probably will decrease because of all the revenue the NHL is losing with this season getting scrapped.

In other words, I keep thinking of how the band was perfectly built for this season and how there is no way they'll be able to bring the whole band back next season. The thought sucks, man, it just sucks.

No point

One of the most discouraging things about the Great Corona Scare of 2020 is the fact that so many people insist on seeing the virus through the lens of their politics, and how they refuse to set aside their partisan sniping in this time when basic human decency is what's needed.

Keep in mind, I have no qualms about engaging in partisan sniping. Peruse things I have written in the almost 12 years I've had this blog, and you will find a fair amount of vinegary partisanship on display. Partisanship does not bother me so long as everybody, starting with yours truly, makes his or her case logically and honestly and in good faith. Unfortunately that is not happening with a lot of the Coronavirus comments.

The virus we are presently dealing with is called a novel Coronavirus, meaning it is new. We don't have a track record to go on. Our understanding and knowledge of it have been changing for months, and therefore people's opinions of it have not been consistent. This is true for medical professionals, politicians, and journalists alike.

Quarantining and social distancing have no doubt helped keep the fatalities down, but there is no way to know how much they have helped because we don't know how reliable the original projections were. They could have been anywhere from empirically sound to empirically off to pure balderdash. There is no way to know.

People have tried to compare and contrast different countries' results in dealing with Coronavirus, but the comparisons are meaningless because different countries keep statistics in different ways. Italy's death rate looks much higher than Germany's, but Italy considers a death to have been caused by Coronavirus any time a deceased person had the virus, even if that person had multiple other deadly conditions and would have died anyway -- whereas Germany considers a death to have been caused by Coronavirus only if the deceased person had no other medical conditions whatsoever. It's apples and oranges.

Here in the US of A, the latest I have seen says that we are following Italy's approach to what is considered cause of death. This will obviously make our "Coronavirus death rate" seem higher than it otherwise would, so we should remember that whenever we hear breathless reports about our death rate being high.

Donald Trump announced a China travel ban on January 31st, believing it was best medically even though he knew it would be bad for the economy. That made us the first major nation to take such a drastic step and his critics denounced it as dictatorial and racist. But now those same critics are denouncing him for "not being decisive" and they are claiming he only cares about the economy.

America's economy was pretty much roaring, then huge sectors of it suddenly stopped on a dime through no fault of their own. The quarantining and social distancing created the economic version of a head-on car crash and we need to discuss the harm that will be caused by that crash, because it could -- could -- be worse than the harm caused directly by the virus. With economic ruin comes increased depression, anxiety, family discord, substance abuse, and all the other health problems that flow from those. We are in a bad place when people who try to raise that issue by talking about a "need to re-start the economy" find themselves accused of not caring whether people live or die.

And the carping goes both ways. I've seen plenty of memes declaring that if you didn't vote for Trump, you shouldn't accept the Coronavirus stimulus check when "he" sends it to you. That kind of sentiment is just as bad and every bit as ignorant as the kind I mentioned above. Those checks are for Americans because they are Americans, not for members of a particular political party because of who they supposedly voted for three Novembers ago. Plus, who in our federal government is responsible for setting the budget and appropriating the money and sending the checks? (Hint: It's not the president and never has been.)

I find the carping to be revolting, and yet here I am on the edge of doing it myself. America has come through worse times than these, and will come through these as well. But for us to come through these times as good as possible, we need to stop carping. So I'll do my modest best to start the stopping by zipping my lips right now.

Until next time, take care.