“How lonely sits the city that was once so full of people” (Lamentations 1:1).
“Then I will eliminate from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem, says the Lord, the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the groom and the voice of the bride; for the land will become a site of ruins” (Jeremiah 7:24).
There is a very thoughtful article in First Things about how we have sacrificed life to preserve life in response to the pandemic. Here is a link. And here are some choice excerpts:
The effort to preserve life by prohibiting the living of it doesn’t work. It can’t work. It would work if we were mere biological machines, who need nothing but air, food, water, sewage, and shelter. It would work if men and women were nothing but detached shards of humanity who can flourish in isolation, if communion were an optional extra. It would work if life were nothing more than food, and the body no more than clothing. It would work if we could save our life by merely preserving it.
That’s not how human life is designed. That doesn’t fit the real world. And when we try to force life into that mold, it backfires. We’ve sacrificed all the social and cultural activities that lend beauty and richness to life, things that make life more than bare biological survival. We sacrificed life to preserve life. In the name of love, we canceled love.
It’s bound to backfire. In our frenetic necrophobia, we flee death, avoiding contact with others, locking ourselves in our homes, obsessively washing our hands, avoiding public places and gatherings—all for the sake of survival. But a life without human touch, a life in which we never venture, a life without risk is no life at all, but a living death.
A true cost-benefit analysis of our response to the pandemic should seek to quantify both the health benefits won and the quality of life benefits sacrificed. How many lives were deeply affected by lost jobs, lost businesses, lost social and cultural life, and utter loneliness and depression? We listened only to the scientists and we silenced the poets.
Something to think about as we begin our study of the Written Constitution and its many protections of liberty.
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