Failing the Test of Civilization

It is quite evident that the idea that the best response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to shut down society and the economy except for the bare bones minimum, order everybody to “stay at home” and to maintain “social distancing” on the exceptional occasions when they are allowed out for some necessary reason, was thought up by people who have large enough homes that being required to stay in them for months on end will not feel like a prison sentence, where they live with their immediate families, who can afford to have everything they need delivered to them, who can work from home, and who assume that what is true of them is true of everybody, or at least the vast majority of people. It was thought up by pampered fools in other words.

What do these morons think “stay at home” could possibly mean to people who have no home?

It is currently estimated that in the city in which I reside, Winnipeg, Manitoba, there are anywhere between three to fifteen thousand such people. Even the smaller estimate exceeds by far the capacity of all of the city’s homeless shelters combined. The numbers of homeless are much larger in cities like Toronto and it is estimated that in the Dominion of Canada as a whole, there are approximately thirty five thousand homeless on any given night, and over two hundred thousand who will experience homelessness in any given year.

While the shut down orders do not apply to homeless shelters, the social distancing laws have greatly restricted the number they can take in. Meanwhile, the closing of restaurant dining rooms, libraries, and most other public places, has taken away from them the places where they go to find warmth and respite from the elements in winter. It was still winter when these measures were put in place and even now we are hardly past the point where really cold temperatures and large snowfalls would be considered extraordinary, as the huge two-day snowfall of last week demonstrates.

As part of the ill-conceived “flatten the curve” strategy, our governments have been encouraging businesses to switch to debit and credit transactions only. While this undoubtedly makes sense from their narrow point of view – physical currency, which is constantly exchanging hands, is notorious as a means of passing on germs – it is very hard on those who do not have bank accounts and whose only means of exchange is hard cash. It is also, of course, objectionable from a civil libertarian point of view. A cashless society is the totalitarian’s dream, for it means that the government can monitor and record all market transactions. St. John’s Apocalyptic description of the ultimate totalitarian, the Satanic false messiah who will deceive the world and become global despot prior to the Second Coming of the true Messiah, includes the famous detail that he will require people to receive a mark bearing his name or the number of his name – six hundred, threescore and six – on their right hand or forehead in order to buy or sell. Not a few people have drawn the obvious link between this and the totalitarian nature of a cashless society. Some of the supposedly “Christian” supporters of the “flatten the curve” strategy and its extreme measures, in their almost total disregard for the threat to civil rights and liberties during this universal government power grab and their haste to condemn anyone, but especially other Christians, who dissents from their point of view as “selfish” and “ideological” give every impression of having taken the Mark of the Beast in their hearts already.

Just as there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is meaningless because they have no home to stay at, so there are large numbers of people for whom “stay at home” is the equivalent of a sentence of solitary confinement. This is because such people live in small, cramped, quarters with very little space. Such people will be especially vulnerable to “cabin fever” during this period because, unless they are extreme introverts, they depend upon getting out of the apartment and into the neighbourhood to avoid a sense of confinement.

Similarly, people who are single and live by themselves rather than with a spouse and children, depend upon social events and gatherings to avoid a depression-inducing sense of loneliness. These social events and gatherings have now been stolen from them by these vile, power mad, despotic, health bureaucrats who think that flattening the curve is the only acceptable response to this pandemic and that any and all means to that end are justified, which is a truly diabolical point of view.

Obviously, a response to the pandemic that involves shutting down most of society and the economy, will have a disproportionately hard impact on people who depend upon their paycheques to pay the rent, their grocery and utility bills, and other necessary expenses and have little to nothing left over after doing so, and therefore little to no savings. Shutting down the so-called “non-essential” sector of the economy, is far more likely to put such people out of work, than it is to put people with high figure salaries, who can work from home, like the overpaid bloody twits who thought up the “stay at home” strategy, out of work. It eliminates their existing jobs and makes it virtually impossible to find new ones. Government programs to assist such people can only ever be a very short term solution to this problem. Placing such a huge percentage of the population on government assistance at the same time that you are killing the source of government revenue is simply not sustainable for the kind of time frame that the models the “flatten the curve” strategy is based upon require.

Samuel Johnson is quoted by his friend and biographer James Boswell as having said: “Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill policed, and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization."

The new programs being enacted by the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa are not what “a decent provision for the poor” looks like. They are at best an attempt to lessen the incredible evil that our governments, Dominion and provincial, are doing to the poor through their ill-advised strategy for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. We are failing Dr. Johnson’s “true test of civilization.”