The Approach of Winter

At midnight, as Remembrance Day ended and at least four weeks of Code Red lockdown on the province of Manitoba began, it was snowing in Winnipeg.   Within a couple of hours the ground was white and, as of noon on the twelfth, the snow was stilling coming down.    This is not unusual for Manitoba around this time of year.   This city is referred to as "Winterpeg" for a reason.    While the forecast is predicting a rise to low but above freezing temperatures on the weekend and again around Wednesday of next week, overall the highs predicted for the next two weeks are below the freezing point.   Weather forecasting is notoriously unreliable, but at this time of year unforeseen complications often include sudden and quick-moving low pressure systems sweeping the prairies and bringing a ton of wind, snow, and cold along with them.   As we get this taste of the long winter we know is inevitably coming, grocery stores and other businesses fortunate enough to be considered essential by the health bureaucrats and politicians who arrogantly think they have the right to designate other people's businesses and livelihoods as otherwise, have been reduced to twenty-five percent capacity.    This means long lineups, out in the cold, waiting to get into the store to buy what you need to keep you and your family from starving.

 

Let us think about that for a moment.

 

How many of you when you were growing up, heard your mothers say to you, too many times to count, something to the effect of “get inside, do you want to catch your death of pneumonia?”

 

I think it is a safe assumption to say that the vast majority of you would answer “yes.”    Unless you have suffered from a lifelong agoraphobia, in the conventional sense of a fear of the outdoors rather than the more technical clinical sense, chances are good that when you were a child you would play outdoors in cold and wet weather, with little thought to protecting yourself against the elements, prompting such an expression of maternal concern.

 

Now consider the irony.   Brent Roussin, our local public health mandarin, has issued orders that will require people to stand outside in cold and most likely wet weather for long periods of time.   The purpose of these orders is to prevent people from catching their death from the severe type of pneumonia that, in a small minority of cases, those who contract the bat flu virus experience.

 

Who do you trust more, Brent Roussin or your mother?

 

There are those who will answer by saying that this is an unfair question.   Roussin is an expert on these sort of things, after all, and our mothers, except, of course, for the ones who happened to also be physicians and epidemiologists, were not.   All of that, however, is another way of saying “shut up, don’t think for yourself, just listen to the experts and don’t ask questions.”

 

It is also advocating for stupidity.

 

It is obvious to anyone with any amount of life experience and common sense that Roussin’s orders are going to result in more people getting sick rather than less.     Not only are we entering a period of cold and wet weather, in which, thanks to the public health orders we are all going to have to stand outside in long lineups, this is a season in which people always get sick.  It is the period in which sunlight hours are the shortest, everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency and therefore a weakened immune system, and, consequently, the bugs that are always with us are able to do their worst.

 

This is a huge problem for us because, as I have discussed previously, Roussin and the premier’s attitude since the end of September has been one of piling restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions when the previous restrictions failed to reduce the number of cases, blaming the failure on the disobedience of the public, and threatening and bullying people.  What are the chances that they are finally going to realize – or, rather, admit – that the problem is not with the public, but with this entire approach?   It doesn’t work and no amount of hiring more enforcers, raising the fines, berating and haranguing us, and taking away more of our rights and freedoms, is ever going to change that.    Unless Roussin and Pallister finally acknowledge this, they will just keep piling rule after useless rule upon us.   Since, unlike with the first lockdown, we are transitioning into the period of maximum sickness rather than out of it, that will be going on for a long time.

 

The person whose job it is to raise these kind of questions, challenge the government when its policies and actions are stupid and wrong, and fight the government when its actions infringe upon our traditional and constitutional rights and freedoms, is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   That may yet happen at the Dominion level, where the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, has been urging the provincial governments to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the bat flu.   I have my doubts.   Erin O’Toole should have spoken out long before now.   The only leader of a Dominion level political party who has consistently spoken out for the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians against these draconian lockdowns has been Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has no sitting Members in Parliament.   At the provincial level here in Manitoba, Wab Kinew has been doing the opposite of his job.   He has been demanding more restrictions than those the government has been imposing, criticizing the Health Minister for meeting with and giving a hearing to people who expressed their opposition to such measures, and, most recently, condemning the government for relaxing one of the more odious elements of the recent public health orders, i.e., restricting social interaction to within the immediate household.   I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kinew, who is married and has three sons, to think about what such an order would mean to the many people who live by themselves, far more today than in previous times?

 

Lockdowns do a lot of damage and, furthermore, they hurt a lot more people than the bat flu does.   While socialists like Kinew and his echo chamber in the local CBC and most of the “private” media, justify their support of lockdowns in spite of this fact on the grounds that the harm lockdowns do is merely economic whereas the virus kills, this reasoning is entirely spurious.    Enforcing extreme social isolation upon a society where loneliness was already a problem will increase the rates of suicide and addiction.   Note, with regards to the latter, that once again stores specializing in booze and the mind-destroying toxins that can be extracted from certain cultivars of hemp are deemed essential and allowed to operate at a time when all religious services have been ordered to close.   Lockdowns, not to put too fine a point on it, kill.

 

To attempt to stop the spread of the bat flu with a lockdown is a major violation of medical ethics.   It is also incredibly stupid.  That you cannot lock people away from a plague is not exactly a new insight.   It was the point made by Edgar Allan Poe in his The Masque of the Red Death, originally published in 1842.   Perhaps the egalitarian socialists who support lockdowns think they have avoided the hubris and nemesis of Poe’s Prince Prospero by locking away the common people as well as the wealthy, but the harm inflicted by lockdowns falls disproportionately on the poor.    We are, again, entering the winter season.   With the new health orders, homeless shelters are operating at reduced capacity, public places such as libraries are closed to them, as are restaurant dining rooms.   With all the businesses closed and jobs lost due to the earlier lockdown measures and these new ones, I very much doubt there are fewer homeless in this province than at this time last year.   All of these physicians who have been petitioning the government for stricter lockdown measures, as if crashing everything else in an attempt to prevent the hospitals from crashing made any sense, ought to stripped of their medical credentials and busted down to jobs that cannot be done by video teleconference from home.

 

As we enter into winter the demonic spirit behind the lockdowns becomes even more apparent.  With winter comes Christmas.    Indeed, the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, Christ the King, or, what used to be called “Stir-up Sunday” after the first words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for that day, is the Sunday after the next, only a little over a week away.   The lockdown orders currently extend into at least the first two weeks of Advent.   The Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, is scheduled to begin this year right after the time the lockdown orders as they currently stand expire, but if the current four weeks of province-wide Code Red lockdown does not stop the spread of the bat flu, and it is hardly likely that it will, the next thing on deck will be for the same Grinches that stole Easter and Passover earlier this year, to steal Christmas and Hanukkah too.    Having robbed us of the joyous celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s Glorious Resurrection, they appear set to rob us of the joyous celebration of His Nativity and Incarnation as well. 

 

The ordinary thermometer cold of winter is not enough for these people.   They wish to drive the warmth of faith from our hearts as well.