Journaling the Coronavirus (COVID19) Pandemic,
Reflection #79

June 20, 2020

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

That’s not a quote from the Constitution. It’s from the Declaration of Independence…and I use it to illustrate that we seem to be very likely to be headed into Declaration times ahead instead of Constitutional times. There is a crying need for people to be free again. It happened before when the country was born. Everyone feels chained down…by the harshest differential in the economic status of all time, by the police forces ensuring not only order but lock-step obedience in so many places, by a cold, driven mass media that celebrates only the worst of news while converting half-way good news into tragedy and misery, and finally, by a strange ‘strangling’ occurring because of the distancing effects of cell phone and Internet technology.

The crying need to be free is being expressed by the huge increase in motor home rentals. People just want to take off and get away…from everything. That crying need has been a part of the human condition since the beginning but it has never been quite as undeservedly heartfelt as right this minute. Undeserved because most people are not starving (statistically worldwide) and most people live much longer and much healthier lives than ever before (the COVID is a statistical blip on the radar of life).

The unalienable rights endowed by the Creator, in the Declaration of Independence, mentions three things that may not be taken away from citizens…and those are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The people who want to take to the road today are in pursuit of that last thing, and are we not all? There may come a time very soon when that last thing becomes violently in opposition to the former two. The virus, and the response to the virus by the nation as a whole, has brought into vivid technicolor brilliance the obvious fact that life has not gone in the direction most assumed it would when they were very young, and the disappointment in that illustrative discovery is going to lead to a whole lot more than silent, attending, enduring and peaceful disappointment.

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