Monday, April 27, 2020

The New Normal


Gov Edwards has been speaking lately about the ‘new normal’ for Louisiana.  Let us look specifically at two goals he is driving us towards.

First, he would like the wearing of face masks to be considered a new way of showing politeness because doing so will supposedly slow the spread of the COVID virus.  This needs a good bit of unpacking. 

To begin with, there is a gaping hole in the Governor’s COVID strategy:  Nowhere does it recommend strengthening the human immune system.  Wearing masks, social distancing, staying at home, etc., do not help the body fight off diseases.  There are some simple things that can be done, however, that have been shown to be successful in overcoming infections in general and COVID in particular.  Among these are taking some inexpensive, readily available supplements:  zinc (taken with an ionophore (a compound that helps zinc penetrate the cell membrane) like quercetin found in apples, peppers, kale, blueberries, etc.), vitamins A, C, and D (the last is particularly important for our African-American brothers and sisters, whose bodies do not produce as much vitamin D from sunlight as lighter-skinned European folks’), and iodine.  Writers and doctors like Bill Sardi and Dr David Brownstein have been tracking this subject closely.  Zinc in particular helps the thymus gland to produce the needed antibodies to fight any ailment, so vaccines are unnecessary if enough zinc is taken (vaccines, ironically, usually wind up weakening the immune system because of the presence of toxins like MSG and heavy metals like aluminum and mercury, in addition to other ghastly ingredients like cells from aborted babies:  https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-10-08-aborted-fetal-cells-engineered-cancer-causing-vaccines.html, https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-04-14-catholic-bishop-vows-refuse-coronavirus-vaccine-aborted-fetal-tissue.html).

Also, sunlight, which causes the body to produce its own vitamin D while also killing viruses, and fresh air have been shown to help fight off infections.  Doctors had better success treating patients outside during the Spanish Flu of 1918 than inside for this reason.

Apart from this, what else does wearing a mask do?  It marks us as slaves of the government, just as the iron collars of the Roman Empire’s slaves marked them as the property of their masters.  ‘We obey without questioning the truth or efficacy of the government’s orders’:  This is the message the wide-spread adoption of ‘masking up’ will send.  To be sure, there are some who would benefit (like healthcare workers and those who have serious medical conditions already).  But the vast majority of the population would be better off without them.  In order to put COVID in the past, we need to expose everyone who is healthy to the virus in order to develop antibodies to it.  The more we stay away from one another, the longer this whole sorry scenario is going to drag out.

Furthermore, the wearing of masks is dehumanizing as it breaks the communion of man with man.  The face, as Father Dumitru Staniloae has noted in his Orthodox Dogmatic Theology series of books, is one of the places par excellence of human communion.  The more we hide our faces from one another, the less human we become, for we are by nature social creatures, beings made for life physically close to one another, able to behold one another’s facial expressions directly.  Our interactions with each other were not intended to be mediated by a video screen or a plastic shield or a face mask.

And this approach to the divine brings us to a second goal of the Governor’s ‘new normal’:  chastising people for celebrating holy days together during an epidemic as he did after Easter Sunday.  Traditionally, when difficult circumstances arose, the political leaders of Christian lands together with Church clergy would lead their people in processions with holy relics and icons, holy water, and so on through the streets of the cities, asking for God’s mercy and blessing. 

It is still being carried out in Orthodox countries by the clergy, e.g., https://orthochristian.com/130502.html

This practice has thankfully come to some of the States by Orthodox clergy acting on their own initiative:




But for the most part, our modern ‘Christian leaders’ in the South and elsewhere like Gov Edwards command us to forsake all this, and to our great dishonor, most have complied.  Truly, our faith has grown weak and cold.

Gov Edwards’s ‘new normal’ is not what Louisianans need to ward off the COVID illness.  It is in fact only going to prolong our suffering - of body, feelings, and soul - if we adopt it.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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