Friday, May 8, 2020

The New Normal: Contact Tracing


One of the major pillars of Gov Edwards’s New Normal is called ‘contact tracing’.  The web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists the following as ‘Key Concepts’ of contact tracing:

-‘Trace and monitor contacts of infected people. Notify them of their exposure.
-‘Support the quarantine of contacts. Help ensure the safe, sustainable and effective quarantine of contacts to prevent additional transmission.
-‘Expand staffing resources. Contact tracing in the US will require that states, tribes, localities and territorial establish large cadres of contact tracers.
-‘Use digital tools. Adoption and evaluation of digital tools may expand reach and efficacy of contact tracers.’

Source page: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/php/open-america/contact-tracing.html

We understand that a great many folks have been scared witless about the COVID illness by the nonstop stoking of fear by various media outlets and government officials.  But we all need to stop, get hold of ourselves, and make sure we really want to walk through the door contact tracing is opening up for us here in Louisiana. 

There are a number of disturbing implications that come along with it.  First, expanded surveillance and tracking of every man, woman, and child.  Second, forced incarceration without appeal.  Third, a huge growth of the government bureaucracy in the form of spies and tattletales.

This is bitterly at odds with our venerable old legal traditions - such as suspicion of an actual crime having been committed before an investigation of someone can begin (having a virus in one’s body, last we checked, did not violate any law); the presumption of innocence of the accused; the need to acquire a warrant from a judge to be able to pry into someone’s private life (who he’s had contact with, in this case); the ability to freely associate with others; as well as having a jury trial before someone can be locked up for any length of time.

Again, we must be absolutely sure that we want to open this door, because it may be generations before we are able to close it.  In the meantime, however, we would be trapped in an updated version of the gulag whose invasive reach and insidious powers of coercion would shame anything the Soviets were able to come up with.

No, let us leave that door closed.  Instead, the folk of Louisiana ought to return to the Christian wisdom of our French forefathers who settled in Acadiana.  They brought to St Martinville in the 18th century a bone relic of St Martin of Tours, one of the main patron saints of France, who has poured forth streams of healing both during his lifetime and after his repose in the Lord in 397 A.D.  If we want true healing, of body and soul, let us humbly seek it through the prayers of this wonderful intercessor before the throne of God for the French people, including the people of la Louisiane.

But do we have courage enough to even open the doors of the St Martin de Tours Church in St Martinville, where his holy and blessed bone relic rests, much less the faith needed to ask God to help us through St Martin’s prayers?  Our sickness goes far beyond a virus of the body.  Nevertheless, let all Louisianans, wherever we are, whether before his Grace-filled relic or not, cry out to our loving holy father, St Martin of Tours, for his fervent prayers for our deliverance from the COVID sickness and from all misfortune.

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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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