In this unprecedented Coronavirus pandemic there are so many unforeseen consequences due to the randomness of multifaceted interlocking elements at play it boggles the mind.
Most people fear the unknown and we definitely are facing a largely inexplicable and unpredictable future simply because of how such a viral disease spreads and the societal response to it, both personal and governmental.
Public health authorities believe they can predict what primary target groups are most likely candidates for infection and vulnerability based on data-based epidemiological medical and public health estimates but ultimately it still comes down to a cosmic crap shoot. These hard facts do not lessen the tragic and devastating near unfathomable consequences to families whose loved ones are affected or succumb to this deadly contagion.
Pause and think of everything you have ever learned in your lifetime about economics, the vast interplay of the international division of labor and supply and demand, of the millions of goods and services produced globally and how that is being affected and disrupted. There is also an informational division of labor in communications and media and the descriptive narrative put forth concerning the pandemic is being radically transformed and manipulated by ever-changing events.
Think of everything you have ever learned about government at the local, state and federal level, about the Constitution, federalism and the separation of powers, and how it is substantially being altered after the brief course of a few weeks. Government leaders and their administrative staffs have fully endorsed and are implementing the progressive view of broad executive powers unrestrained by constitutional prohibitions and directives. They have adopted the authoritarian extra-constitutional position of Theodore Roosevelt that government, at the federal, state, and local level, can do anything not specifically prohibited or forbidden by their archaic and obsolete Constitutions that they took a solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend.
As with the decades old hoary pretexts put forth for the national security leviathan state, the national emergency posed by this threat justifies any invasive action. They rationalize that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” as they go about destroying the rule of law and any remnants of civil society in the name of seeking to preserve it.
Since the New Deal the general government has created and instituted a vast regulatory superstructure of countervailing administrative entities to centrally plan, control and direct both the economy and regulate the most personal and intimate aspects of every person in the country. From tens of millions of multinational and domestic corporations, down to the local businesses, franchises, and small private firms, all are subject to this collectivist penumbra of “friendly fascism.”
So what to do in the interstices of the crisis and its resolution? There is not much an individual person can do on a broad societal basis but take and provide for the utmost safety and security of oneself and their families, calling on that innermost reservoir of strength, fortitude, courage, and integrity, both spiritual and intellectual, to face the consequences that the unknown future holds.
9:13 am on April 5, 2020
