Sigh – The Mask. In late February of last year, the “Reverend” Dr. Fauci told us not to wear masks. They were, he said, largely ineffective against the Corona virus and only gave people a sense of safety that they should not have. They also built up bacteria, both from normal breathing and from mishandling, something (the mishandling) that almost all of us do. A year later, the CDC has quietly let us know (or so a reporter has said) that the regular surgical masks most of us use lead to a “1.5% decrease in the spread of the virus,” confirming the study completed last summer in Denmark. Pathetic. But Fauci and others did add at one time or another that the false sense of security the mask gave us might be beneficial in keeping the general public from panic. It was something that we all could do, no matter how futile, and so they finally went with it.
A symbol. The average mask is now known to be largely worthless, but it acted (and still acts for some) as a symbol of safety because the authorities eventually told us that we MUST wear it, and because we wanted it and craved it along with anything else that we could touch or see that might help us survive the invisible enemy.
That is, most of us did. Many, however, did not want a safety blanket. While these anti-maskers were seen by the masses as “killing grandma,” the anti-maskers retorted that the mask was a symbol of the abusive power of the state. “How dare they tell me to wear a flimsy, stupid-looking and worthless panty on my face!” As these people looked into the crowd, they did not see a nation pulling together to save everyone and all from death, but rather a people bowing before the authorities like sheep bleating to the slaughter.
Such it goes with symbols, and they are no small things, regardless of how materially useless they seem to be. Let’s take the Confederate Flag. Born when I was, the Stars and Bars became a symbol for all of us young partiers in the 1970’s of freedom to do whatever we wanted to do. Thanks to the tremendous success of the Southern rock bands, the Flag was to us a joyful finger in the face of The Man. It had no, absolutely no, racist implications for us. That past was dead and we were glad of it, if we thought about it at all. Instead, it meant “yee-hah!” and “whoop-ee!” for all, regardless of race or creed, etc., from rock concerts to the stupid but beloved action sit-com, “The Dukes of Hazard.”
Can’t see that last one in re-runs anymore, and boy-howdy how the Left has changed the meaning of that symbol.
Speaking of racism, how about the Covid 19 vaccines? Many black Americans do not want to take it, far more than the average news reels want to tell us, and it is because of racism, both real and imagined. There was the Tuskegee experiment in the 1930’s, where doctors did not treat black men with syphilis so that they could study how the disease progressed. In the same era, Margarete Sanger came up with the forerunner to Planned Parenthood to keep the ever-breeding black masses from becoming the dominant phenotype in the US. Both were real, and half of abortions done today are on black women, who make up only 13% of the female population. Sanger’s dark vision lives on.
With such a background, many black Americans have become extremely cautious about cures and vaccines. There is currently a story out – it is true to a degree but I do not know to what degree – that Bill Gates funded an agency in Kenya to provide free tetanus shots to the people (black, of course). Disgracefully, the vaccine also made women sterile, including those who did not want to be. This was also done by Indira Ghandi in the 1960’s to the poor in India. When it was discovered, she caught hell for it, but who knows? Black people, whether rightly or not, believe that the Man does not want them to be here. Might not he slip sterilization drugs into those oh-so-wonderful “free” Covid 19 Vaccines?
And so medicine and vaccines have become a symbol of oppression to many, even though the actuality on the ground might not merit the fear.
Symbols do matter, a lot. Go ahead and fly a Nazi flag from your car window, or better yet, get a swastika tattoo on your neck. See how many friends you get besides ex-con Arian Brotherhood felons. Yes, symbols that otherwise actually do nothing – do not shoot guns or swing nooses - can change your whole life.
I am now reading a perfectly-written book, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, by Monsignor James Shea, that deals bluntly with the collapse of Western Christianity over the last century. In this, we read that Christianity, combined with technical achievement, led the West to believe that humans were evolving morally, heading to a perfect world. After the Enlightenment, many came to believe that this utopia could be achieved on earth through human means. This way of thinking has progressed to the point where the symbol of Christianity – of hope for a perfect spiritual afterlife – has come to signify, to many, hypocrisy, antiquated fun-killing morality, and even child rape. This distaste for the Cross is so embedded now that even some believers (such as myself) recoil at the approach of someone ostentatiously wearing a cross or crucifix. What game is this person going to play? What moral pap will he try to sell me, or what will he attempt to gain materially? This reaction to the symbol of Christianity says more about our world view than much of what we tell ourselves. It tells us that ours has become one of nearly relentless cynicism smattered with feel-good spirituality that offers little comfort in difficult times, and little guidance for our leaders.
We are now collectively in free-fall, our symbols reflecting a righteousness that offers nothing for a deep and meaningful life. As Shea tells us, since utopianism ignores the real facts of (fallen) human nature, it must find scapegoats to explain away the continuing cupidity of human behavior. The defanged symbol of Southern slavery has been remade into a symbol of white supremacy and white privilege; the defeated symbol of Nazism has been reintroduced as a real and present danger to racial equality and social perfection; and disease has become something that simply cannot exist, so that all else must be sacrificed for its eradication. There must always be a set of persons or circumstances that prevent the earthly utopia that the young and the immature now insist is only a few laws, a few vaccines, and a few reparations away. There must be, or there would be nothing left to provide us with a vision that brings hope to us individually and collectively.
All this from not seeing that the Christian version of God is what gave us historical hope in the first place. Without that God, the West has been brought to persecute and blame and point fingers at this or that to explain the vacuum at its center, one that must be.
Humanity has always been called toward the divine to fill that vacuum, something made more poignant by the West’s view of historical progress. We have the means to fill that vacuum at hand if we could turn from the vision of earthly utopianism towards the perfect and eternal spiritual utopia that is promised by the symbol that is the Cross. We cannot let this symbol of hope continue to be made a scapegoat for our worldly discontent. Everything, from the social to the individual, depends on this. Symbols mean something; and in some cases, the meanings we give to them might mean everything.
RSS Feed