Liberties in peril

After seven decades, it’s become far easier to accept in delivers.stride most of the things life

But when I read about those worshippers in Greenville, Miss., who were in their cars in the church parking lot to hear their pastor preach remotely when police showed up at behest of the town’s mayor to issue $500 fines for violating the local covid-19 stay-at-home order, I felt my temperature rise.

How misguided can one city’s leader be? I’m also referring to any U.S. community that imposes unconstitutional and draconian restrictions on its law-abiding citizens who want only to safely worship their creator, or perhaps shop for garden tools.

In light of what’s been happening, we should rethink the assumption that it couldn’t happen here, due to the dubious gift to the world of a viral pandemic courtesy of the Chinese Communist Party. This scourge has sadly exposed how badly some of the more fearful and bored among us can mistreat each other. In fairness, however, it’s also revealed the abundance of wonderful things so many are contributing to help others.

Compounding my disbelief after reading of the Mississippi’s worshipping travesty and similar restrictions on citizens by some other state’s governors were local examples also defying common sense published in the Harrison Daily Times’ Police Log.

Some blurbs told of residents calling police to rat on fellow citizens for congregating too closely in this period of recommended social distancing.

One news item left me teetering: “An anonymous female subject called to report she saw someone in a motorhome traveling through Harrison and she thought it was illegal due to the coronavirus outbreak. She said he stopped for fuel at a gas station and he told her to leave him alone when she confronted him.”

I can practically hear such panicked calls to authorities: “Hello police. I just witnessed four neighbors talking across their shared fence. They couldn’t have been more than three feet apart. One of them was holding a sack containing gardening supplies and vegetable seeds. Please hurry. Use your siren.”

Please assure me our country, after sacrificing so much blood and treasure to preserve individual liberties so our citizens might enjoy freedom, isn’t devolving into a nation where many citizens willingly rat on their fellow Americans. Did we really sink that level so quickly?

Before this virus, most among us never thought such travesty could happen in the land of the free, right?

Meanwhile folks in some states aren’t allowed to purchase what their authorities deem non-essential items while permitting apparently essential liquor stores to freely ply their trade. What difference does it make in the name of public health if people can congregate to purchase alcohol but not other items like children’s coloring books or paint supplies, or attend a worship service in the confines of their cars?

And how did our country get through the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, where the CDC estimated 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (32 in Arkansas), without the need to explode our economy?

Relevant predictions?

I was intrigued to read the late medium and author Sylvia Browne’s predictions about a 2020 viral pandemic.

In her 2004 book Prophecy: What the Future Holds For You, Browne wrote: “By 2020 we’ll see more people than ever wearing surgical masks and rubber gloves in public, inspired by an outbreak of a severe pneumonia-like illness that attacks both the lungs and the bronchial tubes and is ruthlessly resistant to treatment. This illness will be particularly baffling in that, after causing a winter of absolute panic, it will seem to vanish completely until 10 years later, making both its source and its cure that much more mysterious.”

Then, in 2008 in her book End of Days, Browne amplified that message somewhat, while leaving the essential message intact: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again 10 years later, and then disappear completely.”

Skeptics have done their best, through parsing her words, to make it appear Browne, who died in 2013, twice just made a lucky guess. That’s certainly their prerogative. Frankly, I couldn’t care less whether Browne initially wrote “By 2020” versus four years later writing, “In around 2020.” The matching specific references to a severe and baffling pneumonia-like illness attacking the lungs occurring by 2020 and masks and gloves are impressive enough to grab my attention.

Make of it what you will. If nothing else, her predictions strike me as pretty amazing.

Now go out into the world and that everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.