It's Vaccination Day! - .For The First Time In Forever. Frozen Parody For the first time in forever, I might actually go out... and put on a bra. I know... #parody #comedy #covid Well, 2020 is over but 2021 still is pretty weird. So we ...
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Over the past week, three approaches to the widespread availability of anti-Covid-19 vaccinations have crossed my desktop. One was the comical music video (above) celebrating a post-vaccine reversion to normalcy including a return to restaurants, movies, gatherings with family members, friends, grandchildren and maskless interaction with the world at large. I couldn't help smiling and laughing at my own relieved celebration of freedom's prospect after more than a year of quarantine restrictions.
The second approach however was more sobering. It was an essay by Ernesto Burgio published in the Wall Street Journal's Science and Technology International Magazine. Its basic message was "Not so fast; the human race is not nearly out of the woods."
The third slant on the expected end of our current crisis returned me to the world of comedy and entertainment - to Bill Maher of all people and his recent riff on China's competition with the United States (see below). He called it "We're Not 'Losing' to China - We Lost." Without saying so, Maher's thesis implied that China's system of governance holds much more promise of dealing with Burgio's dire warnings than does our own.
Finally, and speaking specifically as a theologian, I was driven by the three pieces just referenced to jump to a fourth level, a spiritual one. The leap had me concluding that nothing less than a China-inspired change in the West's guiding spiritual mythology will save us from destruction.
Let me explain.
The 1st Anthropocene Pandemic
In his Wall Street Journal piece, Burgio pointed out that scientists have been predicting something like SARS-CoV2 pandemic for the last 20 years. In fact, Covid is merely the most dramatic manifestation of a long-expected more general biological crisis resulting from a two-century long "War on Nature" - from what Pope Francis has called a systemic attack on humankind's "Common Home."
In recent memory, pandemic precursors have already surfaced as outbreaks of:
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