We’ll be kissing our cousins from afar this holiday season.
Secularists have
already stripped Christmas of Christ. Now come the politicians, pleading
Coronavirus, to strip the seasons of relatives. Scrooge made the celebration of
Christmas difficult but not impossible. The Coronavirus governors have raised
his bid to destroy joy. And the governors of New York, New Jersey and
Connecticut are leading the pack.
It is not enough
that enlightened, “science based” politics has driven our relations out of
state, many of them in pursuit of fleeing businesses. The Coronavirus Governor
of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, now threatens to prevent their return during
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Travel itself has been interdicted at the borders,
and those entering Connecticut from foreign parts – Massachusetts has recently
been put on the interdiction list – are beginning to feel what wretches feel. It
is less of a chore in Connecticut to bust the Mexican border and settle in one
of our state’s sanctuary cities than it is for a gas guzzling citizen of the “land
of steady habits” to escape the state’s onerous gas taxes by sneaking across
Connecticut’s border to buy gas that is not taxed twice, once at the port and
once at the pump. Bradley Field, voted one of the best airports in the country,
is beginning to look like a wasteland. Here is Ned throwing
ashes on the joy of
Thanksgiving and Christmas:
“With Thanksgiving
a month away, Lamont said he’s concerned college students returning home for
the holiday might bring COVID-19 with them.
“’I am really
worried about thousands of kids coming back from universities all over the
country, places like Wisconsin and Nevada and Utah, where they have a 30%
infection rate,’ Lamont said in Bridgeport.
“The governor said
he’d work with governors in other states on ‘really strict guidance,’ perhaps
asking students to quarantine for two weeks before returning to Connecticut,
then get tested for COVID-19 when they arrive.
“Lamont said the
Department of Public Health would soon issue guidelines for returning students.
“’I don’t want
people just getting on that plane, going home, potentially putting their family
at risk and their friends at risk,’ Lamont said.”
Really, with a
daddy and mommy like Lamont, who need’s daddies and mommies?
Thanksgiving, now
that we are all toxic, will be less thankful. Halloween has flitted by like a
ghost; no children were on the streets; the candy dishes are still full. All
Saints Day was muted, church attendance having been clipped by Lamont’s
emergency orders.
Facing a tsunami of
atheist tinged secularism G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The act of defending
any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.” On this
score, not much has changed over the centuries.
The four cardinal
virtues listed by Aristotle are prudence, justice, temperance,
and fortitude, all of them sadly missing in our politics, which gives us
more than enough reason to fortify ourselves with them. A prudent, just and
temperate policy on Coronavirus would allow and even facilitate the joys of
Christmas, Thanksgiving and All Saints Day,
Long since secularized
and bastardized as Halloween.
Columbus Day has passed
without further Columbus statues having been beheaded by modern vandals, for
which, exercising our First Amendment rights – but not in churches – we may thank
God. Restaurants, those lucky few that have not yet gone out of business, are
less than half full because they are only three quarters open on orders of the
governor in preparation for a second wave Coronavirus panic. Tomorrow, on a gubernatorial whim, the restaurants
may be shuttered once again. The arts in Connecticut, all of them, are only
virtually alive. Our cities are ghost towns. And though legislators,
sequestered far from the state Capitol, have plenty of time on hand, not one of
them appears to have had time to read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Precautions were taken by Lord Prospero to
keep at bay the Red Death ravaging the countryside outside the walls of his
castle: “With such
precautions,” Poe writes, “the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.”
Ha!!!
A Puritan stink
bomb has exploded here in the northeast and left behind the wreckage of joy.
Handshakes are out; hugs are out; kisses are fatal; even our daring president
elect, Joe Biden, has lately refrained from smelling women’s hair and pawing
uncomfortable strange children. The Puritan Calvinists of pre-Revolutionary
Boston must be clapping in their graves, applauding because John and Cotton
Mather would rather sink into Hell than dance in their graves or celebrate a Bob
Cratchit Christmas.
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