One of the reasons I am in favor of political and charitable donations (particularly from individuals) being as anonymous as the donator wishes them to be is because a fair number of people in our day see “list of people who donated to cause or candidate I do not like” as “list of people whose life I should make every possible effort to destroy”. And electronic and social media has made efforts to destroy the life of another as low-risk and immediately pleasurable as perhaps it has ever been, which encourages people to make the effort.
I mentioned in the last post here that GiveSendGo, which had “taken over” donations for the Canadian truckers from GoFundMe, had been hacked. At the time I did not realize that the hack included obtaining, and then releasing, a list of all the people who had donated to the truckers - oh good, a list of people whose lives we should destroy. And of course that was the whole point of releasing the list.
And now we get to enjoy articles like, from the Ottawa Citizen, “Threats close Stella Luna Gelato Café after owner's name appears in GiveSendGo data leak”.
Alison Mah is an editor at the newspaper, and note that her preferred phrasing here is something like, “she made the donation after police were already saying they were bad, she should’ve known better”. Because journalists egg this behavior on more than anyone else.
A few thoughts, if I may
One, there is an alternate reality out there where public health recognizes that setting neighbor against neighbor in eager cruelty should itself be counted as a failure of public health… and one much worse than a virus, in fact. Public health officials, the media, and others didn’t create this impulse within man, but they did encourage people to let it out.
Two, even when it is trying to function rationally, the whole idea of a “public health response” carries within in it the requirement to weigh how important one aspect of human life is as compared to another aspect. It is therefore an inherently worldview-dependent, or we could even say religious, activity. Perhaps most obviously, is telling people they cannot attend church worth whatever reduction in viral spread will result? Do the benefits of masking the faces of children exceed the harms? Is making the unvaccinated a designated target of rage for the public a good idea if it’ll slightly raise vaccination rates? One way to understand why our public health response has been so dysfunctional is to say that, when officials were implicitly forced to decide “is A more important than B, or is B more important than A?”, they have constantly made the wrong choice, and it turned society upside-down.
Three, we live in evil times. Many have remarked that we had all these pandemic plans written for exactly this moment, and then the moment arrived, and we ignored them. Actually we often acted exactly oppositely of what those plans indicated we should do in this situation.
(I’m not sure you can see PoliMath’s link above, so here it is.) Why did we respond so poorly? Because, when we wrote those plans, we were decently sober-minded and had a proper concern for such things as “maintaining social cohesion and a well functioning society”. And many people now either don’t much care about those things, or actually want to destroy them. I would not be the first person in history to note that authoritarians find a divided and angry populace much easier to manipulate and control. And generally, sin enjoys destroying what is good, for the very reason that it is good. No further “benefit” is needed besides that sinful pleasure of destruction.
So, as just about every critical post I write seems to end - people have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened.
THE END
"So, as just about every critical post I write seems to end - people have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened."
Yes. I recently read through the Book of Judges. We read that and we think that it happened so many thousand years ago. But, why should we assume that an analogous process isn't happening in the age of The Church? Your statement above is correct but I think it's very likely that it is the People of God who have forgotten God, and that what is happening now is a judgment upon His people.
Rather than thinking about what needs to happen in order to get back to "normal", maybe we should be thinking about how we need to repent.
If rebuilding society and trust in other people is the task here, then I believe we need to see this as a missionary project, which likely will take a long time.