Friday, May 01, 2009
VP Biden said yesterday that he and his family are avoiding mass transit. I wonder if he does that for all of the significantly more dangerous and more likely to contract diseases, like the common flu. As this pastor points out, the common flu kills 35,000 Americans every year. And the rotavirus, a common ailment of kids, kills 2.1 million American children every year. By comparison, the swine flu is harmless.
We often care more about the dramatic than we do about the truly perilous. New dangers shock our sensibilities more than grave dangers. Threats that we have learned to live with for a long while fade from our consciousness, even though the risk may not be reduced.
The economic crisis gets our attention far more than the spiritual crisis the world is experiencing. We feel a deeper concern with our 401k’s than we do with the declining moral climate in our nation. Many churches expend more energy changing worship styles than they ever do strategizing to reach their communities.
The greatest loss of perspective is that we have learned to view those who are lost around us with indifference and detachment. While they perish, we play. While they die without Christ, we live without telling them. Nothing is more real than hell, but one wouldn’t know that by the way most Christians live.
God grant us perspective.
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3 comments:
I cannot see, for the life of me, why people do not recognize this as an obvious attempt to manipulate the population through fear. As has been pointed out, there are relatively few deaths in comparison to the regular flu. This is probably just a PSYOP in preparation for real biological pandemics that was coordinated with the other PSYOP of Air Force One flying over NYC at low altitude.
Northern Command (NorthCom), the part of the army who has jurisdiction over the United States as per the previous president is already poised to provide "assistance in support of civil authorities" in the case of an epidemic. This is not that epidemic. If anything it is a dry run.
This is what we should pay close attention to in matters such as this: the role of the United Nations by way of the World Health Organization and coordinated efforts of international military forces. Pay attention to how governments respond to this because when the real thing comes - and the government and most recently and specifically Janet Napolitano (Homeland Security) has warned us that it is coming - it will be an amplified version of how they are responding to this drill. People have to be acclimated to the possibility of quarantine, martial law, etc.
Chris, I'm not sure I would agree that it's an intention fear-mongering ploy (it may be, but sometimes things are a lot more simpler than a conspiracy). I would notch it up more to the fact that people are idiots and that the unsaved world is easily rattled. By the fact that politicians are people too, they also tend toward unwarranted anxiety. Just look at the global warming hysteria... yes, politicians are using it to gain more power, but plenty of them are true believers too. People are scared because they don't have the Hope.
I do agree with your last paragraph though; if people go this insane about a relatively benign flu bug, what will they do (or more importantly, what will they allow to be done to them) when the real thing hits?
I think this is intentional simply because the measures to cull the spread of the disease obviously did not match the threat. Whether it was totally contrived or they took the opportunity to completely blow things out of proportion, I do not know. The WHO moved this up to a phase 5, which is supposed to mean that a pandemic is imminent. There was just no evidence to suggest that this was the case. They knew this for days, yet they continued to feed the hysteria. And they had the faithful cooperation of federal, state, and local governments worldwide. When they push it up to phase 6, that's when they can start implementing forced inoculation and martial law.
I've been wrong before, but this is how I see it: This was a drill. It was conducted to test the system that is in place and to see how much cooperation they would get - not only with municipalities - but with the media and the public. How would they respond to the fear? People must be acclimated to the possibility of a pandemic in order for them to cooperate in the case of an "actual emergency". But now people are familiar with the people who would issue such warnings in the future, so if it were to happen again it wouldn't be so foreign to them that they wouldn't go along. These are incremental measures that are completely justifiable in the eyes of the UN. And they can only run so many drills before the public thinks they are crying wolf, so if you hear of another scare...
This is my warning to everyone: Whatever you do, don't take any new vaccines! Many people believe the 1976 swine vaccine actually killed people. That can be disputed, but what cannot be disputed is the fact that Baxter, the company that may be commissioned to make the next swine flu vaccine, shipped out flu vaccines that contained two live strains of avian flu back in March. It was sent out to 18 different countries. Luckily it was tested on some ferrets before people started injecting it. (It killed them, by the way.) Otherwise we would really have a pandemic on our hands. Of course it was just an "accident" since everyone knows how easy it is to contaminate regular flu vaccines with bird flu - two different strains, no less.
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