As Americans, we are fiercely independent. We are not like a collectivist society like China, which can mandate the behavior of an entire nation (note the quote here about China from a S. Korean professor.). We are individualists, and we prize our freedoms. How, then, should we respond when our government restricts these freedoms in the name of public safety? Is this an infringement of our constitutional rights? Or is it an opportunity to love our neighbor?
Before answering these questions, we would do well to consider what is at stake. The New York Times paints this grim picture from Italy:
“Hospital morgues there are inundated. Bergamo’s mayor, Giorgio Gori, issued an ordinance that closed the local cemetery this week for the first time since World War II, though he guaranteed that its mortuary would still accept coffins. Many of them had been sent to the Church of All Saints in Bergamo, located in the closed cemetery, where scores of waxed wooden coffins form a macabre line for cremations.”
And what, exactly, does this look like?
“‘Unfortunately, we don’t know where to put them,’ said Brother Marco Bergamelli, one of the priests at the church. He said that with hundreds dying each day, and with each body taking more than an hour to cremate, there was an awful backlog. ‘It takes time and the dead are many.’”
This is what happens when the coronavirus is not checked in time. This is what we could be facing in America.
One more glimpse from the Times:
“At around midnight on Wednesday, Renzo Carlo Testa, 85, died from the coronavirus in a hospital in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Five days later, his body was still sitting in a coffin, one of scores lined head-to-toe in the church of the local cemetery, which is itself closed to the public.
“His wife of 50 years, Franca Stefanelli, would like to give him a proper funeral. But traditional funeral services are illegal throughout Italy now, part of the national restrictions against gatherings and going out that have been put in place to try to stem the spread of Europe’s worst outbreak of the coronavirus. In any case, she and her sons could not attend anyway, because they are themselves sick and in quarantine.”
Would you like this to happen to your family? Your city?
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Michael Brown
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