Blogs » Arts & Culture » Hit & Run Commentary #136

Hit & Run Commentary #136

  • It almost reeks of conspiratorial collusion that some of the worst riots in contemporary history just happened to transpire at the exact same moment when these destructive vagrants can’t be punished for concealing their faces with a mask but rather could be if they did not.

     

    On the podcast “Pastoring In A Pandemic”, it was suggested that a church could stagger the concentration of congregants by placing them in different rooms throughout the church property. Individuals could be spaced sufficiently apart and extended the privilege of viewing a video feed of what was transpiring in the main sanctuary. But if you have to remain that far apart from one another while looking at the proceedings on a screen, how is that any better than watching from home? At least there in your own domicile it won’t feel like you are going to be shot from the guard tower overlooking the prison yard.

     

    Sophisticates sneer that wearing a facemask indoors is no more an imposition upon legitimate liberty than requiring customers to wear pants. So what such intellects are insinuating is that your face hole is obscene as your tail hole. These articles of clothing and the anatomical regions they conceal are not inherently the same in terms of propriety. If they were, if one removes one’s trousers upon exiting the supermarket, does that mean one will no longer be arrested for nudity or placed on an offender registry forbidding you to be in the vicinity of young children? If facemasks and pants are the same, does that mean media professionals calling for federal muzzle mandates while not wearing one are as lewd as strippers or porn stars? If facemasks and pants are moral equivalents, does that mean you can expect a visit from the police should you forget to close your curtains and the neighbors catch sight of you prancing around your home unfettered without a mask with your lips dangling in the breeze?

     

    The so-called “Black National Anthem” is to be played before the Star Spangled Banner at the commencement of NFL games. Will those refusing to stand before it or kneel be celebrated as heroes of conscience? Will a ditty be played in honor of every specific ethnicity or only for those prone to destroy private property and loot electronics when they don’t get their way in terms of public policy?

     

    If jurisdictions eliminate police, how and on what grounds will facemask mandates which for the most part are not based upon actual laws but fiat executive orders be enforced?

     

    An agitator interviewed on Fox News hypothesized in response to a mascot being eliminated because of allusions to “Gone With The Wind” that the university should be allowed to change it to whatever it wants if that is what a COMMUNITY desires. But are such changes being made because of a true consultation of prevailing sentiment or because those in a particular constituency are afraid of violent reprisals if the decision reached does not comply with that demanded by a cadre of violent revolutionaries? And if the COMMUNITY, heralded as morally superior to any mere individual, decides in its infinite wisdom, after a time of deliberation to reverse these hastily derived alterations?

     

    Fox News pundit A.B. Stoddard remarked that she hoped President Trump would wear a mask as a show of solidarity with those fighting Coronavirus. So apparently the covering is not about preventing the spread of disease but about the imposition of an ideological conformity bordering on the religious after all.

     

    In calling for defunding the police, if Joe Biden wins the presidency, does that include the Secret Service and, more importantly, the enforcement bureaucracies intended to impose the confiscatory tax policies and racialist agenda advocated by much of the Democratic Party?

     

    In a sermon on racism, a Baptist pastor lamented why must we feel the need to declare our way is the only way or to meet violence with violence? So just how many ways are we obligated to relent to as legitimate? The pastor rhetorically responded that we do so for fear or losing power or control. So to what extent are we obligated to compromise and to allow violence or the threats of such to be used against us as competing systems attempt to impose their preferred worldview and policy vision? Would the pastor gladly surrender the church building as an Antifa encampment should a cell of this revolutionary movement show up in the narthex demanding as such? Should the nation as a whole similarly refuse to defend itself should radical jihadists attempt to establish some sort of caliphate in areas where control by civil authorities might be precarious at best as we see beginning to take place in decayed urban environments?

     

    In a sermon on racism, a Baptist pastor remarked that it is an attempt to grab personal glory to point out that a statement made by someone else is incorrect. As an example, he pointed out an individual that says “All Lives Matter” in response to the the slogan “Black Lives Matter” or when someone says that they do not see how someone could support President Trump. According to the pastor, such statements are a declaration that one person claims to possess greater knowledge of good and evil than someone else. But isn’t he himself making such an assertion by insisting that he knows the motivations behind all articulated ethical propositions? If one cannot point out the ethical implications of Black Lives Matter as a sociopolitical movement, then on what grounds is one justified in opposing similar sentiments when articulated by White power activists? And if the pastor really believes that any articulated verbal qualifiers that create a sense of “otherness” are unacceptable, why does he not condemn the ecclesiastical assembly that he leads for calling itself “Baptist Church” rather than simply “Church”?

     

    By Frederick Meekins