In more recent years, when faced with the fact that ultrasounds don’t lie, the more honest among them came clean, arguing that, yes, the unborn are indeed living human beings but that ‘choice’ must nevertheless trump ‘life’ itself—a rather startling confirmation of the Thomistic contention that the dictates of natural law can, over time, be drowned out by pride and habitual sin. 

The Covid pandemic, however, has turned this paradigm on its head, as pro-abort Democrats are now admonishing those who would end the Covid lockdown as somehow lacking due respect for the sanctity of human life.  A demonic inversion, to be sure, in which even the most ruthless pro-aborts (e.g. Gov. Andrew Cuomo) would prolong the shutdown of the economy in the name of saving the lives of the “most vulnerable”.

So, here’s the question: For how long will feigned compassion for the elderly victims of Covid be allowed to trump the common good of the entire nation?  At some point, someone, somewhere is going to have to address this 900-pound gorilla in the parlor. 

It seems to me that the resolution for what’s now become an international debate must refer back to the principle of double effect, that if doing something morally good has an unintended bad side-effect, it is nonetheless moral to go ahead with it.

So, for example, abortion is intrinsically evil. No exceptions!  But in the act of saving the life of a pregnant woman, a surgeon not only may but must proceed with the necessary operation, even if it will inadvertently end the life of her unborn baby. Why? Because the surgeon’s purpose is to save the life of the mother, not terminate her pregnancy.

This principle also applies to the present national lockdown. If opening our country in order to save many lives comes with an increased risk to the lives of elderly Americans, it’s not only morally permissible to proceed but morally obligatory. And this has nothing to do with some lack of compassion for the victims.

Death Does Not Justify Murder

Death is a fact of life. All of us were born and all of us will die. There’s no getting out of here alive.   And while the willful taking of a human life is immoral (outside of the usual exceptions, i.e., just war and self-defense), the principle on which we must rely is that the preservation of the few to the destruction of the many is intrinsically immoral.

So, for example, “Better Red than Dead” was offensive to pious ears during the so-called Cold War. Why? Because God and His Church teach us that there are things worse than death. In fact, under pain of mortal sin, every confirmed Catholic promises to be willing to die rather than deny his Faith.

Our Lord Himself teaches that “greater love than this no man hath than to lay down his life for his friends.”

Every martyr in history chose death over apostasy, which is an offense against God and Faith so pernicious that it presents a clear and present danger to the common good of the entire nation, whether Christian or not.

The hard reality we face today is that, for millions of Americans, living in a totalitarian regime—with lost livelihoods, closed churches and massive crackdowns on civil liberties—is already becoming a fate worse than death.

So, let’s address the gorilla in the parlor.

The risk of death is something each of us must weigh every time we walk out of the house, especially if we intend to get behind the wheel of a car.  Traffic accidents on America’s highways are the leading cause of death for people aged 1 to 54.

According to the lockdown logic, we should have outlawed automobiles years ago.  Why? Because the data show that from behind the wheel of a car, Americans not only risk their own lives but also the lives of the most vulnerable people around them, especially innocent pedestrians and bicyclists.

And it's only getting more out of control. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more pedestrians and cyclists were killed in 2018 than in any year since 1990. So, by what right does any one of us continue to risk the lives of others just so we can go to work and make money?

To be consistent with the lockdown logic, should we not stop being “selfish” and get off the road? After all, that would dramatically slow the spread of the leading cause of death in America, even if it would mean that hundreds of millions will lose their jobs, lose their homes, run out of money and die. 

War Kills the Most Vulnerable Among Us

Let us consider another example.

A just war is waged for the common good of the nation and its citizens. It is not only moral in the eyes of God but also legal and even necessary according to the law and constitution of the nation.  And yet it is generally understood that young and healthy people will have to die during the execution of war.   

Every effort must be undertaken to ensure the fewest possible number of casualties, of course, but that lives will be lost is a given.

How can this be justified?  

It’s quite simple, really. The preservation of the nation and the common good of its citizens overrides the risk to the lives of the few who are called to national defense as well as the protection of hearth and home. And in this case, the “most vulnerable among us” are not of the elderly, but rather tens of thousands of young soldiers who are just starting out in life.

The Catholic Church’s just war principles underscore that if there are to be lives sacrificed in war, a nation’s political leaders must ensure that the matter is grave, that the cause is just and that there exists a reasonable expectation of victory.

What about the Casualties of Lockdown?

At this moment, our nation is in peril. If the lockdown is not lifted, millions will lose their livelihood, their homes, and the ability to feed and educate their children. Many will also lose their lives.

Scientists, doctors, experts on all sides agree that America is under imminent threat of economic collapse surpassing even that of the Great Depression, which destroyed millions of lives, crippled the nation, and left future generations burdened with draconian new deals.

If our lockdown is really about true compassion for those most adversely effected by Covid-19, then we must consider the 36.5 million Americans who are currently unemployed and growing more vulnerable every day. 

Sanctimonious virtue signaling from “pro-life” Democrats notwithstanding, our nation simply cannot go on like this. The lockdown is neither just nor compassionate, which is why the governors of New York, California, Virginia and Michigan are behaving like child-abusing babysitters who think the nanny cams are offline.  

Why are they berating into submission the very people they’ve sworn to serve, treating most of them like children and some like common criminals? Because they know the prolonged lockdown is not only unconstitutional but immoral. They are holding America hostage.

Whatever good intentions might have initially come into play, the lockdown is all about raw and ruthless election year politics, and the country is becoming increasingly concerned over what looks a lot like a dress rehearsal for tyranny.

If they truly cared about elderly Americans, maybe our masked public servants should do something to actually help them. Because as it is, they are holding America’s senior citizens hostage as well, essentially threatening that  if American workers don’t stay in our houses and help wreck the U.S. economy, the blood of millions of old people will be on our hands.   

But guess what? The lock down itself is killing America’s elderly citizens.

I have daughters working in a nursing home right now, and every evening they tell me how many more beautiful old people died that day, and how they’ve been dying at an alarming rate over the past month, even though Covid-19 has been kept out.

Why are they dying? Because the residents are locked in their rooms—not locked in the facility itself, mind you, but in their actual rooms—where they are gradually wasting away, many terrified of dying alone. 

Frightened, confused and deprived of visits from family and friends, many are losing the will to live.  And separated from family advocates, the level of care itself has decreased, since elderly residents have no better advocates than family members who positively obsess over whether or not their loved ones have ample sustenance and emotional support to stay healthy.

Anyone who has ever had an elderly relative living in a nursing home, as I have, knows this to be true. We know the tragic look on a loved one’s face when, sitting dejectedly in the common room and staring out the window, they wonder if anyone is coming to see them today, only to go downhill fast when nobody does.

What we’re doing to elderly Americans right now is perverse.  So, please don’t tell me how compassionate Mr. Cuomo is or Mr. Newsom or the insufferable Mrs. Pelosi. These pro death politicians are putting the suffering of America’s grandmothers and grandfathers in the service of a leftist, globalist political agenda. 

At the end of the day, it would be sick and unnatural for anyone to seriously argue that in order to supposedly save the lives of the elderly, we must lock them in their rooms and destroy their grandchildren’s future.

In the name of prolonging the lives of the elderly, God Himself does not mandate that we wreck the lives of the young, destroy the nation, or hand over our homeland to tyrants who will dictate to everyone—including the elderly—when and if the churches can open, when and if we can go to the park, when and if we can take an elderly parent out to dinner on a Sunday afternoon.

If you really want to keep the elderly alive a while longer, then denounce this draconian lockdown and go visit them!  Restore them to life, return to them their main source of happiness and reasons to go on. 

Save the Nation, Liberate the Most Vulnerable

Risks must be weighed, and casualties factored in, but the war to keep and sustain the sovereignty and economic prosperity of the United States of America is fundamentally just. Some Americans, alas, will succumb to the lethal virus. Of that number, most will be advanced in years, some will be middle aged with comorbidities, and one might be me. But the war must be fought, nonetheless.

What’s going on right now is cold and heartless beyond belief, especially when so much more could be done to actually protect those most vulnerable to the deadly virus.

Such as?

• Put the next trillion-dollar stimulus package into the protection and preservation of the lives of elderly Americans living in nursing homes. 
• Put the country back to work so that the U.S. economy will be strong enough to underwrite the strategy and resources needed for the protection of the elderly for years to come.  
• Set up some sort of Nursing Home Protection Act, which will put those trillion-dollar stimulus packages directly into the defense of long-term care facilities and our frontline hospital workers.

Impossible? No, it’s not!

Purchase hazmat suits for every caregiver and family member, neighbor and priest who wishes to visit the elderly and infirmed. 

Absurd? No, it’s not!

Even if every American were to get his own personal hazmat suit, this would still be trillions cheaper than the massive distribution of wealth we’ve got going on right now. 

And, by the way, instead of locking them up like prisoners, it would save the lives of tens of thousands of seniors all across this country, dramatically “slow the spread” of the virus and not just “flatten the curve”, but crater it. 

So, what are we waiting for, Mr. “Pro-Life” Democrat Governor? Instead of showing “compassion” for Planned Parenthood and the Kennedy Center, let’s partner with families and churches all across America to initiate Operation Save Our Seniors.

Conclusion

Thousands of elderly Americans are going to die if we keep this country locked down, and millions of Americans will suffer the loss of everything if we don’t open up the economy. How is this not lose/lose for everyone concerned, including and especially the now incarcerated elderly?

And this is to say nothing of the encroachment of a totalitarian regime that is riding in on the coattails of national lockdown, waiting for America to trade her freedom for a mess of socialist pottage, gearing up to euthanize the elderly along with the unborn and any other ‘nonproductive’ citizen.

It’s time to make a move, and we must allow pro-death politicians to control neither the language nor the compassion meter any longer, especially when their compassion for the “most vulnerable” is so demonstrably suspect. 

Let’s take Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example.   

Cuomo assures us that he cares about the lives of elderly Americans so much that he needs to continue an unconstitutional lock down in order to save them. Why? Because he cares about the sanctity of human life more than we do. 

But does he?

He’s on record in support of his state’s Right to Die Act. Last year, he urged his state legislature to pass medical aid-in-dying legislation. Why? Because, according to Cuomo, “the older we get and the better medicine gets, the more we’ve seen people suffer for too, too long...”

So, let’s let ‘em die. Right, Andy? No slippery slope there! 

This angry, little man is locking young and healthy Americans down right now for reasons that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. Just how much of a leap would it be for him to make elderly Americans’ “right” to die into a “mandate”?  After all, keeping the elderly alive is not cheap and, for Cuomo, life itself obviously is.   

That’s why he ordered a state mandate requiring nursing homes to accept those recovering from Covid-19, even if they still might be contagious.   The result of that particular “act of compassion” quickly turned deadly, and Cuomo’s lunatical order has since been rescinded. 

This begins to look like "senicide", those practices of early pre-Christian cultures which proactively sought to reduce the elderly population.

If "mitigation" and national lockdown are so darn effective, then how is it that some 28,000 elderly Americans living in long-term care facilities have succumbed to the ­virus?  

No wonder Michael Goodwin, writing in the New York Post, notes that: 

If they are honest, historians judging the American experience during the coronavirus pandemic will excoriate our barbaric failure to protect the elderly. We think of ourselves as civilized, but mindless policies and bureaucratic indifference turned many nursing homes and rehabilitation centers into killing fields.

But, wait! There’s more.

To celebrate the 46^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Andrew “The Catholic” Cuomo signed a bill that legalized late-term abortion in New York.   “Today is sweet,” he opined, “because in a few minutes, I will sign this bill, and another New York national precedent will be established, the most aggressive women’s equality platform in the nation is going to be a law in this state, and that’s the way it should be.”

(This RTV Short says it all about Andrews Cuomo's "compassion" for the most vulnerable)

And when pro-life Americans objected to Cuomo ghoulish plan to let doctors kill babies moments before delivery, New York’s “compassionate” governor let it be known that they are not welcome in New York:  “Right-to-life conservatives have no place in the state of New York,” threatened Cuomo, “because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”

Right! So, if Andrew Cuomo was that unconcerned with the protection of the most vulnerable in that case, why ever would we take seriously his newfound concern for the most vulnerable in this one?  

Andrew Cuomo is a pro death politician and, obviously, his prolonged lockdown of New York has little to do with respect for the sanctity of human life. How do I know? Because killing babies is even harder than killing old people. Andrew would let them all die unless, of course, they have Covid and he's looking for federal bailout money.

So, here’s a simple message for our prolife Democrat governors: Open your states now. Give our stimulus money to the protection of the most vulnerable victims of Covid-19, elderly Americans—those who in their younger years would have denounced your totalitarian lockdown as something worthy of Soviet Cold Warriors but certainly un-American as hell.

The bottom line is this: If the lockdown continues, our country will be long gone before the grandchildren of the “most vulnerable” have a chance to grow up in it. And if anyone actually took the time to ask them what they think about all this, I’m confident most of the “Greatest Generation” would quickly make it crystal clear that they’d sooner sacrifice their lives than go along with the America-killing tyranny of “keeping us safe.”

Whatever you think of him, and whether or not he actually said it, something attributed to Ben Franklin provides clarity so simple to comprehend that even an Andy Cuomo could probably work it out:  “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Indeed, and in other words, open the country now, before there is no country left to open. 

Trump 2020!

_____________________

Author’s Note: I dedicate this article to a dear friend of The Remnant who passed away on May 2, 2020, at 99 years of age. One of General Douglas MacArthur’s actual ‘old soldiers’, Major Robert K. Dahl spent his last days battling the Covid19 virus, after having spent a lifetime dedicating his energies to the fight against Modernism and its bastard child, the so-called New World Order. Having distinguished himself as a US Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II, including during the liberation of the Philippines, Robert Dahl was an American soldier and patriot, but he was a Catholic first. I was honored to interview him in The Remnant a couple of years ago, where he shared his view on the exploitation of Pearl Harbor in the war against the America First movement:  “The circumstance of the 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, served Roosevelt’s anxious design to find a way to enter World War II. It also served to quiet the ‘America-First’ antiwar political movement, very much alive since 1920, especially in midland America.”  As I know Mr. Dahl would vigorously oppose the current exploitation of the Covid pandemic against today’s Make America Great movement, I dedicate this article to his memory. May he rest in peace. MJM