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Introduction
With COVID, the Holocaust and Climate Change there are legions of deniers, the true unbelievers.
That is the subject of today’s 10-minute episode.
Continuing
All three of today’s topic areas, COVID, the Holocaust and CLimate Change are, if true, events of monumental importance which we ignore or, or worse, deny, to our peril. So the question is the extent to which each one of these is real as portrayed by those making that claim, and not exaggerated or even a hoax.
The Holocaust, the brutal incarcertion, enslavement and murder of 6M Jews would seem to be easily proven by overwhleming and compellingly shocking evidence. Tens of thousands of documents, photographs and videos all testify to the truth of this horror. Additional tens of thousands of eyewitnesses from the inmates to the guards to the Allied soldiers who saw the camps, and an equal number of German citizens who were forced to tour the camps in their areas have added their voices to the mountains of silent evidence. And the Holocaust started in the 1920’s when Hitler and his fellow Nazis promised to do just exactly they eventually did. Yet the willfully ignorant and callously knowledgeable deniers abound. This from the Atlantic Monthly, “Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world’s population don’t know the Holocaust happened—or they deny it. These beliefs follow some unexpected patterns, too. The Middle East and North Africa had the largest percentage of doubters, with only 8 percent of respondents reporting that they had heard of the genocide and believed descriptions of it were accurate. But only 12 percent of respondents in sub-Saharan Africa said the same, and only 23 percent in Asia. People in these groups were likely to say they believed the number of deaths has been exaggerated—just over half of Middle Easterners and a third of Asians and Africans think the body count has been distorted over time.” What is the point of validating the horrible truth of the Holocaust? Is it as simple as knowing history so that we can learn from it? Well yes, but there is much more. The Germans of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, were no different than the people in any given country today. We need to know that we in America, the people in any country, can get as far away from any kind of decency as did the citizens of Nazi Germany.
If something as massively and obviously true as the Holocaust can be denied and claimed to have been a fraud, a hoax, what chance do issues like COVID and Climate Change stand against skeptics and deniers?
Let’s turn our attention to COVID. The numbers concerning cases, hospitalizations and death, from disparate sources like CNN, Fox, Ben Shapiro, the Wall Street Journal and my local paper are all pretty much the same. In round numbers as of today, 280K have died, with a total of 14M cases. That’s a 2% death rate, which means that if all 330M of us got “the rona”, 6.6M of us would die. We can logically dismiss the, “It’s just the flu.” claim.
But what about things like masks and lockdowns? One of the main ways that COVID is transmitted is through infected droplets that are expelled when a person breathes, speaks, coughs, etc. Masks are effective in greatly reducing the transmission of those infected droplets. Even a simple and cheap, low-level surgical mask is effective in filtering out most of the relatively large and “sticky” water droplets. Social distancing is as logical as mask use, as is hand washing.
Well, Will, what about lockdowns? Taken to its logical extreme, if all of us were locked down and isolated at home, the virus would necessarily quickly run out of steam. As would the economy, along with utilities, food production and distribution–everything. And every step we take away from that impossible complete lockdown scenario would make more goods and services available, and allow the virus to attack more people. So we need a balance, and that balance needs to be decided and acted upon county by county. One size absolutely does not fit all. And we continue to set new records for cases, hospitalizations and deaths, with no end coming soon. Vaccines are indeed on the way, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory if we hit herd immunity with the help of the vaccines and there were a million or more Americans dead at the time.
Let’s hear from a local Colorado medical professional. “It’s just a hurtful place to be, when one day we’re being called heroes and the next day people are saying, ‘This is a made-up disease anyway.’ What have I been doing these past few months? What have I been fighting?” -Erin Trujillo, ICU manager at North Suburban Medical Center in Thornton, Colorado. Remember, one of the two main tenets of the Revolution 2.0™ belief system, is being our Brother’s Keepers.
Before we leave the COVID discussion, let’s ask a question that I do not see often asked in the media or in private conversation: “What can I do to contribute to the physical safety, health and mental well being of those with whom I come in contact?” There is no conflict between this focus on others and personal freedoms. Conversely, focusing on others is needed before any group can be truly free, and before any individual in that group can be free. This view ties nicely with John F. Kennedy’s challenge issued at his Presidential inaugural, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Lastly, we will look at Climate Change. If you have followed Revolution 2.0™ long enough, you will know that the core question to ask here is, “Is there a cure that is not worse than the disease?” There are facile, empty answers on both sides. “Armageddon, all is lost in 10 years if we don’t spend everything we have and change everything we do immediately.” That response makes the case that the disease is so immediate and fatal that there is no “cure” that can possibly be worse than the disease, no matter how extreme that so-called cure. Alternatively, there are those who deny climate change is anything but something the planet does on its own every few millennia, so we can all just enjoy our weekends when we tow gasoline powered snowmobiles to our second homes behind our deep snow configured full size SUV. And stop wondering about why we have to go further and further north every year to find the same amount of snow.
Climate Change is the one of these three where there is the least amount of convincing information, compounded by decades of admittedly greatly exaggerated claims of impending disaster. How do we think this through? The stakes on both sides of the answer to this key question are enormous and lasting. We need to get the answer to this question right. What are your thoughts?
Tell me what you believe. I and many others want to know.
As always, whatever you do, do it in love. Without love, anything we do is empty.
Contact
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Will Luden, coming to you from 7,200’ in Colorado Springs.
