Day 250…
It seems hard to believe it now, as I look outside at this perfect day, but last night my phone lit up and beeped with a tornado warning for Manhattan.
There were apparently some clouds spotted that were starting to rotate over Fort Lee, New Jersey. It doesn’t look like a tornado actually touched down, but for a while there the wind was whipping the trees outside and driving the rain in every direction except down.
It didn’t look like New York at all.
It took only six days for the US to add another million cases of COVID-19 to our tally. We are now clocking in at over 11 million cases of the coronavirus.
Not only is the President and his Administration refusing to address curtailing the spread, they are actively doing the opposite.
States are having to take matters into their own hands.
Governor Whitmer of Michigan recently put more safeguards into effect - high schools and colleges need to switch to remote learning for three weeks, and stricter restrictions have been placed on social gatherings and businesses.
Dr. Scott Atlas, on the President’s COVID task force, despite his lack of expertise in the area, tweeted about Governor Whitmer’s mandates yesterday, "The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept."
Unfortunately, people are listening to this.
Chad Kimball is a member of the Broadway community. He was nominated for a Tony for his starring role in the musical, Memphis and was performing in another musical, Come From Away, at the point at which Broadway shut down.
Yesterday on twitter, he wrote, “Respectfully, I will never allow a Governor, or anyone, to stop me from SINGING, let alone sing in worship to my God. Folks, absolute POWER corrupts ABSOLUTELY. This is not about safety. It’s about POWER. I will respectfully disobey these unlawful orders.”
Suddenly, this isn’t about the selfishness of a bunch of gun toting MAGA supporters in the Midwest, this is about the complete selfishness of one of our own.
It’s a raw bid for attention, nothing else. Like the President’s other supporters, he uses God as an excuse for doing something that he wants to do, despite myriad good reasons that should stop him.
He clearly misses the applause. He must miss the validation. He doesn’t seem to believe that he can find within himself, that which he needs to get from others. He doesn’t want to sing for God, he wants to sing for an audience of people watching and clapping for him singing to God. He wants everyone to praise him for his devotion.
There is nothing whatsoever stopping Chad Kimball from singing his heart out anywhere he likes. By himself.
Singing requires the full use of one’s lungs. He has had COVID-19 and recovered from it. That does not mean that he is immune.
There are reports that particles of the virus can remain for much longer than thought in the intestines and in the deepest part of the lungs. It is thought that some people who appeared to get re-infected actually just never fully got rid of their initial case.
Singing in front of a live audience of people is believed, at the moment, to be one of the most dangerous things that any of us could do.
Chad Kimball is not a star, but he does have a following. With that position comes a responsibility. He has fans who will listen to him.
The word ‘respectfully’ implies admiration and deference. He uses the word twice, but clearly does not mean it at all. His use of the word is pure sarcasm.
In an interview on 60 Minutes last night, President Barack Obama said, "What we've seen is what some people call truth decay, something that's been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn't even matter."
The President and his cronies are standing by their decision of complete non-intervention. In their view, the end of the virus will come once it has ripped its way through the entire population like a tornado, killing hundreds of thousands in its path.
Moderna has just announced that they, too, now have a vaccine that appears to be even more effective than the one from Pfizer. It is also easier to maintain- it does not require deep freezer storage.
If these vaccines actually work, they could do the job of immunizing us. This Administration, however, is not willing to wait. They want the virus to just cull out the susceptible now and leave those who resist it behind.
Someone like Chad Kimball listens to the lies from the President and then decides that that gives him full license to do what he wants.
Whatever is in him that requires attention from an audience is clearly something he is addicted to. Not getting that response is likely genuinely painful to him. Like any addict, he has rationalized his selfish actions. He claims that he is standing up to “POWER” but in reality, he just needs a fix.
The idea that getting that fix could put hundreds of people - his fans - potentially at risk for their lives does not seem to have entered his thinking. He wants what he wants and has built up a whole construct around it to support the decision.
Chad Kimball is not alone in this. Not by a long shot. He joins a whole throng of people around the country who want what they want and want it now.
The armed protesters who stormed the Michigan State Capitol railing against mask wearing mandates want the same thing.
That’s the difficulty of where we are. How do we get selfish people to think about people other than themselves?
The President has served his term in office by catering to himself rather than to the American people. In order to justify that, he has spent the last four years urging his supporters to do the same. And they’ve listened.
Chad Kimball, bless his heart, heard the message.
I don’t know Chad Kimball personally. I know of him, certainly. I’ve seen him onstage. From that tweet, I can see that he’s not thinking about his fans. He’s just thinking about himself.
Unfortunately, he’s a sign that the greater infection that we all thought was ‘out there’ is actually in here, too. His tweet was a kind of early-warning storm alert.
We all want to get back to what we do. There are days when the need to do it is almost unbearable. We all want to get back to it, but we simply can’t yet. For the good of all, we need to keep apart.
By all means, we should be making a joyful noise unto our personal lords, but that dialogue needs to be one on one for the moment.
There are plenty of ways to gather together online to sing together and worship together. A methadone-like substitute for the real thing, certainly. Not nearly as good a high, but it gets you through.
I’m sorry to pick on Chad Kimball but what he said yesterday was pure recklessness. And dangerous.
Fight truth decay.
As the chorus of the song goes:
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need.
Fight truth decay.
❤️fight decay with regular flossing
xoxo
yup!! xx