Article by Bryan Preston in "PJMedia":
On
the first day of the coronavirus quarantine I went for a walk through
my neighborhood to the park. The weather was warm and the walk was nice.
The park looked like a park in central Texas should in the spring, with
wildflowers and bluebonnets in bloom and dandelions popping up like
little white clouds above the grasstops. Kids were out playing,
oblivious as they should be to the world’s problems, when they should
have been at school. But everywhere I looked on the way to the park,
where there should be empty driveways, there were cars. Everyone was
home. It looked like a Saturday morning, but it was Tuesday.
Some
of my neighbors were working from home, as I was, teleworking to avoid
coronavirus. But surely some were home because they could no longer
work. Their businesses are shut down by the virus. They were inside,
worrying how or if they can keep their homes. Worrying about what
tomorrow would bring, and the day after that. This creeping dread we all
feel once in a while has taken up residence in millions of American
homes.
There’s
a little church along a country highway heading east that I pass often,
a small thing that some pastor had the vision to build to reach a small
community. It’s a shell now, empty. Closed. It failed. Someone cuts the
grass around it every once in a while, probably a city crew, but when
they delay the grounds get overgrown and it looks lost in time.
There
are few things in modern life that gnaw at me like a shuttered church.
There’s something heartbreaking about a place built to exemplify faith
that has failed and hollowed out. We’re seeing a lot of shuttered
churches now, not because of any failures within them. Their faith is
fine, maybe stronger now than a few weeks ago. Hardship will do that.
They’re closed because we can’t gather in groups anymore, because of the
virus. We can’t worship together, or have large weddings or funerals.
Games and graduations and concerts are canceled. The gatherings of our
lives are gone for a while. Because of the virus.
Right
along with shuttered churches, shuttered businesses break the heart. A
failed business represents a failed dream, livelihoods lost, risks taken
but not rewarded, the end to something that often did not lead to a new
beginning, just bankruptcy. Before the virus, out-of-control property
taxes were killing businesses around here. Now it's the virus.
We
have hundreds of thousands of churches and businesses and schools
across America that are closed now. Many of them will not re-open. They
didn’t fail because of some flaw within them or because their model
didn’t work. They failed, or will fail, because of a tyrannical system
beyond our shores that lied to the whole world. America’s churches and
businesses and schools are closed because on the other side of the
world, China’s amoral dictators failed to be a normal nation and do the
right thing. They lied out of their paranoid obsession with power. In
America, we can make fun of Trump, call him names and mock whoever we
want and find others who will laugh with us. In China, merely displaying
a cartoon of Winnie the Pooh - because of his resemblance to dictator
Xi - risks imprisonment. Should we do business with such a thin-skinned
despot?
China’s
coronavirus actions have been entirely indefensible. Not that you would
ever know that if you listen to some in the media and among our smug
elites. There was, first, the lie that the novel virus would not infect
humans. Then the communists order the early samples destroyed and
silenced the doctors, at the point of a gun that Mao himself may as well
have been pointing at them. They prosecuted the doctor who sounded the
alarm, making a noble hero die a criminal. China abused its
manufacturing power to build and then hoard
the N95 masks doctors and nurses the world over need as they battle the
virus. Some medical heroes will become infected and die, because of
China. China’s communists did all this, while the whole world watched
and suffered, and while Italy’s coronavirus death toll surpassed the
grim toll of 9-11. China now says its coronavirus infection rates are
dropping, but can we believe them? When China is pushing a crank conspiracy that the US created the coronavirus? China’s communists are trolling the world to dodge responsibility and keep their power. This cannot stand.
We
tried making China rich to make the Chinese people free. The
globalists’ theory was that trade would make prosperous people who would
then demand their freedom, and the Chinese Communist Party would either
grant it or die. It hasn’t worked. China has become more prosperous but
less free. Its people live under a digital dictatorship fed by social
media algorithms and always-on video surveillance. Their future is
cradle to grave monitoring for thoughtcrime. The paranoid communists are
as brutal and ruthless as ever, shuttering churches with hammer and
sickle and using Uighurs and dissenters as slave labor. China uses its
wealth to buy hearts and minds in Africa and positive propaganda press everywhere.
China uses its wealth to fracture our own bedrock rights, as when it
turned the NBA into its red white and blue thought police right here on
American soil. This cannot stand.
The
world cannot get into this situation again. We can’t just pretend this
did not happen, resume normal trade relations, go on with our lives, and
keep allowing the communists to rob us blind and make us vulnerable. We
can’t let China’s criminal caste of communists brutalize their own
people, threaten their peaceful neighbors and menace the world. We
can’t.
We depend on China
for cheap labor and cheap goods. But we cannot afford China any longer.
The price is too high. We must divest. We must redirect. Some of our
manufacturing in China must come back home. Some must go elsewhere, to
India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, to
other free republics with open societies. We must favor free peoples
everywhere, shun tyrants everywhere, and do business with friends of
liberty everywhere. For our own good.
The
free world built up China’s economy in a naive attempt to free its
people. This faith that has truly failed. This is one business we should
no longer patronize, one school that has taught us its final lesson.
This church should empty now and seal up its doors.