After a break to get my own house in order, I am back, littering the landscape with my political poems.
I wrote this poem after hearing China’s leader, President Xi Jinping, quoted on the news. His words make up the poem’s first line.
The statement seems especially ironic in this time of strife between Russia and Ukraine, during which Ukraine has fought expressly in the name of Freedom.
But of course China is in a different situation. This nation with its enormous population is trying to clamp down on a virus that rejoices and proliferates, when people roam freely. We in the West try to co-exist with the more friendly, recent versions of the virus (though they still cause 300 deaths a day in the US!) with measures imposed, if at all, on a sliding scale. Meanwhile, China has taken a different, more effortful and more intrusive stance: that of trying to enforce zero-COVID policies.
Another interesting aspect of this self-imposed isolation in an interconnected world is China’s history of cutting itself off from the West in the past. We in the West are now so connected with and dependent upon the Chinese economy, that we can’t help but feel the effects of China’s pain: in our strained supply chain, in our jumpy stock market, and in our pocketbooks.
Sadly, both causes, the fight for freedom, and the fight to completely resist one’s desire to be free, seem to me doomed to failure. Hope I am wrong about them both! Thanks again, for coming by to read!
Control your soul’s desire for freedom.
Hole yourself within a cave.
Close the blinds and mind your business.
We don’t want the germs you have.
Staying pure and isolating
Insulates us from the Foe.
Were you not so brief in jail,
You’d blight us with that Fiend you know.
What? You tell me He’s escaped?
Our sprays and days of quarantine
Have not prevented his attempts
To breed among us, libertine?
Then lock it down, each block, each city.
All our nation, one by one.
We can’t abide this beast among us,
For this game is zero-sum.
Copyright 2022 Andrea LeDew
For another take on Covid measures, from a less human perspective, read Quarantine. For another look at uncurbed power in times of trouble, read On Pharoah’s Watch.
Summer Playground
Smallpox was eradicated due to widespread vaccination. Just sayin’.
That’s true! Hope we can say the same about COVID someday.
United effort is not something, lately anyway, that the US has been particularly good at. Anything that comes top-down as a mandate, like the Chinese measures, is perceived instinctively as coercion. And rebelled against, no matter how good the bitter medicine is for us.
I don’t think these people realize that most top-down public health mandates wouldn’t be needed if the entire population would just follow the recommended safety protocols.
I personally find it hard to “adjust to conditions” as per the current CDC guidelines. This laissez-faire approach feels to me like an abdication of responsibility, much like that exhibited through the inaction on masks and such, by the previous administration.
This change of tune also comes from a much greater faith in the ability or willingness of individuals to do what is in their own best interests, than I currently profess.
Is the virus deadly, or not? And if deadly to anyone, but not to me, what is the extent of my responsibility to care for my fellow man?
I hope the worst is over but who knows? My doubting soul craves not freedom, but a simple unchanging rule that applies to all.
The airline rule feels just plain (plane 😊) foolish to me, considering how other countries are having trouble controlling the virus, with much more effective tools than those we use here.
And there’s always the next, not-so-friendly variant, waiting to be born. Or the variant for which the vaccines no longer act as a muffler of its effects.
End of rant. 😊
I am so glad that someone else thinks the same way I do. I’ve been very disappointed in the CDC’s 180 turn. I can’t help but think that they’ve bowed to poltical pressure in an election year.