In the sane states of the union (including Texas, where I live) the lockdown is slowly lifting. In most of those same states the most vulnerable Americans were quickly protected. I count that the biggest imaginable “win.” Our state officials didn’t dump virus patients on nursing homes, to desperately empty hospital beds for young, healthy patients who pay taxes. Who never showed up.

So those Korean war veterans, grandparents, and others who built the actual society we now live in made it through this stage of the virus crisis alive. (At least in most of the Red States.) Instead of gasping for their last breaths locked down, far from their families, without even anyone to pray with them. Just the face of a frightened nurse seen through a plexiglass mask. What a hellish way to leave this world.

We make this world a hell when we shrug at sorrows like these.

In Blue States, My Fears Came True

Early on, back in mid-March, I warned about what might happen to aged, helpless residents in such facilities. Reading about Joe Biden’s euthanasia-happy chief virus advisor, Ezekiel Emanuel, I was scared. I wrote that our elders, who lived through much tougher times than we ever faced, were now in danger.

[Italian seniors] shouldn’t be choking and dying in hospital hallways. Neither should the elderly in America. But I fear that if our health care system gets totally overwhelmed, that’s exactly what will happen. I’m afraid that we, more than Italians, are likely to succumb to a cold-blooded utilitarian calculus. Our health bureaucrats will do things like counting the “likely productive years” of the patients they face, and route resources “efficiently” toward the younger and the stronger.

And that’s exactly what happened in states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. While he bloviated on TV about the need to lock down the state to save “just one life,” and fretted about his mama, Matilda, Andrew Cuomo moved coldly and cruelly.

Throwing Our “Matildas” Under the Bus

Like other pro-abortion Blue State governors, Cuomo wrote off the elderly in nursing homes. Forced those homes to infect themselves with COVID patients, to make room in hospitals for the young. As veteran after veteran, grandmother after grandfather, died a horrific, needless death, Cuomo just shrugged. Those people were going to die anyway, he told the crowd of fawning reporters. And most of them just shrugged too.

It took the relentless reporting of The New York Post, and nightly jabs on Fox News by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson, for Cuomo to finally back down. Too late, for thousands of elderly New Yorkers. Too late for those in other states where this wicked policy remains in effect.

Wickedness in Michigan

For instance Michigan, where power-besotted Governor Gretchen Whitmer defies her citizens with another three weeks of lockdown. From that same state, we see a glimpse of the awful suffering she inflicted by following Cuomo’s icy, utilitarian calculus.

WARNING: The video below is shocking. It shows a mentally disturbed man with COVID  and possibly also autism assaulting an elderly nursing home patient. Michigan dumped the young man on the Westwood Nursing Center, which now has the virus too.

 

The young man seems clearly out of his mind. But our hands should tremble with outrage at the “sane” politicians who put him among helpless old people, to get him and them out of the way.

Cannibalize the Young, Abandon the Elderly

Are we really that shocked though? Governor Whitmer is a vocal public supporter of Planned Parenthood. We have hundreds of hours of video proof that that organization sells human baby parts for profit. (Yet even President Trump can’t get congressional Republicans to defund it.) The Mainstream Media dismissed that careful reporting as “doctored.” The state of California is still trying to imprison the pro-life journalists who compiled it.

If this video proves too inconvenient for the ambitious Governor Whitmer, will we learn that it’s “doctored” too? Will the person who posted it to Youtube face criminal charges for violating somebody’s “privacy”? How long till the next fawning media profile of Whitmer as a champion of “public health” and “Science?”

A nation that will cannibalize its babies for parts will abandon its elders to secret abuse and choking, solitary deaths. Such a nation fears death, because it believes nothing comes after. So it also fears life, which is intrinsically risky, fragile, and short. It cowers indoors, looks to strongmen like Cuomo and Whitmer to keep it “safe,” and seeks out scapegoats like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to blame and punish. President Trump is of course scapegoat-in-chief.

In the absence of God, in the faint, fading shadows of supernatural faith, all we have left is fear. We fend that off with short, blunt bursts of pleasure and long empty hours of vapid entertainment. Our children are few, and carefully “planned,” swathed in cotton to keep them intact. Our elders are invisible, far away and mostly forgotten.

And that’s why I never want to live in a Blue State again. As soon as it’s safe, I want to start volunteering in nursing homes. Reading to people, talking to them, reminding them that the rest of us still care. Just do my little part to push back this choking Culture of Death.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism.