No, we aren't forgiving and we aren't forgetting until those who created this avoidable tragedy are held to accountability. There were ample people arguing against these measures at the time - the Great Barrington Declaration is a prime example - and they were ridiculed, censored, ostracized, and in some cases fired from their jobs.
No, to avoid this ever happening again, the perpetrators of this catastrophe must be held accountable. Americans are a good and just people and forgiveness is a part of our national character, but there must justice for those damaged by the past 3 years, chief among them our young people.
Because of measures to slow the spread, the 20/21 flu season was virtually nonexistent. Had we done nothing and allowed the virus to spread freely, we would likely have seen 2M dead instead of 1M and a medical system in complete collapse.
When President Biden made the vaccine freely available to everyone, about 500,000 had died from Covid. After that, nearly everyone dying from Covid were unvaccinated.
That is what was reported and what we were told, but was not what I observed as a front line hospital nurse. I don't know one unvaccinated person that died.
Thanks for your response but this topic goes far beyond what can be discussed here in this thread. The statements you have made are unfortunately not accurate. Eugyppius here on substack wrote a very good article explaining the disappearance of flu in 20/21.
The notion that this was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, that the vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death is not accurate either. See for example this data from Germany that shows that 90% of the ICU COVID patients in Germany are vaccinated. The data from Australia, Canada, and the UK are similar. I've linked olafgarbar's twitter page since he was kind enough to translate the German data and plots into English.
You know what has to precede forgiveness? A sincere apology.
And we're not going to get there when articles like this attack right-leaning media for not accepting an apology on behalf of half the population written by one person who wasn't even directly responsible, and in apologizing is already facing criticism from people who haven't broken away from the indoctrination (as noted right above the attack on right-leaning media personality).
I'm loathe to bring up the topic of WW2 Germany, since it's such a cop-out and overused comparison, but before we could even begin to forgive Germany and Japan, we had public trials of all of the people responsible at the top, in which many were sentenced to *death* for the atrocities they had committed.
Now I'm not saying that death is the appropriate judgement, but heads do need to roll to show sincerity that something like this can never happen again.
We can't just forgive the entirety of the Nazis because one foot soldier says "I was just following orders"
Again, forgiveness will eventually come, but the first step is for a sincere apology that includes accountability.
I don't usually believe in the death penalty. I only agree to it in the most horrendous national situations like what happened in Germany during WWII. If anyone responsible for the forced vaccinations, lock downs, lab created virus, is found to have purposely orchestrated this nightmare (and many of us believe they did - evidence points to it), then, YES, there should be full accountability up to and including execution. I think people like Miss Emily don't understand the full impact of what just happened or if they do, they want to scrub it and shove it under the carpet.
I tend to agree with your point that "I noticed an absence of repentance in Oster’s piece and wondered whether a differently framed essay might have better modeled the possibility of reconciliation."
This likely is the cause for most of the tense reactions I have seen too. You didn't mention how she also calls for more mandates in the same piece. It really shows where she is coming from and still motivated by fear. To me it's a very empty acceptance of actions like wishing ill on the unvaccinated. Without atonement we are doomed to repeat in the very doom loop she said she wants to avoid.
There should be some acceptance to the damage many measures did to people's livelihood and healthy social life but there is none. I don't want to ever go through that medical authoritarian hellstate ever again. Oster's piece does nothing but fan the fire for many that are still dealing with the fallout of onerous leadership decisions, myself included.
Oster's essay and your essay are nothing but self-serving BS. There was ample evidence early on that the virus was not serious for most and that early treatment using a combination of safe, inexpensive, repurposed drugs was the appropriate response. There was never a need to close schools, destroy small businesses, mask people, force them into isolation, deny them treatment, allow them to die alone, and impose vaccine mandates unless, of course, the goal was to coerce the population, via fear, to accept rushed-to-market, experimental injection$$$. Oh, wait. That was the goal. Mission accomplished. And, for what it's worth, speak for yourself. Some of us have no "COVID missteps" to apologize for. Not all of us have made "pandemic mistakes."
No, there wasn't. It took time before it was understood that older people were mostly at risk, and of course no one ever talks about Long Covid, which can be very devastating.
There was no evidence early on that other treatments worked, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been proven ineffective and even dangerous. The only treatment which shows any efficacy is remdesivir, and that wasn't discovered until very late in the pandemic.
One more comment. In your article you write that "Whatever the truth of the pandemic may be, it’s definitely not my truth, and it’s definitely not yours." I would argue that there were many of us that were actually right at the time on the key issues: a) masks were ineffective b) the negative impact of lockdowns far outweighed any small benefit to slowing down the disease c) school closures were damaging and unnecessary d) the vaccines were ineffective except for a ~4 month of good effectiveness e) the vaccines were not safe compared to other vaccines with the high excess mortality today indicative of major problems f) early treatment programs could have saved many lives but these programs were not even discussed.
Yet, people with these opinions were silenced, censored, ridiculed and ostracized, despite being right on all of these issues at that time. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the future. Those who imposed these incorrect concepts onto us without any rationale discussion have to be held accountable.
Read again the Great Barrington Declaration from October 2020. Those men and women are American heroes for standing up against this sea of poor measures imposed on the world. They were right in every respect.
No contrition, no repentance, no apology, no admission of wrong doing, no compunction... NOTHING.
Try those first before asking for amnesty.
After the lockdown and death shot NAZI's spend 2 years profusely apologizing and acknowledging the exact human violations they committed against other human beings, their could be consideration for forgiveness for the human and physical rights violations.
Investigations and international trials might get things underway... we may never know exactly what happened, but many of the guilty actors are clear. Prosecute all involved.
After sincere progress is made by those seeking forgiveness, forbearance might be considered. There will be no exoneration. There will be no release. In other words, we will NEVER forget.
Sorry John, but do you understand the day to day reality that was inflicted on the unvaccinated (and still is, in many places across the globe). Because I truly think that is something you need to consider, before you tell people to move on and forgive. We were robbed of fundamental and inalienable civil liberties, in the space of mere hours (on 16 December 2021 I had those liberties, and at midnight on 17 December 2021, the mandates came in and the liberties were gone). People lost their ability to work and earn money for their families. Many were put into poverty as a result. Others were denied education. Freedom of movement was restricted. People in Canada were denied the ability to use trains and planes. Australians who were unvaccinated were prevented from leaving the country, when the borders were open for vaccinated Australians. Parents in Western Australia were prevented from visiting at children's hospitals, to be with their own sick infant children (no matter that this was obviously not in the best interests of the children in question). Personally, I was locked out of society for 5 months. Aside from not being able to go anywhere or do anything but meet friends for picnics basically, during that time: I was not allowed to attend at several friends weddings; my sister was kicked out of a family funeral (on that afternoon, it was difficult to look around my city and accept that Australia was still a democracy); we were told we could not meet a cousin's new baby; we were not allowed to visit family members sick in hospital (not having covid was not considered a relevant factor). I could go on and on and on. When we eventually got covid, I had no symptoms but sore muscles and my sister had no symptoms at all. The most jabbed person I know, an otherwise fit and healthy 40 year old cycling enthusiast, has had covid twice and attended at hospital on both occasions. So I would love to move on and forgive, and I consider that to be an important and necessary thing moving forward, but too much has transpired for that to happen without an apology, at the very least. Those that advocated for mandates and thus advocated for segregation and discrimination, need to admit they were wrong, and acknowledge the destruction they caused (which is great and which continues to pile up) if there is to be any hope at all that people move on. If I were in the public health business I would be concerned, because I'm a Solicitor and I can guarantee you that at some point, there will be inquiries and tribunals set up to investigate the harms from the mandates, and undoubtedly, people will be held responsible.
I don't see any public figures asking for forgiveness or explaining how sick they were in promoting hate against people who actually had the foresight to investigate and listen to all the censored voices.
Sorry you feel stupid now that you understand what just went down the last 2 years; however, I am a lay person and caught onto their lies back in March 2020. I never once feared for my life over this virus. I was scared sh**less over what the Government, Entertainers, Media, and Employers and people like Emily and the Atlantic were doing.
Forgiveness isn't a blanket over your errors or faults. To repent is to truly acknowledge the harm you caused. You be sorry, we get on the same page through conversation. Then, I forgive you.
I believe in forgiveness and agree with Emily Oster that no one got everything perfectly right. I also believe that we’re still in the fog of war a bit, and we won’t know the full picture for several more years after the politics and feelings of it all has faded. That being said, I am so angry. I’m not at all an angry person, but thinking of covid and the response to it is like a punch to the gut. I physically feel the anger.
Oster’s article received the reaction it did because it downplays everything. I’ve encountered this in real life quite a bit - when I complain about what has happened, people respond like, “oh, I’m sorry you had to wear a mask.” The masking was the very least of my issues. I’m angry that my job was threatened, I’m angry that I lost relationships, I’m angry that I got excommunicated from holidays, I’m angry that people were taken off the organ transplant waiting list, I’m angry that I haven’t seen my grandma for nearly three years because of covid restrictions. I’m angry at all the businesses that went under, I’m angry that no one stood up for me. I’m angry that doctors talked seriously of denying medical care to the unvaccinated or triaging them to the back of the line. I’m angry that people talked seriously of making the unvaccinated pay for their own care and denying them the use of insurance. I’m angry for all the people who missed cancer screenings, or had to live in pain far longer than necessary because their surgery or treatment was “not essential.” I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, but if folks like Emily want real forgiveness and reconciliation, they must admit the full extent of the damage and stop trying to minimize it.
There are times when societies seemingly go crazy for a few years. This happened in Nazi Germany. Thoughtful people can look on that event and wonder how they would have responded. Would they have stood up to the craziness? Fled the country? Gone along with it quietly or participated fully? We’ve now seen something similar happen in our lifetimes. The world seemingly went crazy for a couple of years. We didn’t turn into Nazi Germany, but we came pretty close. Government and authorities “othered” a significant portion of the population, casting them out of polite society and limiting their movement with passports. They encouraged families and individuals to do the same, and a large number of them did. Now is the time to apologize and reflect on this, but folks like Emily Oster can’t even acknowledge it happened.
I will pray for the mean spirited people who enjoyed hurting others include the WHO, Gates, politicians were exempted themselves and forced patients to die alone, the media calling people dumb and stupid and denying natural immunity, the ones involved with the origination cover-up, doctors who told vaccine injured "not related" offering no care, and medical staff who behaved like Nazis defiling the oath "do not harm".
I think that particularly in personal relationships, forgiveness, even if it is forgiveness while walking away from the relationship, can be important. But it is also sometimes the easy, "cheap" option.
You also need to honor the victims. That means, whether you are the "forgiver" or the "forgivee", work together for change. If you now feel bad about knowing people lost their jobs or got vaccine injured from a shot that they did not want, then work to make laws against vaccine mandates and vaccine status discrimination. If you were horrified by hospitals being required to use a protocol that was obviously killing most of their patients, then speak up for change. Hospital staff members who stated on twitter etc that they were up for killing or providing sub standard care to unvaccinated need to be investigated. Did they kill anyone knowingly? Why were infected patients sent into nursing homes?
Why were normal basic respiratory treatments for breathing, secondary infections, etc no longer given on an outpatient basis? How do we reform the CDC so that vaccine injuries like myocarditis are no longer being hidden or dismissed?
Forgiveness; Imo worry less about getting someone to say the words " I forgive you" and instead all of us work together to fix the problems and make sure it can't happen again. Learn from it. And in the end, forgiveness, which mostly has to come from each of us within anyway, will come also.
There's also a component to forgiveness you're leaving out. First there's repentance, then amends must be made, and finally forgiveness can occur. Not only was there no repentance in this article or in the attitude of anyone I've met with left leaning political persuasion but there has been no attempt at making amends, so forgiveness cannot happen. Also the act of forgiveness does not supersede the need for justice, after all one can choose their actions but they cannot choose their consequences unless they choose their actions with the consequences in mind.
Thanks for your comment. You're conflating forgiveness with: (1) reconciliation; and (2) justice. It may be that you personally are not willing to forgive in the absence of repentance (a precondition to reconciliation) or justice (usually administered by the state). But forgiveness is possible (and often extraordinarily powerful) without, or prior to, repentance or justice. I tried to make those distinctions in my post above; see also this piece: https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-incomprehensible-witness-of-forgiveness.
To my mind, there are two key paragraphs in the piece above on which you're commenting. The first begins: "Still, I remain uncertain how reconciliation should unfold in the wake of this pandemic." The second is the immediately following the first, which begins "But perhaps it is more plausible—and more actionable—to think about forgiveness and repentance in our individual and interpersonal relationships" (which ties back to the block quote from Michael Wear).
As for me personally, I don't convey direct repentance in the piece above because the examples of where I fell short are all interpersonal ones best addressed with particular individuals rather than in a public setting. If you can think of anything in my public commentary during the pandemic that you believe requires repentance, I would be glad to consider it. For what it's worth, I've made relatively little public commentary about the pandemic or responses to it. You can find my most comprehensive assessment and commentary here: https://johninazu.substack.com/p/covid-19-churches-and-culture-wars.
Prof Oster's piece is an attack on the medical establishment & Dems/liberals. Not a word about what the RW was wrong about, and the RW was wrong on the most fundamental thing - Covid was much more deadly than the flu, 10x more deadly.
The RW was wrong about so much more than that: precautions taken to slow the spread, masks, lockdowns worked and we know this because the 20/21 flu season was almost nonexistent. 1M people died of Covid and if the Covid deniers had their way, it would have likely been double that. Our medical system was pressed to the breaking point, had we let the virus spread freely, it would have been in complete collapse.
The virus would go away when the weather got warm, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work, don't take the vaccine, nearly everyone dying from Covid is unvaccinated. I could go on and on but the RW were the ones who were mostly wrong, gravely wrong. Had we done what they wanted, right now we would be screaming at them for the absolute catastrophe they allowed to happen.
Wow, John. I just read through all of the comments you've received (after posting my first, the reference to the road rage liturgy). It was painful! Who knew that the very mention of forgiveness could evoke so much rage??!! First Oster--and now you--are clearly touching on some raw nerves.
I will say, I heard her interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered, where, offered a chance to "tell us what you'd like to say to those who have disagreed with you," she could have done a lot more to apologize and ask for forgiveness herself.
Advocating forgiveness can be tricky. It really is vital that we model both forgiveness and repentance ourselves. No, let me reverse those two: it's vital that we model repentance and forgiveness, in that order, although the two are inextricably interwoven.
John -- Your reference in passing to how you view those who drive faster or slower than you (you and I are, of course, Goldilocks drivers, doing everything "just right"), reminded me of this liturgy that I read recently in the first volume of Every Moment Holy. Its message applies to all forms of "self-generated righteousness," including that surrounding Pandemic policies and personal choices. I certainly found it convicting.
A Liturgy for Experiencing Road Rage
If my heart were more content in you, O Lord,
I would be less inclined to rage at others.
Let me gauge by the knot in my gut,
the poverty of my own understanding
of the grace that I have received
from a God who, loving me,
chose rather to receive wounds
than to give them.
Take from me my self-righteousness,
and my ego-driven demands for respect.
Overthrow the tyranny of my anger, O Lord,
and it its place establish a better vision
of your throne, your kingdom, and your peace.
Amen.
It IS very helpful to be reminded of the overwhelming grace that we have received; and to keep that in mind when tempted to lash out.
No, we aren't forgiving and we aren't forgetting until those who created this avoidable tragedy are held to accountability. There were ample people arguing against these measures at the time - the Great Barrington Declaration is a prime example - and they were ridiculed, censored, ostracized, and in some cases fired from their jobs.
No, to avoid this ever happening again, the perpetrators of this catastrophe must be held accountable. Americans are a good and just people and forgiveness is a part of our national character, but there must justice for those damaged by the past 3 years, chief among them our young people.
Because of measures to slow the spread, the 20/21 flu season was virtually nonexistent. Had we done nothing and allowed the virus to spread freely, we would likely have seen 2M dead instead of 1M and a medical system in complete collapse.
When President Biden made the vaccine freely available to everyone, about 500,000 had died from Covid. After that, nearly everyone dying from Covid were unvaccinated.
That is what was reported and what we were told, but was not what I observed as a front line hospital nurse. I don't know one unvaccinated person that died.
Thanks for your response but this topic goes far beyond what can be discussed here in this thread. The statements you have made are unfortunately not accurate. Eugyppius here on substack wrote a very good article explaining the disappearance of flu in 20/21.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-influenza
The notion that this was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, that the vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death is not accurate either. See for example this data from Germany that shows that 90% of the ICU COVID patients in Germany are vaccinated. The data from Australia, Canada, and the UK are similar. I've linked olafgarbar's twitter page since he was kind enough to translate the German data and plots into English.
https://twitter.com/olafgarber/status/1589219377232035840
This will all come out in the end, and slowly but surely it is.
You know what has to precede forgiveness? A sincere apology.
And we're not going to get there when articles like this attack right-leaning media for not accepting an apology on behalf of half the population written by one person who wasn't even directly responsible, and in apologizing is already facing criticism from people who haven't broken away from the indoctrination (as noted right above the attack on right-leaning media personality).
I'm loathe to bring up the topic of WW2 Germany, since it's such a cop-out and overused comparison, but before we could even begin to forgive Germany and Japan, we had public trials of all of the people responsible at the top, in which many were sentenced to *death* for the atrocities they had committed.
Now I'm not saying that death is the appropriate judgement, but heads do need to roll to show sincerity that something like this can never happen again.
We can't just forgive the entirety of the Nazis because one foot soldier says "I was just following orders"
Again, forgiveness will eventually come, but the first step is for a sincere apology that includes accountability.
I don't usually believe in the death penalty. I only agree to it in the most horrendous national situations like what happened in Germany during WWII. If anyone responsible for the forced vaccinations, lock downs, lab created virus, is found to have purposely orchestrated this nightmare (and many of us believe they did - evidence points to it), then, YES, there should be full accountability up to and including execution. I think people like Miss Emily don't understand the full impact of what just happened or if they do, they want to scrub it and shove it under the carpet.
I tend to agree with your point that "I noticed an absence of repentance in Oster’s piece and wondered whether a differently framed essay might have better modeled the possibility of reconciliation."
This likely is the cause for most of the tense reactions I have seen too. You didn't mention how she also calls for more mandates in the same piece. It really shows where she is coming from and still motivated by fear. To me it's a very empty acceptance of actions like wishing ill on the unvaccinated. Without atonement we are doomed to repeat in the very doom loop she said she wants to avoid.
There should be some acceptance to the damage many measures did to people's livelihood and healthy social life but there is none. I don't want to ever go through that medical authoritarian hellstate ever again. Oster's piece does nothing but fan the fire for many that are still dealing with the fallout of onerous leadership decisions, myself included.
Oster's essay and your essay are nothing but self-serving BS. There was ample evidence early on that the virus was not serious for most and that early treatment using a combination of safe, inexpensive, repurposed drugs was the appropriate response. There was never a need to close schools, destroy small businesses, mask people, force them into isolation, deny them treatment, allow them to die alone, and impose vaccine mandates unless, of course, the goal was to coerce the population, via fear, to accept rushed-to-market, experimental injection$$$. Oh, wait. That was the goal. Mission accomplished. And, for what it's worth, speak for yourself. Some of us have no "COVID missteps" to apologize for. Not all of us have made "pandemic mistakes."
No, there wasn't. It took time before it was understood that older people were mostly at risk, and of course no one ever talks about Long Covid, which can be very devastating.
There was no evidence early on that other treatments worked, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been proven ineffective and even dangerous. The only treatment which shows any efficacy is remdesivir, and that wasn't discovered until very late in the pandemic.
You’re just flat out wrong.
One more comment. In your article you write that "Whatever the truth of the pandemic may be, it’s definitely not my truth, and it’s definitely not yours." I would argue that there were many of us that were actually right at the time on the key issues: a) masks were ineffective b) the negative impact of lockdowns far outweighed any small benefit to slowing down the disease c) school closures were damaging and unnecessary d) the vaccines were ineffective except for a ~4 month of good effectiveness e) the vaccines were not safe compared to other vaccines with the high excess mortality today indicative of major problems f) early treatment programs could have saved many lives but these programs were not even discussed.
Yet, people with these opinions were silenced, censored, ridiculed and ostracized, despite being right on all of these issues at that time. This cannot be allowed to happen again in the future. Those who imposed these incorrect concepts onto us without any rationale discussion have to be held accountable.
Read again the Great Barrington Declaration from October 2020. Those men and women are American heroes for standing up against this sea of poor measures imposed on the world. They were right in every respect.
No.
No contrition, no repentance, no apology, no admission of wrong doing, no compunction... NOTHING.
Try those first before asking for amnesty.
After the lockdown and death shot NAZI's spend 2 years profusely apologizing and acknowledging the exact human violations they committed against other human beings, their could be consideration for forgiveness for the human and physical rights violations.
Investigations and international trials might get things underway... we may never know exactly what happened, but many of the guilty actors are clear. Prosecute all involved.
After sincere progress is made by those seeking forgiveness, forbearance might be considered. There will be no exoneration. There will be no release. In other words, we will NEVER forget.
Sorry John, but do you understand the day to day reality that was inflicted on the unvaccinated (and still is, in many places across the globe). Because I truly think that is something you need to consider, before you tell people to move on and forgive. We were robbed of fundamental and inalienable civil liberties, in the space of mere hours (on 16 December 2021 I had those liberties, and at midnight on 17 December 2021, the mandates came in and the liberties were gone). People lost their ability to work and earn money for their families. Many were put into poverty as a result. Others were denied education. Freedom of movement was restricted. People in Canada were denied the ability to use trains and planes. Australians who were unvaccinated were prevented from leaving the country, when the borders were open for vaccinated Australians. Parents in Western Australia were prevented from visiting at children's hospitals, to be with their own sick infant children (no matter that this was obviously not in the best interests of the children in question). Personally, I was locked out of society for 5 months. Aside from not being able to go anywhere or do anything but meet friends for picnics basically, during that time: I was not allowed to attend at several friends weddings; my sister was kicked out of a family funeral (on that afternoon, it was difficult to look around my city and accept that Australia was still a democracy); we were told we could not meet a cousin's new baby; we were not allowed to visit family members sick in hospital (not having covid was not considered a relevant factor). I could go on and on and on. When we eventually got covid, I had no symptoms but sore muscles and my sister had no symptoms at all. The most jabbed person I know, an otherwise fit and healthy 40 year old cycling enthusiast, has had covid twice and attended at hospital on both occasions. So I would love to move on and forgive, and I consider that to be an important and necessary thing moving forward, but too much has transpired for that to happen without an apology, at the very least. Those that advocated for mandates and thus advocated for segregation and discrimination, need to admit they were wrong, and acknowledge the destruction they caused (which is great and which continues to pile up) if there is to be any hope at all that people move on. If I were in the public health business I would be concerned, because I'm a Solicitor and I can guarantee you that at some point, there will be inquiries and tribunals set up to investigate the harms from the mandates, and undoubtedly, people will be held responsible.
I don't see any public figures asking for forgiveness or explaining how sick they were in promoting hate against people who actually had the foresight to investigate and listen to all the censored voices.
Sorry you feel stupid now that you understand what just went down the last 2 years; however, I am a lay person and caught onto their lies back in March 2020. I never once feared for my life over this virus. I was scared sh**less over what the Government, Entertainers, Media, and Employers and people like Emily and the Atlantic were doing.
Forgiveness isn't a blanket over your errors or faults. To repent is to truly acknowledge the harm you caused. You be sorry, we get on the same page through conversation. Then, I forgive you.
I believe in forgiveness and agree with Emily Oster that no one got everything perfectly right. I also believe that we’re still in the fog of war a bit, and we won’t know the full picture for several more years after the politics and feelings of it all has faded. That being said, I am so angry. I’m not at all an angry person, but thinking of covid and the response to it is like a punch to the gut. I physically feel the anger.
Oster’s article received the reaction it did because it downplays everything. I’ve encountered this in real life quite a bit - when I complain about what has happened, people respond like, “oh, I’m sorry you had to wear a mask.” The masking was the very least of my issues. I’m angry that my job was threatened, I’m angry that I lost relationships, I’m angry that I got excommunicated from holidays, I’m angry that people were taken off the organ transplant waiting list, I’m angry that I haven’t seen my grandma for nearly three years because of covid restrictions. I’m angry at all the businesses that went under, I’m angry that no one stood up for me. I’m angry that doctors talked seriously of denying medical care to the unvaccinated or triaging them to the back of the line. I’m angry that people talked seriously of making the unvaccinated pay for their own care and denying them the use of insurance. I’m angry for all the people who missed cancer screenings, or had to live in pain far longer than necessary because their surgery or treatment was “not essential.” I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, but if folks like Emily want real forgiveness and reconciliation, they must admit the full extent of the damage and stop trying to minimize it.
There are times when societies seemingly go crazy for a few years. This happened in Nazi Germany. Thoughtful people can look on that event and wonder how they would have responded. Would they have stood up to the craziness? Fled the country? Gone along with it quietly or participated fully? We’ve now seen something similar happen in our lifetimes. The world seemingly went crazy for a couple of years. We didn’t turn into Nazi Germany, but we came pretty close. Government and authorities “othered” a significant portion of the population, casting them out of polite society and limiting their movement with passports. They encouraged families and individuals to do the same, and a large number of them did. Now is the time to apologize and reflect on this, but folks like Emily Oster can’t even acknowledge it happened.
I will pray for the mean spirited people who enjoyed hurting others include the WHO, Gates, politicians were exempted themselves and forced patients to die alone, the media calling people dumb and stupid and denying natural immunity, the ones involved with the origination cover-up, doctors who told vaccine injured "not related" offering no care, and medical staff who behaved like Nazis defiling the oath "do not harm".
I think that particularly in personal relationships, forgiveness, even if it is forgiveness while walking away from the relationship, can be important. But it is also sometimes the easy, "cheap" option.
You also need to honor the victims. That means, whether you are the "forgiver" or the "forgivee", work together for change. If you now feel bad about knowing people lost their jobs or got vaccine injured from a shot that they did not want, then work to make laws against vaccine mandates and vaccine status discrimination. If you were horrified by hospitals being required to use a protocol that was obviously killing most of their patients, then speak up for change. Hospital staff members who stated on twitter etc that they were up for killing or providing sub standard care to unvaccinated need to be investigated. Did they kill anyone knowingly? Why were infected patients sent into nursing homes?
Why were normal basic respiratory treatments for breathing, secondary infections, etc no longer given on an outpatient basis? How do we reform the CDC so that vaccine injuries like myocarditis are no longer being hidden or dismissed?
Forgiveness; Imo worry less about getting someone to say the words " I forgive you" and instead all of us work together to fix the problems and make sure it can't happen again. Learn from it. And in the end, forgiveness, which mostly has to come from each of us within anyway, will come also.
There's also a component to forgiveness you're leaving out. First there's repentance, then amends must be made, and finally forgiveness can occur. Not only was there no repentance in this article or in the attitude of anyone I've met with left leaning political persuasion but there has been no attempt at making amends, so forgiveness cannot happen. Also the act of forgiveness does not supersede the need for justice, after all one can choose their actions but they cannot choose their consequences unless they choose their actions with the consequences in mind.
Thanks for your comment. You're conflating forgiveness with: (1) reconciliation; and (2) justice. It may be that you personally are not willing to forgive in the absence of repentance (a precondition to reconciliation) or justice (usually administered by the state). But forgiveness is possible (and often extraordinarily powerful) without, or prior to, repentance or justice. I tried to make those distinctions in my post above; see also this piece: https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-incomprehensible-witness-of-forgiveness.
To my mind, there are two key paragraphs in the piece above on which you're commenting. The first begins: "Still, I remain uncertain how reconciliation should unfold in the wake of this pandemic." The second is the immediately following the first, which begins "But perhaps it is more plausible—and more actionable—to think about forgiveness and repentance in our individual and interpersonal relationships" (which ties back to the block quote from Michael Wear).
As for me personally, I don't convey direct repentance in the piece above because the examples of where I fell short are all interpersonal ones best addressed with particular individuals rather than in a public setting. If you can think of anything in my public commentary during the pandemic that you believe requires repentance, I would be glad to consider it. For what it's worth, I've made relatively little public commentary about the pandemic or responses to it. You can find my most comprehensive assessment and commentary here: https://johninazu.substack.com/p/covid-19-churches-and-culture-wars.
Your piece in Hedgehog Review is excellent. Thanks for linking to it; may it redeem the rest of this thread!
Prof Oster's piece is an attack on the medical establishment & Dems/liberals. Not a word about what the RW was wrong about, and the RW was wrong on the most fundamental thing - Covid was much more deadly than the flu, 10x more deadly.
The RW was wrong about so much more than that: precautions taken to slow the spread, masks, lockdowns worked and we know this because the 20/21 flu season was almost nonexistent. 1M people died of Covid and if the Covid deniers had their way, it would have likely been double that. Our medical system was pressed to the breaking point, had we let the virus spread freely, it would have been in complete collapse.
The virus would go away when the weather got warm, Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work, don't take the vaccine, nearly everyone dying from Covid is unvaccinated. I could go on and on but the RW were the ones who were mostly wrong, gravely wrong. Had we done what they wanted, right now we would be screaming at them for the absolute catastrophe they allowed to happen.
Are you capable of admitting you are wrong about anything?
Many on the RW, including Trump, were saying Covid was no worse than the flu. Are you denying this?
Wow, John. I just read through all of the comments you've received (after posting my first, the reference to the road rage liturgy). It was painful! Who knew that the very mention of forgiveness could evoke so much rage??!! First Oster--and now you--are clearly touching on some raw nerves.
I will say, I heard her interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered, where, offered a chance to "tell us what you'd like to say to those who have disagreed with you," she could have done a lot more to apologize and ask for forgiveness herself.
Advocating forgiveness can be tricky. It really is vital that we model both forgiveness and repentance ourselves. No, let me reverse those two: it's vital that we model repentance and forgiveness, in that order, although the two are inextricably interwoven.
God have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
John -- Your reference in passing to how you view those who drive faster or slower than you (you and I are, of course, Goldilocks drivers, doing everything "just right"), reminded me of this liturgy that I read recently in the first volume of Every Moment Holy. Its message applies to all forms of "self-generated righteousness," including that surrounding Pandemic policies and personal choices. I certainly found it convicting.
A Liturgy for Experiencing Road Rage
If my heart were more content in you, O Lord,
I would be less inclined to rage at others.
Let me gauge by the knot in my gut,
the poverty of my own understanding
of the grace that I have received
from a God who, loving me,
chose rather to receive wounds
than to give them.
Take from me my self-righteousness,
and my ego-driven demands for respect.
Overthrow the tyranny of my anger, O Lord,
and it its place establish a better vision
of your throne, your kingdom, and your peace.
Amen.
It IS very helpful to be reminded of the overwhelming grace that we have received; and to keep that in mind when tempted to lash out.