Now that Trump is COVID-positive

friend chided me last night that she thought I only wrote about negative things. She is correct. Nobody writes about positive things as often and there is a simple explanation for that.

The number of flights all over the world in one day is 102,465. Multiply that number twice you have 204,930 takeoffs and landings everyday. Three airplanes take off or land safely somewhere around the world every single second. You never read about it much in the newspapers or see it in the evening news on TV because it is only that one airplane crashing in a fiery heap that makes it to the headline.

   There is a place you can find good report--it's called the bible. Every other agent of news is a harbinger of gloom and doom. That is not a defect of news--it is its definition.  It is not a question of  positive or negative news content either. A sad event is not guaranteed wide press coverage, especially if it's  the kind that repeats. The fact that 207,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 is not getting as much press now than the coming into the US of the first Ebola patient--we're talking of one person--back in September 30, 2014. 

   It made the news because that one person broke the glass ceiling of complacency. His coming into the US was the end of popular innocence about the dreadful disease. That is the same order of newsworthiness that engendered the announcement of US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump both testing positive for COVID-19.  If the scoffers  were unfazed by the death of 207,000 faceless and nameless people they have neither met nor wiil ever meet, this time the news involved the all-too familiar.  Finally, the President of the United States who has led his nation in denial must fight  the disease he had only confronted with wishful thinking up to this point.  Not only will he now reckon the truth, he now has no choice but to believe it.

   The negative news of their infection is a milestone. It's a refutation of everything Trump said wrong about coronavirus, and an affirmation of everything everyone else said right.  Social distancing, wearing of masks, moratoriums on mass gatherings and a recognition of specific ethno- and socioeconomic vulnerability of certain classes and communities of individuals--all of these will now cease to be mere punchlines. Hopefully, they will now become the defining credo of a more rational policy for public safety protection. It took the diminutive virus a while, but it finally manged to afflict a worthy opponent: an enlightened Donald Trump.

   In the wild, monkeys avoided eating the red berries because its bright color advertised danger. It takes the alpha ape to sample the red berries before the whole gang of simians followed suit and feasted on the bountiful food supply. For months the scientific community had been laying out fields of red berries to fight people's information malnutrition. They were roundly rejected by Donald Trump who chose to espouse a perversion of blind faith, and prophesied that COVID-19 would eventually "go away as if by a miracle." 

   Shades of oracle  talk like that  sits well with his evangelical bailiwick but the virus was not as ecumenical.  Viruses obey God more perfectly than any human believer. They act  as any God-created being does--reproducing themselves in the host. So to humans God gave intelligence to use in constructing a wall between the virus and themselves. That wall was the science of natural medicine. What Donald Trump didn't realize is  rejecting  the science about the disease is a dog whistle  to his cult-like following to reject their best chances of staying healthy--indeed, their best chances of  staying alive. Safe in his biological bunker, with everyone else outside of it, his own protection is not an achievement in improving the prospects for everyone else.  

   Stripped of his biological bunker--a protocol so tight people are tested for COVID-19 days before they face him and get retested for days after--Trump can rely only on true medicine from this point on. There will be no quaffing megadoses of hydroxychloroquine, or shooting Lysol up a palpated vein. There will be no UV lights floodlit into body orifices.  Most of all, there will be no more mockery of the cautiousness that was all  the unvaccinated populace had against a menace no one can see.  If only the enlightenment had come earlier than the infection, doctors would be signing fewer death certificates. But they would be signing much more if the infection had not come at all. 

   Donald Trump, if nothing else just out of residual pride, might still argue with the truth. But he cannot argue with a virus that doesn't care about what he believes or not.  That's what makes this negative development a point of hope ultimately. Knowing that  the outcome at the end of the day is determined by a sovereign higher than both the virus and Donald Trump.   You must not pray for someone to get sick. But when someone's  sickness can pave the way for others' healing, you must not  argue either about who God allowed this thing to happen to.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON