Pretexts

 The problem with pretexts is that they don’t have to be rational, logical, or even make sense. It’s not as though you’re trying to convince the guy who worked half his life to build a business that you are justified in looting it and burning down the remnants of whatever you didn’t steal because someone three states over got shot by the cops. It’s a ludicrous premise. You know it, I know it, they know it, and the entire country knows it by now.

To those who try to use pretexts to justify their actions, whether those actions are keeping churches shuttered, schools boarded up, or businesses closed, never take into account the irreparable damage they may be causing, directly or indirectly. Your feelings, wellbeing, livelihood, mental health, or quality of life never enter into the equation, and even if they did, they would be dismissed outright. The perverse out that the greater good theory gives to every despotic mini-tyrant is that they are hurting the individual for the sake of the greater good, and that makes them good and noble.

Even when the science they so orgasmically touted as being the alpha and omega of their decision-making process began to chip away at their narrative, they surmised that science just hadn’t caught up. We’re saving lives, man, and even if we save one life, then that’s one life saved! Strangely, that’s not the same attitude they have towards something like I don’t know, abortion.

This is not so much a warning as it is a statement after the fact. This is not a prescription for betterment; it is an obituary. This is how nations die, and we are witnessing a slow-motion disaster in the making. The horse is out of the barn, and it likes the freedom it has to roam wild, do as it wills, and answer to no one.

What freedoms or constitutional rights will evaporate into the ether via the use of some pretext or another? Understand that those who have discovered this mechanism of control will attempt to use it again, and again, as often as they can, until they are stopped or run out of office.

Evidently, we the people are not so quick on the uptake, since it took almost six months for even the household of faith to realize that the two weeks of lockdowns we were told were necessary to flatten the curve have turned into twenty weeks of lockdowns.

Now that people are beginning to shake off the slumber and take an objective look at what their nation has become, threats, fines, and possible prison time have become the cudgels the power structure will use to beat the citizen into submission. Since resistance is inevitable, the more the citizen resists, the more draconian the tyrants will become, because power is the most addictive drug in the world, and giving it up is not an option if one can avoid it.

Whatever the pretext, however, convoluted the logic, as a child of God, you must understand that you’ve always been the target, and eventually, the crosshairs will settle on the church. Thus far, it’s only fines and nuisance actions, like not allowing congregants to use city parking spaces, but everything must have a beginning, and this is just that. Even baby steps in the wrong direction are worrisome, and what we are seeing is by no means baby steps.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.