1. A New Home
Nursing and elderly living homes across the country have been converted into what I call “K.I.N.D.” camps (Canadian Institutions for the Nullification of Disease).* The seniors of society, whose wisdom and value we’re commanded to cherish, are the immediate victims of its inception. Our Premiers, Chief Medical Officers, and Prime Minster act as the executives, while local health managers handle the more detailed and personal aspects of the camps. The purpose of K.I.N.D.’s “humanitarian” design is to control the spread of viruses like Covid, influenza, unauthorized thought, and unregulated speech. The guarantee of safe, secure, and long life, free of danger, is the ethic they believe society needs to achieve. Official and unofficial proponents of this dogma, present in the academic, legislative, and medical domains, propagate safety and security as virtues that must be attained no matter what.
So, our parents and grandparents are the inaugural inhabitants of K.I.N.D.’s created dystopia. Doubtless, the administrators responsible for these unprecedented lockdowns of senior citizen homes disagree with me. They argue that extraordinary measures like confining patients to their rooms and only permitting 1 or 2 family members ever to see them are for their benefit. I fail to see how. Not when these poor prisoners were never given a choice in the matter. But how did we allow this to happen?
As a positive consequence of free-market capitalism, the opportunity for individuals to diversify their capital became apparent and available. The historical farmer could now study, put his newfound talents of maths and physics to productive use, and become an astrophysicist. Thus, our knowledge of the sciences has advanced very greatly in the previous hundreds of years. And because of its progression, we have produced experts in nearly every field. It’s precisely because they’re experts that we rely on them to inform us of the rules and realities of their discipline. For example, the epidemiologist determines the probability of infectious outbreaks and their relative rates of death. I do not have the intellectual ability, nor the time, to conduct the necessary research and analysis that achieves a sufficient understanding of the subject, so I must look to the expert.
Thus, if a government or society determines that it must achieve absolute safety for its citizens, experts must rule. Only experts know what’s truly safe. In a K.I.N.D. camp, democracy and law cannot reign because they have nothing to do with safety primarily, but majority and justice and legislative restraint. If we are to be secure, then we dare not elect a leader for fear that the people might choose a man who is uneducated in the relative science. Instead, the concern with temporal life has ensured the experts must become, in essence, dictators. Because of their education, they are allotted unrestrained power “for the benefit of the subject.”
2. An Old Horror
But the advanced education of a scientist doesn’t permit him a sort of moral superiority over his fellow man. On the contrary, scripture is absolute and uncompromising when it says that “there is no one righteous, no not one (Romans 3:10), and “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Irrespective of personality, time, or education, the truth is all men are sinful. We often think ourselves so good and virtuous that we will instinctively do what’s right, that those operating K.I.N.D. camps would never dare commit any harm, but history wallops us back into reality. All people, experts or not, are naturally cruel creatures with a proclivity to act lawlessly. With its monopoly on the use of force in the name of law, the institution of government restrains us. Just punishments make crime undesirable—for this, we are thankful. But what about those above the law? What about the experts who now make laws in the name of safety?
Thus, our justified concern is evident:
All people are sinful and will commit egregious actions if unrestrained.
Experts are people
Experts are sinful and will commit egregious actions if unrestrained.
And so, our senior citizens are experiencing the full consequences of being isolated at a K.I.N.D. camp. They are locked in their rooms and treated like animals with a foreign disease. It’s like going to the zoo. The heartbroken must remain outside the “exhibit,” separated by an iron curtain of glass from the ones they adore. The healthcare aids, many of whom are performing their duties with distinction under these impossible conditions, have been transformed into handlers. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they must enter the resident’s enclosure with all the safety and precaution of a zookeeper trying to feed a tiger.
This is the great cruelty of the K.I.N.D. doctrine; it disregards our nature and replaces it with something primal. By declaring that which is not inherently ethical, to be inherently ethical, our rulers are trying to change the essence of man. And by disregarding our nature, they can, “for the good of mankind,” treat us as something other than human.
Along with countless other citizens in the province and country, I have sent letters and petitioned our respective governors. We are pleading with them to reform the policy regarding these seniors homes. We have seen little improvement. In fact, I daresay the situation has become more serious. These seniors are merely existing, not living. There are no friends, no family, no pastor, no entertainment, only loneliness in the name of survival. They are dying of depression. But because K.I.N.D. is the brandished solution proposed by leaders, because neither I, nor the families, nor the residents of seniors homes are experts in Covid and safety, our complaints are duly noted and promptly dismissed.
3. An Eternal Highness
Of course, if this life is all there is, if we are nothing more than a combination of universal elements like carbon and hydrogen, then there’s really no way to argue that the imprisonment of our seniors is wrong. Absent an objective moral standard, we cannot declare this treatment of our elders to be cruel. Instead, justice ebbs and flows from legislation to legislation. The closest thing to any sort of fundamental law would be the commands from K.I.N.D.’s administration. Last year, we might have understood that living five years longer through some action did not guarantee the morality of the action. But this year, under the direction of these new agencies, longevity of life and safety are becoming supreme ethics by which they measure justice itself.
Yet the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day, vindicating Him and His claims, along with the natural law and the law revealed from Heaven, proves to us that there is an objective moral law. The moral setter, by which a thing can be called “just” or “unjust,” is Christ. Because we know this, now we can ask the real question—“does safety and relative susceptibility to danger determine what legislation is right?”
I am susceptible to grain dust as a consequence of my asthma. Should I be not only forbidden to walk outside during harvest time, but locked in my room, unable to see friends who farm incase they have dust residue on their jacket? Is that automatically just? I’m not so sure. Justice is clear and present if a law or command reflects the character of God. Justice is denied if a law or command doesn’t reflect the character of God. Locking a man away from companions, forestalling, by unnatural isolation, something that has already been appointed for everyone, and treating him less than human, is wrong because Christ says so (Matthew 22:39, Genesis 1:27).
Death by Covid, which is incredibly rare according to its 99.978% survival rate,** is not a victory for the virus. Don’t we know we’re going to die anyway? No, true victory for Covid is when it creates these K.I.N.D. camps, has us cowering in every corner, and ensures we face the most unnatural event of life, death, alone. Then, Covid has conquered us.
*Of course, nursing homes haven't actually been converted into actual "K.I.N.D. camps." I simply made the name up to describe what's happening there--information on what truly happens inside the homes is heavily censored here in Canada. My information therefore is directly from an extended family member living in one.
**Statistics from World Data