Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today I want to address an open letter to the progressive hysterical woman who hectored me in a local park this week as I jogged without a mask. And she said, you, where is your mask? Don't you know you're risking the health and well-being of the rest of us by not wearing one?

We all need to do our part. It may be a sacrifice, but all of us need to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. And she went on like this until I just moved on. Now this was an exercise in social shaming. And this is going to happen more and more in our COVID culture.

Social shaming designed to alter my behavior in accordance with the dictates of the herd instinct. More on this momentarily. What is the herd instinct? Well, I politely told her to mind her own business, perhaps consider for tomorrow a mask that covered her whole face. But as I jogged, I thought, well, this encounter might serve as a kind of metaphor for the whole coronavirus crisis.

If I were to answer her more thoughtfully instead of with an insult or an apology, I guess, what would I say? Well, first of all, I thought of the people of Israel when they were poised to go into the land after God had delivered them from Egypt and they sent out 12 spies to spy out the land of Canaan and then come back with a report. And you may remember from this incident in the book of Numbers in the Old Testament that indeed of those 12 spies, two of them brought back a good report. The land is flowing with milk and honey, right? It took two men to carry one cluster of grapes.

They were so large and fruitful. That was Joshua and Caleb who brought back a good report. And they were the ones who ended up of all the tribe of Israel, tribes of Israel. It was Joshua and Caleb who were the only ones that eventually did go into the land. Well, 10 of the others, spies, then they brought back a bad report and just terrified the people of Israel, just as bad as America is terrified today of this coronavirus.

Now, I'm not exegeting the text in exact accordance with the rules of exegesis, but I'm merely making an analogy here between the terror and the fear and the hysteria of Israel and the terror and the fear and the hysteria of the American people now over this virus, right? Well, Numbers tells us that that night all the people of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly said to them, if only we had died in Egypt or in this desert, why is the Lord bringing us to the land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder.

Wouldn't it be better for us to go back to Egypt? And they said to each other, we should choose a leader and go back to Egypt. There is true fear and hysteria and terror. Oh, the whole assembly, when Moses tried to talk them out of it, the whole assembly talked about stoning them. Oh, and God threatened, I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them.

Funny that he would use a plague to do that. I wonder if it was the coronavirus he had in mind. And he says to Moses and Aaron, I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they. Oh, then the men Moses had sent to explore the land who returned and made the whole community grumble against him by spreading a bad report about it. These men, the Bible tells us, responsible for spreading the bad report about the land were struck down and died of a plague before the Lord.

Oh, dear listener, this is the same kind of terror and fear and herd instinct, I submit to you, that we face here in this country today. And the Lord is not pleased with us, I submit to you. Well, when I thought of this situation, I thought immediately of Ben Franklin's remark about trading liberty for safety, for that's what America wants to do now. Oh, we're so panicked and hysterical about this thing that we're willing to trade our liberty for a promise of safety. No guarantees, of course.

Oh, Ben Franklin said, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. How insightful that saying is, because it's precisely what's transpiring now in America. Oh, as we speak, the current shutdown ordered by Governor Little, and more broadly, by the federal government in Washington, D.C. In it, we are promised safety from the coronavirus pandemic if we just surrender our constitutional liberties. That is virtually shut down now for the time being, isn't it?

Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. We are not able to exercise our Christian faith as congregations, right? Or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble. That peaceable assembly is now forbidden, isn't it? Our governments, both federal and state, have flattened our liberties in this amendment as thoroughly as an 18-wheeler flattens roadkill on a highway.

I can't practice my Christian faith on Sunday, but Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota can practice theirs on Friday. My freedom of speech to preach in my church is gone. My church's freedom to peaceably assemble is gone. Oh, but pastor, a condescendingly clueless Christian told me, it's only for a little while until this emergency passes. Oh, is that so?

Is that so? In the first place, there's no foreseeable end as lockdown extensions follow one after another. Even if they do end temporarily, they will be reimposed in the near future. You can guarantee that as night follows day. As surely as love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, these shutdowns will continue and follow one after another.

And then regardless of how short or long the shutdown is, where does any government get the authority to take my liberty for any cause? Oh, it doesn't, dear listener. And it's time we stood up and said this clearly. My liberties are unalienable and they are given by my creator, not by government. And they can't be taken away by government either.

Neither you nor your government have the authority to take, suspend, or diminish them in any way. It doesn't matter whether a pestilence takes 0.9 or 99% of a population. No government has the right to deprive me of my liberties, even for a day. Rather, in an emergency situation like ours, and we are admittedly in an emergency situation, the government does have an advisory and a support role in an event like this. The resources, marshal and supplied, can still be provided.

All of the resources and all of the advice provided by both federal and state governments can still be offered and provided without the draconian measures before us. Advice from places like the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health can still be given and strongly exhorted. But the force of government is beyond our constitutional boundaries. The progressive tyrant Rahm Emanuel, the late mayor of Chicago and an advisor to Barack Obama, is famous for saying, never let a good crisis go to waste.

He certainly has one here, in which he and other progressives can implement drastic draconian control measures which the American people would otherwise instinctively reject. But here, under the promise of safety in a life-threatening pandemic, government bureaucrats can erect sweeping dictatorial measures to control the population, and these dictatorial measures then, in the end, never go away after the threat has gone away. But Rahm Emanuel is less famous for another saying of socialism, and that goes like this. First, we will try the power of persuasion. If that doesn't work, then we will try the persuasion of power.

Oh, ominous, isn't it? Behold, America, this little witticism unfolding before you. The first part does indeed encapsulate the proper role of government in this situation, and that is, the power of persuasion. Make the case, government. Use reason, facts, and science.

The American people will decide for themselves, right or wrong, but you must persuade them, not compel them. What tyranny does is the second part of that saying, and that is, we will try the persuasion of power. They will use brute force to make you comply. If you are out on the wave surfing in California by yourself, as one guy was doing, there's film of this, far from anyone else, the county sheriff will still send out boats into the ocean to arrest you. If you're playing catch in your front yard with your children, the police in Ohio will still handcuff you in front of your children and take you away.

If you violate a governor's ban on church services in Kentucky, and this is being done by congregating on Sunday morning, the sheriff will take down your license number in the parking lot and order you to quarantine for two weeks. Ah, dear listener, how quickly our liberties go away, and tyranny appears in its place. The essence is that my constitutional liberties do not become non-essential because of a temporary necessity. Necessity, necessity. Oh, we need to do this.

It's so urgent. Well, as William Pitt, the great statesman of England, said, necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves. How right he is.

Necessity. And we are under necessity in our day, aren't we? But it is always the plea for every infringement of human freedom, and it's being done to us now. It is the argument of tyrants, Pitt says. It is the creed of slaves.

Do you want to be a slave or do you want to be a freeman? American, if you give in to the plea of necessity and give up your liberties, as many of us have, rolling over, showing our belly, well then, you richly deserve your slavery. And, oh, I'm afraid this includes you, dear lady that I met in the park, our coronavirus queen. And then secondly, I would say to her, just because you're acting impulsively from your deeply ingrained herd instinct, that doesn't mean that your actions are in accord with reality. No, just because you're acting on herd impulse doesn't mean that you're acting in accordance with reality.

We've heard a lot lately about herd immunity, haven't we? It's become a buzzword. The CDC defines it as a situation in which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune to an infectious disease to make it spread from person to person unlikely. That means that when lots of people are immune, fewer people get sick and fewer germs and viruses are able to spread from person to person. Well, while that condition, it's a ways off yet from obtaining in America, another condition has overwhelmed the culture, and that is herd instinct.

Not herd immunity, but herd instinct. The definition of herd instinct is the obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection. That's what's going on here with the compliance to all these Orwellian measures. The obedience of the individual to the mass, blindly and without reflection. Reflection.

Herd instinct. Now, under the right circumstances, the herd instinct is a survival instinct. When one wildebeest on the African savanna spots a lion, for instance, lions on the hunting, that wildebeest uses its God-given adaptation, which is speed, to flee, well then, the herd follows and it survives. It doesn't have to see the lion to verify its presence before fleeing. It follows the mass, blindly and without reflection.

And then, only the weak and the old fall behind and are thus culled from the herd by the lion. This phenomenon has occurred in human history, too. From the 3rd to the early 5th century, whole populations in Europe fled from the barbarian hordes that invaded in great sweeping waves, raping, pillaging, burning, and killing as they went. No one had to see or meet a barbarian in order to get out of dodge with all due haste, right? The herd instinct caused many to survive who would have otherwise perished.

And during this period, the demographics of Europe changed significantly, too, as a whole new populations resettled in areas previously unknown to them. The herd instinct can change history. For better or worse, that condition is fully established in America today, the herd instinct. And it is changing our history, too. Just as fear drives the wildebeest on and on through the savannah, just as fear drove the 3rd century European on and on, blindly, without reflection, into unknown territory, so today, fear is driving the herd of Americans on and on, blindly, without reflection, into unknown territory.

And that is tyranny. Because while the herd instinct can save lives, it can also destroy lives. Lion prides work together to use the wildebeest herd instinct to drive them to waiting members of the pride. And the Plains Indians used to drive buffalo herds over cliffs, using their herd instinct to harvest a winter's bounty of protein. And famously, of course, the lemmings herd instinct drives them blindly, without reflection, over the cliffs of Dover into the sea.

But, like lemmings, the herd instinct is destroying us. Here in America, it's not saving us. The threat is not commensurate to the measures being taken, dear listener. That's the important point. The threat we are under is not commensurate to the measures that are being taken to ameliorate it.

The measures being taken are destroying the herd. It is one thing for a lion to threaten the wildebeest, a small cub, or a hyena. Hyenas feed on already dead carrion. They can't catch a wildebeest. Well, that's not a threat.

To ignite the herd instinct over a non-threat like this is far more destructive than the supposed threat. Now, there's a qualifier that I have to make here. I'm not saying that the coronavirus is not a threat. It is. It is nasty if you contract it.

And its symptoms are awful. And it can kill. It has killed. But the evidence is that the threat, though real, is not commensurate with the drastic draconian measures being taken by our politicians. Oh, they all love control, don't they?

They're all exulting in this. Well, thus far, for example, Idaho has 1,609 confirmed cases with 41 deaths. And this is out of a population of 1,826,156. That proportion does not call for the measures being taken by our Idaho state government. And in the United States of America as a whole, there have been over 632,000 cases, confirmed cases, with over 31,000 deaths out of a population of over 350 million.

That, too, once again, is the drastic draconian measures. Leveling a country in order to level an ephemeral graph is way out of proportion, not commensurate at all with the measures being taken. In the history of epidemiology, there has never been such a disproportionate response to a pandemic as this one. Now, in those nations which have dealt with this successfully, like South Korea, strategic extensive testing for the virus, identifies many, if not most, of the victims who are then quarantined. The victims are quarantined.

The rest of the population, most of whom are otherwise healthy, are free to go about their normal lives. You don't have to crash the economy to get at a few cases of coronavirus. But what do we do? Instead, we quarantine the healthy so that they're not able to go about their normal lives. What are the results?

What are the results, dear listener? Ah, suicides increase. Number one, for a variety of reasons, suicides increase. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline has seen incoming calls triple since the recession started due to the shutdown, right? And although there are no reliable stats yet on how many more suicides there are to date, the World Journal of Psychiatry reports, and I quote them, they say, economic recession periods appear to increase overall suicide rates, unquote.

Well, then there's also unemployment. Unemployment numbers are approaching historic levels. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts unemployment rates over 15%, that's up from a low of under 3% before the virus recession, many others, many other economists think it is much, much higher, really, in reality, as much as 35%, since the Bureau's numbers lag behind the actual situation on the ground. But that's not hard to predict, is it? You just look out your door, look at the streets downtown.

We can see all around us, no one is working. And then there are small businesses, too. Most of them, family-owned or partnerships, they have had to close, too. So many of them with tight margins of profits and overhead, these will not recover. Your favorite restaurant or hair salon or Pilates studio may or may not be able to reopen when this stupid stay-at-home order is lifted.

Oh, evidence is coming in as well, dear listener. That once strong food chain in America, which supplies our rich and abundant and varied diet of food from farm to processor to distributor to grocer to your table, that food chain is beginning to break down. Pigs and chickens are being slaughtered and rendered into fat instead of bacon. Oh, that's got to be one of the greatest tragedies of all this. No bacon being produced.

That hurts me. Farmers are also pouring milk out on the ground because restaurants no longer purchase it. On and on we could go in this food chain. And all of these may well combine to plunge us into a full-scale depression, many predict. Is this leveling of our country worth leveling some ephemeral coronavirus curve?

Researchers have confirmed that death and disease did increase during the Great Depression by the millions due to malnutrition, not starvation. There's a myth going around that people starve during the Great Depression. There's not a lot of evidence for that. And there's a popular figure going around of 7 million. And that's quite exaggerated, according to other researchers.

It's from the Russian state mouthpiece Pravda, but it's not a reliable figure. But nevertheless, millions did die of death and disease due to malnutrition. You don't eat enough food. You don't eat the right kinds of food, a kind of full diet that provides you with all the vitamins and minerals and nutrition that your body needs. Then you are going to find yourself malnourished and prone to a whole array of different conditions and diseases.

And this indeed did happen and might well happen to us if indeed the food supply in the food chain is short circuited. Well, all of this is to show that the herd instinct, that herd instinct that I saw so clearly, it was just an evangelical and a fervent heart that she had to preserve the species. And you weren't helping to preserve the species by not wearing a mask. Well, that herd instinct to ramp up our collective adrenaline levels and that herd instinct to foster panic and fear in order to stampede us, they're not only destructive, but seem to be very effective.

They were very effective on that person in the park by whom I jogged on that day. There's something primal, isn't there, about working together through this crisis, sacrificing for the greater good. Don't question authority. They know better than us, the old expert syndrome that we see so often, isn't it? We can all hold hands and sing kumbaya around a campfire, especially since the soon will be no more power grid if this keeps up.

And we can virtue signal all day to our friends that we are part of the team as we don our masks and bring our tape measures to ensure we're six feet from you. So 21 feet is now the new separation point and it's kind of confusing to me. And we will snitch on our neighbors when they're outside playing with their children. These are all incidences that have actually happened in the news. Snitch on those that are playing outside with their children or lifting weights in their front yard.

And we can hunt you down in a forest preserved picnic ground and we will try and publicly shame you for not wearing a mask or getting too close or sneezing due to an allergy. The United States is going hysterically insane like Israel did in the promised land at the doorstep of the promised land. We're going hysterically insane too as this herd instinct drives us to complete self-destruction. Oh, as a young boy, I loved going over to my grandma's house for sleepovers. She was always so sweet and she doted on me and spoiled me.

But early in the morning, she would cook breakfast for myself and grandfather. I remember one morning in particular, she was preparing breakfast. The little mouse started scurrying around the kitchen floor and my grandma completely panicked in hysterical fear. She threw a pan of eggs at it and went for her broom too. As she swung that broom, a pan of bacon went flying off the stove.

That was the worst part of the day. Glass was shattered, china broken up in a thousand pieces. And by the time she came to her senses, the entire kitchen looked like a World War II movie set. And to top it off, the mouse got away. This is a metaphor for America, dear listener.

Like my hysterical grandmother, America is in a state of panicked fear. It is destroying the country to get a little elusive ephemeral virus. My grandma's mouse got away in the end and there's already mounting evidence that no matter what we do, this virus has a path of its own, which must play out before we achieve that desired end that is herd immunity. But for now we have indeed herd instinct, don't we, that panics. But it's time to wake up from our collective hysteria, our self-righteous virtue signaling herd instinct delirium and get America back on its prime directive.

And that's building a Christian constitutional republic. Oh, dear listener, I hope that we can indeed aspire then to a Christian constitutional republic in days to come. It is what God has destined us for, and it is indeed that to which we will come. Some of us will anyway. Others may fall behind, but some of us will persevere.

May you persevere through this day and time, dear listener. And I would just exhort God's richest blessing on you and hope that this indeed is the case for you. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Call us to find out when and where we will be meeting in the future. You can call us at area code 208-523-0196.

Area code 208-523-0196. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.