CHURCH: The Coronavirus — Were Medieval Times Really That Bad?

There is a silver lining to this viral monstrosity we call Covid-19, i.e the Coronavirus: we’re being compelled to act as though our homes and home-lives are of primary importance and that the home is not just the place where you park the leftover “luxury” spending that didn’t go into your 401-K; it’s the place where you actually live, love, raise a family and offer the fruits of that sacrifice to God and society. Put another way, the coronavirus is, by its wretched, unnatural fiat, rekindling the family-home life.

Daily life in the U.S. has become a frenetic series of inorganic events that can only be explained by their own necessity. Going to work in an office miles if not hours away from home has become a kind of requirement for respectability. Without any consideration of what is being asked, small talk with strangers invariably will generate this question: “where do you work?” The “where” assumes you’ve not chosen to work in the home, a mortal sin against mandatory career progression. Absence from the home for 10-12 hours a day is therefore a paradigm to which we are all members of even though none of us were given the chance to vote on the matter. Why would anyone with an inkling of conservative tradition think this is normal much less healthy for family life? Yet, here we are.

The staggering number of those entities that have shut their doors due to the irrational COVID-19 “terror” shows us something pertinent to our story: a vast majority of them market or vend consumption. Facebook, Comicon and the NBA fit this billing. Let me be more specific, they market or vend leisure or luxury consumption. “Mr. Church why does that matter and why are you blathering on about it!?” It matters because nearly all of this consumption slices into family time if not completely eliminates it.

Some may be shocked to read that I also view their darling’s “college” as a consumption activity instead of education. Sorry, but today’s predominantly female, SJW guided universities are not only consuming current time and resources, to say nothing of their removal from the family home, they are also consuming future earnings and resources that must be earned to pay back the student loans used to finance this current folly. Then there is also the fact that none of these young women will begin their own families by choosing to become wives and mothers, while their male counterparts are busy playing their own consumption activities of the digital variety; much of it pornographic.

In the husband-wife, married families that remain intact every year vast majorities of them are made up of a pair of commuters. In fact, according the Brookings Institute, “Over 76 percent of Americans drive alone to work every day… [c]onsidering that ACS counted 150 million workers in 2016, that’s at least 115 million cars and trucks hitting American streets every day.” [emphasis mine-MC] This is a recipe for civilizational decline precisely on the scale of what we currently see. The effect on family time, including time spent parenting, should be obvious, but that’s not the worst part.

Kendra Heilpern points out that this dysfunction has now created “commuter marriages.”

“[A]ccording to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 3.5 million couples in the United States live separately for reasons other than an impending divorce. Many of these are ‘commuter marriages.’ This number has more than doubled since 1990.”  Any conservative that is comfortable repeating what they just read is part of the problem. This is an abomination against common sense, natural law and, yes, the 4th Commandment.

The COVID-19 hysteria that has sent tens of millions or adults and their young adult children back to their homes for work or school is actually imposing the healthy routine a natural, Christian, married household should be living. It’s a restoration of Medieval life but with indoor plumbing and powered alarm clocks, great! I suggest you get out the Sorry Game, shuffle a deck of cards and learn to bake some homemade bread together and then do the previously unimaginable: sit down and eat together, enjoy being a family again, and talk about how ridiculous this coronavirus scare is.