COVID-19, THE DISRUPTION OF "GATHERING," AND THE EVIL OF LOCK-DOWNS

One of the incontrovertibly immutable attributes of the human nature is Gathering. Arguably, Gathering also is one of the Communicable Attributes of God; if not an actual attribute, or one that stands on its own, then certainly one that is implicitly part of, or derived from, the communicable attributes of God—love, goodness, justice, righteousness, wisdom. None of those Godly attributes are applicable in isolation; they are meaningful only where two or more people are Gathered. Without a Gathering, there is only a Subject in our sentence; the Object does not exist. Without a Gathering, there is no object of love, justice, goodness or righteousness, thus rendering those attributes of our nature meaningless.

Whether it is two of us (as in Adam and Eve) or 2 billion of us, our norm—our deep desire—is to Gather. You might say that, unlike Covid-19, which is Pandemic, Gathering is Endemic: it is ever-present in all geographical locations, among all peoples, at all times. We are infected by Gathering, and hopeless to annihilate it if we wanted to, as it has proven to be indefatigable even when people perversely have tried to repress and destroy it, as is happening now in the Coronavirus Panic.

All of us—each of us—is a magnet to the rest of us. The laws of nature require that we Gather. To wish to not do so is the anomaly, the unnatural. Gathering is our healthy norm; separation and isolation are the diseases that disrupt and destroy that norm. In our novels and movies, isolation represents the ultimate trauma: being stranded on an island by one's self; solitary confinement in a prison; confinement to a nursing home; abandonment; loneliness. The inability to Gather with others, to connect with them, is our saddest state. It is the basis of many a mental illness. It wounds our very souls.

Experience, observation and studies have shown that we are at our happiest, at our best, when we Gather. The stories we love in books, in poetry, in movies, invariably involve Gathering. Two people fall in love; a family takes a vacation; a nation fights for its survival; a team wins a championship; prisoners of war form cliques that give them the hope to survive; communities come together to help the less fortunate. Gathering is a plural word that derives from the very reason for—the heart of—our existence.

Covid-19, the Great Pandemic of 2020, has disrupted-—has almost altogether destroyed—our normal patterns of Gathering. We no longer Gather with relatives outside our own households. We don't Gather with friends. Workplace gathering—the real, face-to-face kind, not the artificial video-conference kind—is all but verboten. We don't gather in our places of worship. Our children don't go to school. Almost everything in our lives that is good and wholesome—everything that promotes and supports our mental and physical well-being—involves Gathering, And Gathering has been quashed by Covid-19.

To be fair and accurate, though, it is not Covid-19 that has wrecked Gathering. Covid-19 is a virus. It has done nothing but invade our bodies and make them ill. It has no capacity for anything more than that. Destroying our ability to Gather, our happiness, our security, our mental health, requires moral agency. A virus does not have moral agency. When it comes to the damage that has been done by invoking lock-downs during the Covid-19 pandemic, in the words of the immortal Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and it is us."

As some prisoners who have been placed in isolation cells repeatedly or for prolonged stays have voiced, "there are some things that are worse than death." Indeed, some of those prisoners have found ways to take their own lives in order to end their tortured existence in isolation. And so it is now with the Covid-19 lock-downs. People are killing themselves, or thinking about it. Death is preferable to lock-downs. "Give me liberty or Give me death" has morphed into "Stop the Lock-downs Before I Kill Myself."

The human spirit cannot thrive, or even maintain the will to exist, without the ability to Gather. It is perverse to ask it to do so. Anyone in authority who has the power to impose a lock-down and does so in the face of the evidence—in the face of obvious human nature—is, at best, perverse. At worse, that authority is evil.  In the name of all that is holy and good, we need to stop the lock-downs.