Here is an uplifting article; President Trump’s early release from hospital will, alas, bring out the worst in some, like Lex Luther hissing over Superman overcoming the kryptonite necklace. The schadenfreude of the ravenous Marxist-Leftists – the virus claiming its prize victim – now seems, like news of Livingstone’s demise, to be rather premature. We can only hope some level of moral sanity can be restored to a fractured nation, along with the bodily sort. As the first Roosevelt said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Not quite true, but approximately so, and close enough for me.
And I came across this a propos excerpt from the writings of the perspicuous C.S. Lewis, (that adjective sort of rhymes, and may be the basis of future poem – 🙂
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals
Live free, or die trying – or something like that, perhaps phrased in more Catholic terms.
And on a final note of freedom, today is the anniversary of the Englishman Jason Lewis’ return from a 12-year round-the-world trek, using muscle power alone, the first man in known history to do so. He left Greenwich, London on July 12, 1994, and returned, from the other direction, on October 6, 2007, having traveled 45,505 miles, by mountain bike, by pedal-powered boat, by kayak, by foot, and by rollerblades across the continental United States (the first person to do this also). And the day he left, had never mountain biked or kayaked in his life – the first 20 miles outside London nearly did him in. But he persevered, all the way, amidst exhaustion, loneliness, despair, heat, flies, waves. Again, not exactly a Catholic way to spend one’s young adulthood – he was 36 when he left, and on the verge of 40 when he stepped afoot on English soil again – but there is a magnanimity to the endeavour, what we might almost call a secular holiness. Perhaps he will be, or has already been, led to the fullness of holiness.
There is a two-hour documentary out there, but here is a twelve-minute mini-film, showing some of his adventures, which may inspire the reader to dust off that old bike, or buy a new one, or just get out for a sprightly jaunt: