In Our URGENT AS Mad-Dash Scramble To Rid the Earth of the Coronavirus...Have We EVER SO IMPERCEPTIBLY Gravitated to the Polar Opposite 'Stance', Where We're - in Full-Fledged Fight (If Not Flight) Mode - Succumbing to That Deadliest of Chronic, Incurable Diseases: GROUPTHINK, A State in Which We've Become Like So Many Machine-Produced Automatons, Even Clones...All Too Ready - to Garishly Change the Metaphor - to Rush Like Lemmings Into the Deep Blue Yonder...?

Oh Covid, Covid, Covid: Art Thou Setting the Scene/Setting Us All Up...For Trouble Down the Line?

As folk across the land (God's Own/Godzone: Aotearoa-New Zealand, that is) grow increasingly restive and hostile, even at times 'positively' vitriolic towards ANTI-VACCERS, isn't it about time for us all to take a step back and breathe in deeply - without a mask - and ask ourselves some searching questions, realizing that this all may well not end well...

For demonizing those we passionately and even oh so legitimately may well disagree with sets a rather sorry trend for future public discourse and debate, let alone interaction on an ongoing basis...

...however misguided such views may well be...

For my thruppence worth I feel that my Lord is preparing people worldwide - knowing they are (as often as otherwise) not only well-intentioned but quite sincere in their convictions vis-a-vis covid vaccination/s - for a fast-hastening *day wherein/in which folk will be called upon to stand apart from the (well-beaten) crowds and masses, to stand alone if need be against the (vast) majority, for a cause far greater than themselves or the health and wellbeing alone... 

*But spiritual night!

176-odd years ago, a fellow named James Russell Lowell shared his eerily prophetic sense of Planet Earth's crisis of the ages, a scenario nevertheless repeated throughout each and every generation...

Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood, For the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah, Offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble When we share her wretched crust,

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, And 'tis prosperous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses, While the coward stands aside,

Till the multitude make virtue Of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track,

Toiling up new Calvaries ever With the cross that turns not back;

New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward, Who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;

Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong;

Yet that scaffold sways the future, And, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, Keeping watch above His own.

(From 'Once to Every Man and Nation', written in 1845.)

Cop26: "Twiddling Our [Collective] Thumbs and Wishing for the Best": D'Ya Reckon Greenpeace (or was it Friends of the Earth?) - Co-'Attendies' at This (Supposedly) Momentous Climate Conference - Summed It All Up in a Nutshell?!?!

It's Completely Counterintuitive, I Well Realize, But in Modern-Day Rome - None Other Than the United States of America [i.e. the Latter-Day Equivalent of the Iron(clad) Civilization of Rome, the Older Testament Prophet Daniel's 4th Prophetic Empire] - Some of Its Very Best Political Leaders Have Been Former Military MEN [As Has Usually Been the Case, No Gender Bias Intended]...The Likes of Dwight David Eisenhower (in the 1950s), Colin Powell (in recent times), and None Other Than Ullyses S Grant (back in the 1860s and 1870s; Near Successor to the Great Man (i.e. Abraham Lincoln) Himself)...

Postscript: And, incidentally, such an idea occurred to me a short while (as in a day or several) prior to seeing an item on General-cum-President Grant upon the (13/10/2021, NZ time edition of the) 700 Club; in which said former general's "consequential leadership" "holding the Union together, fending off a second civil war", was cited, something highlighted in a new book: 

To Deeply Rescue the Republic...the Fragile Unveiling...

Ullyses S Grant's brave and successful attempts to singlehandedly fight and fend off the KKK and rescue/free a slave he once 'possessed' were especially impressive...  

Post-Postscript:

Incidentally, I recently recalled the ideological predecessors to the current cancel culture movement, and how they even had the temerity, the sheer gall to likewise seek to malign the *great Abe himself, the sort of thing I suppose those of the arty-farty academic set with plenty of time on their hands and nothing better to do have ever shown a similar penchant for doing for any **'tall poppies' they wish to bring down to size or back to earth (from their stratospheric heights of greatness)...

*As in Abraham Lincoln, though naturally 'Father' Abraham of biblical history was another great Abraham...

**A 'New Zealanderism' denoting kiwis' own tendency to ***'cut down to size' our own heroes and heroines...

***(Postscript):

Something once again engaged in wholeheartedly and mercilessly, shamelessly - and moreover ever so shamefully - by Newshub (TV3) News's Jenna Lynch and Tova O'Brien in relation to NZ National's new leader Chris Luxon the other day within mere hours of his gaining the much-coveted position...