We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday. Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes. She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago. It was just after 8 in the morning. Her mother held her as she slept. She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her. Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth. There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.
We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved. There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories. Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services. Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.” We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.
During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects. Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother. Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered. Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare. Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have. We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done. She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.
At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact. She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones. They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out. Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient. The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew.
Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend. Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them. I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say. In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes. They changed what I knew about my granddaughter. So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.
Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes. Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well. You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.
When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it. For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not. My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day. I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it. I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.
What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.
Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced. Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do. I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way. I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.
So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out. But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.
There’s a new economics in town. It’s based on virus avoidance. A majority of Americans have bought some, if not all the virus-avoidance products suddenly for sale. Some of those are advertised as something the wise, concerned, empathetic and news-trusting person definitely should have: things like toilet paper and sanitizing wipes, for example, or things like people-avoidance, face masks and fear. When sales dropped a little, politicians got up on their pedestals and decreed that most of these products were now mandatory, while others, for some arcane, authoritarian reasons, were forbidden.
The latest viral threat has exposed a host of new sales experts, male and female. Unlike the multitude of regulations these same, new sales reps have instituted to protect buyers of everything from prescriptions to orange juice and canned soup, there are provided no guidelines whereby the hoped-for… no, required buyers of the new virus-avoidance products these abrupt sellers are peddling, can fairly judge which are good and wholesome and which are not. Yet, purchase and swallow we do, lest we miss out on the greatest shared sacrifice of all time – the first to bring our nation to its knees.
There is no choice between bitter or sweet, it’s virtually all bitter, and since we are the tough, always successful American people, we join in the sacrifice to show just how patriotic we truly are. There are even new badges of courage, so to speak, like face masks and oddly walking so as to avoid others, not to overlook cowering at home as one of our greatest strengths. The only side-effect of the lately prescribed purchase we all must buy, is a new, nearly universal distrust of everyone else should we be threatened by their presence. Since the FDA- and CDC-approved products are so new, no one knows if the side-effects are long-lasting or even permanent. Small additional price to pay.
Those who are skeptical of our national reaction to our newly purchased fears, are perceived as barely deserving of the right to buy food, even less the right to buy toilet paper. This is a great unifying moment. Obviously it does make sense to wear a face mask of some sort when entering a market or hardware store, although, in a perverse way, it also seems Prudent not to do so, as wearing one indicates acquiescence to the miasma of dictates, pronouncements and unconstitutional separation from “inalienable rights” that hundreds of thousands died for prior.
Nascent socialists love a good crisis like this viral one. Now, what they have dreamed of since entering their first poli-sci lecture or law class, and subsequent entry into “government” itself, there is presented a chance to change the world, re-order disorganized society, and to clear the path through the jungle of liberty that those sufficiently wise can follow to a brighter future. Those who cannot share the vision of an orderly nation will need just a little coaxing to walk arm-in-arm with the wise followers… ahhmm, except walking arm-in-arm will be disallowed to prevent a “second wave” of coronavirus. And, no hand-shaking or sharing others’ spaces, now deemed to be a 3, 4 or 5-foot circle according to the Ministry Of Social Distancing.
Exposure of the best and worst of federal regulation is one of the blatant results of dealing with COVID-19. Evidently there was some concern among intelligence operatives back in November of 2019, that the rapidly spreading, perhaps new contagion, bore watching in the off-chance that it would spread outside of China. Initially their concern was focused on problems for U. S. assets in South Asia. Still, it wasn’t actionable: there was little hard information and it was wholly a Chinese problem. It was good that our arcane intelligence caught wind of the problem, but anything further depended on the honesty of the Chinese Communists. Well.
At some time after the problem surfaced, perhaps the beginning of December, the Chinese not only hid their unique problem, but allowed millions of people to leave Wuhan before they realized they had to lock the city and region down if there was any hope of containing the spread of this new disease. With disinformation as its prime public function, the Chinese Communist Party argued against travel restrictions and coerced the UN’s W.H.O. to repeat their lies for 3 or 4 weeks. First “it doesn’t spread from human to human,” as Chinese trade and technical personnel spread across the world carrying the new “smallpox” to the indigenous tribes of America, Italy, England, Spain, Germany and Iran, among many others. No infected blankets – human-to-human works better than expected!
No one seems to want to consider that COVID-19 has damaged the world’s economies, including ours, on purpose. “Oh, no! No country would ever do that. The Chinese are wonderful people. This was an embarrassing mistake that China feels terrible about.” Indeed, China feels SO badly that it has striven continuously to blame the United States for the disease. The trusted professionals at the W.H.O that China controls, have done their best to reinforce Chinese proficiency at handling the virus, in the face of unending disinformation about the extent of COVID-19 in China, the brutality employed to contain it and about the tens of thousands of deaths that have happened. While the world suffers the constant spread of this new virus, China has miraculously experienced the end of the spread to the point of virtually no new cases and business is up and running and kids are back in school. Okaaayyy. Ignore the western news people who have been kicked out of the country, China is the model to follow. Can you say, “disinformation?”
Relative only to the United States, it has cost only about $10 Trillion in denied business and market wealth to fight the virus… so far. That’s assumed to be a lot of “money,” but it’s not. It is a Hell of a lot of obligation far into the future. There was no money to borrow from the Federal Reserve; the FED didn’t have $2.2 Trillion. What it does have is the right to create lendable “money” out of thin air, and charge Americans interest for it. It’s a nice business to be in. Having received the imaginary air-money from the consortium of private banks we like to call the Federal Reserve, the Federal government, all legislatively legal-like, deposited bits of it into millions of business and personal bank accounts to help us all “fight” the novel coronavirus that China sent us. China’s model for supposedly containing and defeating the COVID-19 coronavirus, is the model most “Western” countries – ostensible democracies and republics – adopted, rather than the Swedish model of good sense and personal responsibility, without national business shutdowns, that is working about as well as the Chinese model of repression is working for the rest of us.
Measuring the astronomical and ongoing costs our fascist lockdowns of businesses and individuals are imposing, one could speculate that we could have posted two nurses and a personal assistant at the side of every vulnerable elderly person and otherwise medically weak person at a cost of about one-twentieth of that $10 Trillion. A private chef could have prepared gourmet meals for each thrice daily and fluffed their pillows on demand. The rest of us could have gone about our business, using care and best practices to minimize infection. One could observe that those who have imposed the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders – all in contravention of our Constitution – are enjoying it a little too much.
As in all matters of great moment and of life-and-death, literally, we are witness to tawdry congressional machinations. Without hesitation certain key congressional figures have attempted to insert completely unrelated issues into “emergency” economic legislation rushed through to save the economy. What constitutes “emergency” legislation for those on the left, includes having voters vote up to 45 days “early” and to vote by mail to “maintain social distancing.” These are election-stealing tactics. The left: socialists, liberals and our beloved Democrats, never relax in their battle to unseat conservatism and the strengths of tradition. Every defeat of their radical (anti-traditional) plans is never accepted, but is a key to how to bring a different tactic to bear in the next battle to unseat a specific tradition. The famous instruction to leftists is “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and “no” means simply, “later.”
Every aspect of traditional life – and belief – is naturally political to leftists in an environment of hateful anti-traditionalism. COVID-19 is a political matter on which sides must be taken and defined. In some way the attack of this new scourge is not a common enemy all Americans should unite against. No, it is an opportune moment to instill ever greater socialist plans and practices, virtually while people aren’t watching. If a few dozens or hundreds of people die in the execution of socialist plans, that is a reasonable cost to install “equality” and to tear down the capitalist, unfair economics of the Constitution and of Christians. China made the same calculation when the (perhaps) accidental release of COVID-19 presented an opportunity, as well.
As epidemiologists have grabbed the economy by the throat, the ostensible requirement of “social distancing” has extended to include everything from weddings to funerals, school classes and restaurants, most jobs and even walks in parks and on beaches, and, quite logically in the eyes of leftists and fascists, our new governors have prohibited Church services! In a nation glued together by religious freedom and codified disestablishment, and built by believers in God, this is extraordinary. This exposes the disdain that leftists hold for religious faith: religion is nothing more than social gathering and virtue-signaling such as the left understands all too well. Amazingly, at the same time that Chinese Christians are risking imprisonment, if not their lives, to hold surreptitious prayer meetings, Americans, and more oddly, their pastors and priests, have acquiesced to the dictates of secular functionaries to avoid church services. What if prayer works?
Secular leftists are laughing in their latte’s as they think they have proven the fallacy of religion. Erstwhile Christians are congratulating themselves on being good rules-followers, not grasping the peril their meekness has placed them in. Regardless of Constitutional guarantees, churches have shown that they will readily forego their faith and their rights when so directed by non-believers. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Nearly every religious tradition around the world includes some form of prayer in unison. There is great effect from unified belief – it’s the strongest force on earth. Are all churches agreeing that there is no one to hear their silly prayers? Are Sunday services mere collection-plate convenience? Good grief! Prudence has seen prayer work in the physical world. No pastor should fail to resist the attempt to squash this essential right – and duty.
Finally, it is hopeful that so many private efforts have sprung into being to supply medical equipment and help to other individuals. Companies have changed course in matters of days to provide masks and ventilators and hand-sanitizer. Remarkable organic chemists and biologists are testing, creating, and improving drug therapies and even potential vaccines to defeat COVID-19. Americans, most especially those of us who have dealt with the risks of private life and economics, are generous, charitable people. Even while unable to work and with their incomes limited or missing, Americans are being asked to donate and they do.
The brunt of the multiple variations of shutdowns and lock-outs has been borne by private interests: individual workers and contractors, small and large businesses, and charities and non-profits to differing extents. The pain has in no way impacted public employees economically. Yes, first responders are working longer shifts – on overtime. Teachers have had to learn (where union-willing) how to teach on-line. Big public thinkers and planners have had to think and plan more than ever, but none has lost pay, benefits or pension. Daily there are stories of private incidents of charity and outreach, some quite widespread as people contribute thanks to social media. What Prudence has failed to observe are news reports of large-scale public-employee charitable efforts, whether by bureaucrats or teachers or others, and maybe the reports have just been missed, somehow. Are “we” all in this together or is it just “you,” the private, not yet socialized sector, who are all in this together? God forbid.
