Of Children and Lockdowns

Photo by Thom Masat on Unsplash

In the heavy lockdown state in which I reside, the early stages of shutdown closed the outdoor playgrounds.  They closed the outdoor basketball courts.  To drive the point home that children were not welcome, the rims and nets were removed from the backboards—the worry must have been that some child might think of defying the governor’s orders.  I noticed at the time that golf courses remained open and were actively used, but I did not hear that many children frequented the fairways or the greens.

We all can agree that the lockdowns and closures of the Great Cessation are not pleasant.  There is a general wish that they would not have to happen.  There is a variety of views about how necessary this all has been.  I have not, though, heard anyone deny that children have been hurt the most.

Consider this partial catalog of harm to the children among us:

Education was abruptly interrupted.  Schools were closed.

• In my major suburban county, government efforts to provide “virtual education” were repeatedly tried and failed and eventually abandoned.  The virtue remained elusive.
• Education that requires group participation, such as music and arts, became unavailable.
• Field trips were canceled. 
• All school clubs’ and extracurricular activities—educationally valuable and greatly desired by children—ceased.
• Personal belongings were quarantined in school lockers for months.
• Public libraries were closed.
• For the fall, the local governments repeatedly tried and failed, and eventually abandoned, efforts to reopen schools.  Children will be offered second class education at best.  That may work, to a limited degree, for well motivated children with consistent parental supervision.  Expect much less success for all the rest.

Social and recreational interaction was interrupted.

• School sports were stopped, including practices, training, games, and facilities.  For many, that can include a whole year of skill development, performing, and advancement, a potential disaster for youth counting on a final year to demonstrate skills to help with college admissions.
• School sponsored social events, such as dances, proms, plays, and other recreations were dropped.
• School organized or sponsored service activities have been canceled.
• Children were ordered to stay at home.  Enjoyment of friendships and development of camaraderie among peers were interrupted.  Usual exchanges with friends and neighbors, and the normal creative interactions, have been stifled.
• The personal exposure to a variety of views and interests and backgrounds became limited.
• Summer camps were closed and seasonal outings were taken off the table.
• Recreational facilities were closed, including parks, sports venues, and pools.
• Movie theaters and other entertainment offerings, such as concerts and spectator sports, became unavailable for warding off youthful ennui. 
• Visits to extended family members declined.

Opportunities for character development have been curbed.

• Churches were closed, including worship services, participation in sacred sacraments, associating in youth groups and instruction, joining in varieties of spiritual development activities, and involvement in service to the needy.
• Similarly, the activities of service organizations are curbed, limiting youth participation and volunteer experiences.
• Summer job opportunities became fewer, whether for wages or as summer internships.

Children’s health has been put at risk.

• Regular doctor visits were for a time banned, and then later merely discouraged.
• Routine treatments for chronic ailments were missed.
• Vaccinations and other traditional child medical treatments have been skipped.
• Dental visits were put off, as have been visits to the optometrist.
• Medical attention has not been sought except for what was considered serious ailments or until they became serious ailments.
• “Elective” procedures have been put off.

What do we offer the children in place of what has been closed to them?  As mentioned in this litany of childhood harm, local authorities ordered children to remain at home, but what kind of homes?  Not all children have the safe, comfortable, well provisioned and lovely homes we would wish or that officials envisioned.  Many habitations, rather than a haven and venue for learning, are without parental supervision, are dirty, uncomfortable, and unsafe, exposed to crime, drugs, and gang activity.  Children have looked to schools and other facilities, now closed to them by the lockdown, as places of refuge.  Lockdown policies can quarantine children into zones of hazard.

As summed up by a recent opinion piece from the American Institute for Economic Research, “Shockingly, it now appears that suicide rates among the young are on the increase, which is concerning since suicide is the leading cause of death for those under the age of 25.” (“CDC Has Become Centers for the Destruction of Childhood,” June 25, 2020)

What do we offer the children in place of what has been closed to them?

Children are the age group least vulnerable to the virus, the fewest to contract it, the quickest to heal, with by far the lowest mortality rate, and the tiniest record for contagion.  They have been covered in masks and fed on a daily feast of fear.  The irony is that the age group least affected by the virus is the group most deeply harmed by the lockdowns—against which they can do little to protect themselves.

Of Free Agency and the Game of Life

This past week my wife and I were drawn to an interesting and insightful headline from the Sports section of the newspaper:  “Free agency can be useful tool if used correctly”.  Very true.  This may be true in the games of sports.  It certainly is true in life.

In professional sports, free agency means having some choice as to which team a player may join and on what terms, depending on talent and performance, interest, and the advocacy skill of his representative, among other factors.  Used well, the player may go on to a successful and happy career, profitable for him and for his team, opening up even greater opportunities, including perhaps championship achievements and continuing successes beyond.  Used unwisely, free agency can lead to a career that is a frustrating struggle inhibiting growth, achievement, and limiting follow on opportunities.

In life, free agency means that you and I can choose our manner of living in mortality and, in the process, the terms of living and opportunities available in the immortal worlds, depending again on talent (as expressed in performance), interest (again demonstrated by performance), and the effectiveness of our representative.  If you will agree to His terms, you can have the very best Advocate as your representative, who only emphasizes your triumphs and takes upon Himself the blame for all of your failures.

A popular board game I knew as a child was “The Game of LIFE.”  In this game several players compete by moving along the board on a marked path, buffeted by the vicissitudes and aggrandized by the rewards of life as determined by the cast of the die.  Its virtue is that it presents to children how life is a steadily moving journey filled with a variety of experiences building to some degree on the ones before.  The game was not a favorite of mine, because it asks for little skill from the players, the events of the game subject almost entirely to chance.  In that sense, it teaches the false lesson that how you fare in life has almost nothing to do with your skill and the exercise of your free agency and everything to do with fate, beyond your control. Success or failure happens.  Perhaps the game does little harm as a diversion, but I have not played it in a long while.

Life is not a game of chance.  Neither, is it a sport, least of all a spectator sport.  Each of us is the key and central player involved in making and applying decisions.  The period of life called mortality is a testing ground, where decisions are free only because results are meaningful.  The results derive their meaning from their reach into the worlds of immortality, following our death and resurrection.  Because life has meaning then, it has meaning now. 

That meaning is a gift from Jesus Christ, purchased by His free gift of voluntarily suffering for our sins, including surrendering His life in an unjust execution, one that He could have prevented should He have exercised His free agency not to bear our burdens.  Because of the injustice of that suffering, He came back from the dead and conquered death, to die no more.  Death was thus converted into a temporary interlude for all of us, allowing the choices of this life to extend beyond the grave.

If, on the contrary, each one of us were to end in death, if our being were then to cease to exist, then nothing we did would really matter in that end.  Whatever we did, whatever we achieved, whatever we learned, so what?  It would all be gone, never to be reclaimed. 

Nothing we do makes any difference in the end, if in the end we are nothing, literally nothing.  As far as we are concerned, it all vanishes with us, and any memory of us ends with the end of any who remembered.  With nothing now mattering later, then all loses any present meaning.  Any meaning we attach to anything now is a mirage, or even a charade.  Like a child’s game, things seem to matter until the game is over, when nothing matters.

If nothing that we do matters, then the choices and decisions that we make do not matter, they have no lasting result, they make no real difference in the end.  Whether we put too much salt or pepper in the soup, it makes no difference if no one eats it.  With death as the end of it all, of all existence of any kind for each of us, then we really have no freedom, because we cannot and do not change anything for ourselves or for others.  In any and all cases, whatever choices we make, it all ends the same way, in complete nothingness, annihilation of being.  Choice itself becomes meaningless, a mirage, a charade.

But it is not like that in reality.  It does not feel like that, and very few of us, even the atheists among us, believe or act like nothingness is our destiny, as if what we do is lost in the void, as if our choices do not matter.  Christ’s redemption of us and of the world has changed everything for everyone.  It gives lasting value to our choices, our actions, our decisions, making them all very real, preserving their consequences, their reach into the continuing life beyond our very temporary death.  Our decisions can and do affect ourselves and others, in lingering ways.  Christ’s redemption from death makes our freedom possible, then and now, because what we do matters, and how it matters is preserved.

With that freedom, Christ has given us a tool, which certainly can be useful, if used correctly.  Fortunately, He also has given us guidance and still gives us guidance so that we may get and save the best results from the use of our free agency.  And that is a big part of why we celebrate Easter, why Christ's atonement and resurrection are the central event in Earth's history.

Of Early Results and Final Scores

When I was recently in San Diego, local football fans were vocally wild with excitement when their NFL team, the San Diego Chargers, was winning its Monday night game 24-0 at half time.  It was all over for the visiting Denver Broncos.  But they played the second half anyway.  When the game was really over by the clock and the rules the final score was 24-35, and the Denver Broncos were the winners.  

In 2004, the arch rivals New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox played each other for the American League baseball championship and the right to go to the World Series.  The New York Yankees won the first 3 games of the best of 7 series.  With 4 games left and the Yankees needing to win only 1 of the 4, the series was all over.  Unfortunately for the Yankees (and their fans in my household), the New York team would not win another game that year and Boston would not lose another game that year, winning the American League championship and then sweeping the World Series in 4 games.  (For the benefit of Boston Red Sox fans I will mention that this was the team’s first World Series championship in almost a century.)

As they say in sports, that’s why they play the games.

As in sports, so often in life, there is virtue in playing to the end of the game and not leaving the field before it is really over.  Like all virtues, that virtue is often challenged in this life.  Many wars are won or lost in the hearts of the participants even before the first battle.  Many are the voices who try to call the election before the first real vote is cast and long before the last one is counted.  Many are the men and women, boys and girls, whose careers are ended before they have begun, or at least after the first setback.  In real life, often it is so, but far too often it is so because people believed it to be so, not because the end was really inevitable.

We are and should be inspired by those who have won through determined perseverance.  The persevering struggles of such technological pioneers as Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers gave them triumphs that changed the world.  How tempting it must have been to them at many points and after many failures to give up and say that “it” could not be done.  How poorer the world would be if they had called the game early and accepted failure.

Perhaps no less inspiring are those who struggled to the end in apparent defeat, only to make a greater victory possible for their friends and allies or sometimes for themselves.  The most famous battle of the Texas Revolution was the apparent defeat at the Alamo.  The Greek defeat by the Persians at Thermopylae is as famous as the Greek victory at Salamis that it helped make possible.  Abraham Lincoln’s loss in his Senate contest with Stephen A. Douglas sowed the seeds for Lincoln’s win against Douglas two years later for President.  Moses fell from royal glory among the Egyptians to become a nomadic shepherd before being chosen by God to be His prophet to deliver Israel from Egypt and restore to them the laws and ordinances to guide them for thousands of years. 

In our own personal lives, it is only those who persevere who win.  There is no easy triumph in the battle of life.  It is intended to be hard.  But the end is also intended to be known and can be known.   The Father and the Son discussed life and its purpose before the world was created.  They revealed to us that purpose and the end to give us direction and hope: 

We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell; and we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them. . .  and they . . . shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.   (Abraham 3:24-26)

The ancient American prophet Nephi explained the proving process this way:

Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life. (2 Nephi 31:20)

There are numerous contrary voices, who would either say that salvation is easy or impossible.  Neither is right.  The pressing forward with a focus on Christ is how each of us can be transformed, how the goodness is refined from a decidedly alloyed ore, “Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

None of us knows how long will be his or her mortality, but we each must play it to the end.  We cannot call the game early.  If we travel and reach the end in company with Christ, then success is certain even as seeing the game throughout all of its stages is worth the playing.  After all, that is why we play.

Of Elections and Sports

It is early Fall.  That means that we are nearing the end of the regular season of baseball, and the New York Yankees are on course to make the playoffs and another run for the World Series title, number 28.  Their chances look good this year, if they can keep their players from injury and the bullpen resumes pitching up to its abilities.

Others are following football.  Already the Washington Redskins have gone from having a lock on getting into the Super Bowl, after winning their first game, to being nearly mathematically eliminated from the playoffs by losing their next two.  As they say in baseball, though with less justification in pro-football, it’s a long season.  And speaking of the Redskins, it has been said that you can tell that someone has been in Washington too long when he begins cheering for the Redskins.  Let that rest on your own taste and experience.

Basketball fans know that in just a few weeks, practice begins for college hoops.  The college basketball season will terminate several months later in the greatest sporting event that the United States has to offer, March Madness!  I don’t know when or whether the professional basketball season ever ends.  I suppose it does.

Somewhere someone is playing soccer, where some team is leading another by the insurmountable score of 1-0.  But I think that we may be in the only few weeks of the year when there are no hockey games—even as the NHL is haunted again by more labor-management strife.

At his school my son is running on a cross country team, the Trinity Tempest.  The motto of the team is not but should be, “Tempest Fugit.”  Instead, it seems to be something like, “Pass the weak, hurdle the dead.”  Nice so far as it goes.  Classical Latin would be better, it seems to me, but I am not a runner and have no say.

Yes, there is much sporting excitement and many sports in the Fall.  Elections, however, are not one of them.  Electing the leaders of our government, who will wield control over life and death, freedom and slavery, prosperity and poverty, is not a sport.  Self-government is one of the most serious activities of life for those who cherish their liberty.  Those who do not will eventually vote away their freedom, as we have seen in places like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia in recent years, and before that in places like Germany of the 1930s.

Of course, you would never know that from the public discourse on television, radio, in newspapers and other media outlets.  Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional races are treated as if they all were games, with little at stake other than whether your favorite team wins.  Issues are trivialized, if mentioned at all.  The trivializers have even assigned team colors, one side “Red” and another “Blue.”  The most important issue in the media after a debate is “who won?” rather than, “what did we learn about what a candidate believes and what he would do if elected?”  Points are awarded by press experts for style, poise, rhetoric, and gotcha lines.  Panels of talking heads award scores as if they were judges at a figure skating competition.

It is all more than beside the point.  It corrupts the process.  Rather than true debates, in which candidates have enough time to declare and explain their views and policies on important issues, media celebrities offer trick questions, to which the future President of the United States is given two, three, or sometimes even five minutes to respond as he or she fishes for a soundbite to make it into the 60-second news recap (most of which will again be focused on, “who won?”).  Based on this silly exercise, viewers are encouraged to text in (for a small fee) their vote—not for who would be the best office holder—but for who was the winner of the night’s contest.

We should expect and demand better.  Through modern revelation we have been given a set of standards.  You do not have to be a believer in revelation to recognize the wisdom of the counsel:

Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise, whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil.  (Doctrine and Covenants 98:10)

Our task as voters interested in preserving our rights and freedoms is too seek out diligently the honest, the good, and the wise.  Anything less is evil.  In an election, in a campaign, in a debate, I want to discover who is the honest, the good, and the wise, and I am little interest in style points. 

That takes careful and diligent effort, for among the honest, the good, and the wise, are the liars, the false, and the foolish intent on deceiving.  These latter like to hide in the noise of the sporting contest and often seek to divert attention to the things that little matter, the stray word, the high school prank.  We need to keep our focus on a diligent search for the honest, the good, and the wise.  With persistent effort, we can find them.

 

In self-government, we are the players.  The issue is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, decidedly not a game.  But if we follow these standards and apply them diligently, then in the end We the People will be the winners.