W. Carol Cleigh letter: Hasty Re-Opening Will “Sacrifice the Weak for the Wealthy”

NDY member Carol Cleigh’s timely and pointed letter below will appear in her local North Carolina paper, Clay County Progress:

Head and shoulders photo of a woman with short gray hair and wire rimmed glasses wearing a blue and white top and a white mask with purple trim and colorful flowers and circles on it.
W. Carol Cleigh

For those who are advocating for lifting of restrictions due to Covid-19 before or without considering the WHO criteria for safely lifting those restrictions, please understand that you’re asking for a devil’s bargain. What you, and so many others, are actually doing is to say that lives, particularly the lives of elder, disabled and chronically ill people, are less important than money. This is literally, the sacrifice of the weak for the wealthy.

You can dress up your ‘need’ to sacrifice our lives however you want. Yes, people, especially the most economically disadvantaged, need to work. But do they need to work more than we need to live? Yes, people need social interaction. But do you really need social interaction more than we need to live? Yes, the economy must be reopened eventually. But can’t we concentrate on actually meeting at least a few of the WHO criteria rather than ignoring them?

Understand that we’re not talking about a few people. We’re talking about numbers similar to  the T4 program’s extermination of ill and disabled people during the Holocaust. Even White House estimates put the cost of premature reopening at more than 230,000 human beings. Not all of whom will be old, ill and/or disabled. Many will be health care workers. Some will be young. Some will have been healthy before becoming ill. Georgia has already had a surge in cases.

Perhaps most importantly in all of this is the question of who we want to be as a people. I’ve even seen advocates for this trying to dress up their devil’s bargain in Jesus’ clothing. Stop it! Quit lying to yourself. If you feel that sacrificing hundreds of thousands of human lives to expediency is something you’d like to see happen, know that you are very definitely not on the side of Jesus. If you want to advocate for those whom Jesus loves, advocate for meeting the WHO criteria, not ignoring it. Advocate for life.

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