The present moment as a gauge of the strength of my faith

Let's see, now.

The S&P 500 halted trading minutes after opening due to a 8.14 percent drop. It's recovered somewhat, but not to a healthy degree.

My local hospital is reporting its first confirmed COVID-19 case.

Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb announced that all bars and restaurants in the state must close. They can still deliver orders. The state joins its neighbors, Illinois and Ohio, and several other states that had implemented this measure in the past few days.  The economic hit to thousands of servers, cooks,  bartenders, hosts and managers will be immediate, as such folk don't typically have a financial cushion.

Yesterday afternoon, the White House coronavirus task force gave a press briefing. It's been a while since I saw such an exhausted-looking group of people. Mike Pence, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Seema Verma et al were clearly in dire need of a decent stretch of sleep. As has been characteristic at these gatherings, the Very Stable Genius had to do his relax-we're-doing-great schtick before the bedraggled grownups gave us the straight skinny.

The Democrat debate last night pretty much cemented the nomination of Joe Biden as the party's presidential candidate.

A word about that: regular LITD readers know that I fall into that zone along the ideological spectrum that Trumpists, as well as some of us when it's expedient to employ shorthand, refer to as Never Trump. I don't like the term for two principle reasons. One, there are gradations within the zone. Matt Boot and Jennifer Rubin are at one end, and David French and Jonah Goldberg, among others (and, if I may include myself in such august company, me) are at the other. Two, the horse is out of the barn, so the term makes it sound like conservatives who find Trump objectionable are untethered from the basic reality that he's president. Now, those closer to the Boot-Rubin end of the zone are the likeliest to declare they're going to vote for the Democrat presidential nominee, even if it's Sanders.

Since I think we can dispense with Sanders after last night, that means Biden, whom these folks have held up as some kind of beacon of "decency," a foil for the VSG, is the one for whom they'll be pulling the lever.

I still can't see myself joining them. For one thing, the decency designation doesn't fit:

You may have heard that Biden lost his wife and daughter in a horrifying drunk-driving wreck, the fault of a monster of a man who irresponsibly “drank his lunch,” as Biden puts it.

Biden’s wife and daughter did, in fact, die in a car wreck. That is true. It is not true that the driver of the other car was drunk, that he had been drinking, or that there was any reason to believe he was drunk or had been drinking — or even that he was at fault. The late Mrs. Biden “drove into the path of [the] tractor-trailer,” the police report says. But Biden, like every other third-rate ward-heeler of his ilk, thinks and speaks only in terms of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats — and if something bad happens to good people, then it must be because somebody in a black hat did something nefarious. The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father. The casual cruelty with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions — for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches — is remarkable.

As Senate Judiciary Committee chair in the 1980s, he let Ted Kennedy's vicious smear campaign against the towering legal scholar Robert Bork cause Bork's nomination to go down in flames.

There's also the "put y'all back in chains" remark during the 2012 campaign.


And his pandering has been on full display in the current election cycle. He's cast his lot with the most radical of the climate alarmists. Now he's vowing to select a woman as his running mate and nominate a woman of color to the Supreme Court. Given that, as I say above, he is going to be the Democrat nominee, his insistence on these demographic criteria for these positions sets a precedent. There will be litmus tests for the foreseeable future, and a fealty to the original intent of the Constitution's framers will recede ever further as a requirement for consideration into the mists of antiquity.

Then there's the much-remarked-upon and obvious mental frailty which causes him to botch terminology and proclaim his happiness to be in states that are far removed from where he actually is.

My point in enumerating all these not-really-so-disparate matters on the nation's plate today is to say that their sum total is driving home for me that we, each and all, are really on our own. We're in the throes of an unprecedented public health crisis with huge economic ramifications, and the current ostensible leader in the effort to address it, as well as the figure who wishes to prove to us that he would lead far more effectively, are clearly inadequate to the task. And the actual experts and crisis managers on the case are having their stamina tested to the very limit.

There is absolutely nowhere to turn but to the sovereign Creator who is not surprised by any of it.

Is my certainty that he is in charge rock-solid every minute during these hair-raising days? I won't lie to you like that.

But I take very seriously the words of James, who spent a great deal of time in the personal company of the Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ, when he admonishes us thusly:

 . . . when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.

As I see it, we have no choice but to rely on the Holy Spirit, not only to get us through our present juncture, but more generally to permeate our hearts and make us yearn to reclaim the unique birthright God gave us as Americans.

I know I have no choice. I've been circumstantially backed into a corner. This is the kind of scenario that forces me to decide if I think this thing called human existence has a purpose.

There's a vote I can cast.