Viewpoints

Grace holds a central place in a life of faith. For my faith tradition, talk of grace begins of course with God’s grace. God giving us love, blessing, help, healing. God doing this freely, with great care for us. Grace is about receiving. Receiving needed support, needed relief, needed compassion. This aspect of grace reminds us that we are people who need help and grace in life, in all manner of ways. We receive grace from God, and we receive grace from other people. So during this time of pandemic and uncertainty, I’d encourage all who are being offered help, offered grace, to receive it. Welcome a friendly word or an offer of support. Take advantage of food pantry supplies and other forms of assistance. In whatever ways you’re being offered grace now, receive it as a gift. Accepting grace, accepting help can be difficult for us. But it is vital and life-giving. So open yourself up to grace. Be kind enough to yourself to receive it.

To the Editor:

I believe that by now, all registered voters in Iowa have received an absentee voter request form in the mail. Please consider using it, and not just because of COVID-19.

Voting from home allows you to carefully consider the candidates and any referenda that may be on the ballot. It assures that whatever happens on election day, your vote is already in.

If you haven’t gotten the mailing yet, you might want to call the Auditor’s office and make sure you are registered, or, if you know you’re not registered, get that done. You don’t want to miss out on choosing our politicians!

You may be one of those people who are skeptical about the privacy of absentee ballots. Let me assure you, as someone who has been on the Absentee Board, on and off, since Billy Roe, Jr. was Auditor, that your ballot is sacred and secret.

To the Editor:

It’s time to make our voices heard on June 2. How fortunate we are in these unpredictable, frightening, isolating times to still be able to vote safely!

All we need to do is call the Allamakee County Auditor’s Office at 563-568-3522 by May 22 and request an application for an absentee ballot. It will come by mail relatively quickly. It gives us the power to help choose candidates for U.S. Senator, Iowa State Representative and Allamakee County Supervisor, among others. It must be returned by mail or hand-delivered to the courthouse by June 1.

If you choose to vote absentee in person, or at the polls on the the actual voting day (June 2), the Auditor’s Office will give you instructions.

God’s Cure For Diseases
 
Every Fall a new flu shot is available at drug stores and clinics. It is never 100% effective but it greatly reduces your chances of getting the flu.  God has also blessed us with many vaccines through the years that are 100% effective.  There is a vaccine for polio, chicken pox, the measles, the mumps and many other diseases.

But what about Covid 19? Will there finally be a cure for that? Of course no one knows the answer to that question. I think it fair to say that most of the experts believe there will be a cure eventually. And how long will it take?  Dr Fauci said that it will likely take a year to a year and a half to develope a vaccine for Covid 19. No one knows for sure.

To the Editor:

“We’re all in this together.”

Are we? Are we really all in this together? I wonder if the way we think about deer and chronic wasting disease is the same way we’ve come to think about the coronavirus?

The human animals are about to “open” up again. As early as today in some states we are going to gather together, despite professional recommendations. And, not unlike the deer, as a result of our desire to be together we put each other at serious risk.

Very little attention is being paid to the fact that our most vulnerable people will likely pay the ultimate price in a war that they cannot win. They are the statistics for Veterans Services, the Homeless, Nursing Homes, the Department of Human Services, etc. They are the numbers that aren’t added in. They are the bodies inside unmarked boxes on the battlefield. And, they are as silent in death as what they heard in life.

When’s the last time you had a good laugh?

In the midst of this pandemic, laughter is probably the last thing on your mind. Our world has been hit hard by the coronavirus, even here in our corner of Northeast Iowa. We probably feel more like crying or screaming than laughing.

And yet it is the Easter season - traditionally a time of great joy. Christians everywhere celebrate the good news that Christ is risen.

Now it didn’t look like good news at first. As we commemorated on Good Friday, Jesus died and was sealed into a tomb. Had the forces of evil triumphed? No, they hadn’t. For suddenly Christ arose. Like the punchline of a joke, the surprise of his resurrection makes us laugh with delight.

That’s why Christians throughout history have observed this holy time with humor.

As we all mark the first month since our schools have closed and many of our businesses have had to shut down, we have all had to adjust our daily routines. These adjustments pale in comparison to the suffering of those who have lost family members, those who wonder if they are infected, or to the anxiety experienced by those who have lost their jobs and income.

To the Editor:

As we face the COVID-19 pandemic and struggle with the country’s shutdown, we must not let ourselves become too impatient to return to normal. It might help us to revisit an earlier epidemic.

One of the world’s worst pandemics occurred in 1918 with an influenza virus. It killed anywhere from 40 or 50 million to 100 million worldwide. According to John Barry’s The Great Influenza, probably 675,000 deaths in the U.S. were due to the influenza.

The first major outbreak started in an army camp in Funston, KS in March 1918. Infected soldiers moving from camp to camp spread the disease and 30 of the largest cities near the camps also suffered outbreaks that spring.

The first wave of the influenza was not particularly lethal. Of the 1,185 men hospitalized in Camp Funston, only 38 died. But as the virus adapted to humans, the second wave became more dangerous in the late summer and fall.

To the Editor:

For 50 years Earth Day has been designated to celebrate our incredible planet. It’s a day to think about what our species has been doing to degrade our environment. But more importantly it’s a day to constructively help our natural world.

If we can instill in our children an appreciation for nature, maybe they will do more than we have to care for this planet. Simple acts like picking up litter, then recycling or trashing it, planting a vegetable garden, planting native species of trees, flowers, and grasses, or simply getting outdoors to enjoy the wonders of nature.

We need to use less gasoline-powered machines and use our muscles more; running, walking, bicycling and scootering. We need to turn off electrical devices we’re not using and conserve water (hand- and dish-washing water is fine for watering plants.) We can all find ways to reduce consumption and recycle, reuse and conserve all we can.

To the Editor:

Human beings like certainty. We are hard-wired to want to know what is happening when and to notice things that feel threatening to us. When things feel uncertain or when we don’t generally feel safe, it’s normal to feel stressed. This very action, while there to protect us, can cause all sorts of havoc when there is a sense of uncertainty and conflicting information around us.

A large part of anxiety comes from a sense of what we think we should be able to control, but can’t. Right now, many of us are worried about COVID-19, known as the “coronavirus.” We may feel helpless about what will happen or what we can do to prevent further stress. This uncertainty might also connect to our uncertainty about other aspects of our lives, or remind us of past times when we didn’t feel safe and the immediate future was uncertain.