AS ST Paul wrote in Corinthians 13:11, ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’
When I was a child I believed in Santa Claus. I have vivid memories of the approaching Christmas Eve and the mounting excitement of Santa squeezing down our chimney and leaving me some presents. I never doubted his existence, but I confess to wondering just how he could deliver to all the children in the world in a single night. How did he manage to drink all the milk and eat all the mince pies that were left for him? How did the reindeer negotiate the snowless rooftops pulling that toy-laden sleigh and how come nobody saw them? I had all these questions and yet still I believed – because my parents told me so. My parents were my bedrock and my source of knowledge of the world around me. If they told me that a generous entity lived at the North Pole and once a year took it upon himself to visit and delight all the children, why would I question it?
Growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, it was the BBC that provided the gold standard of news about what was going on in and around the world. As long as life went on in our cocoon of ease (and it did go on well for us baby boomers) and we enjoyed our home comforts, annual holidays and our superannuated jobs, we could listen to the BBC and receive their news with a degree of dispassionate compassion.
It was the Vietnam War that made me question, as a young teenager, the wisdom of my ‘superiors’. The huge demonstrations in the US were powerful stuff and indeed brought down Lyndon Johnson, in spite of his dedication to a ‘Great Society’. Who among us of a certain age can ever forget the horrific photo of nine-year-old Kim Phuc, her back burning from napalm dropped by American planes?
Politics became for me not a question of right, left or centre, but a question of right or wrong; it brought home that it is always the innocent people who suffer when governments revert to war as ‘politics by other means’.
March 2020 was a seminal time for everyone across the world. Those of us who were already of a questioning mind and with a degree of historical knowledge to appreciate the financial focus of the military and pharmaceutical industrial complexes knew from the outset that the covid narrative was something to be very suspicious of.
All of us depend on our understanding of the world by our five senses. This restricts our direct knowledge of existence to our own immediate surroundings. As children we believed in Santa Claus because we were told he existed and this was taken on trust. Similarly, as adults we were told in 2020 that a deadly disease was on the prowl and that we had to obey those who governed us to prevent the spread of infection. We were to ‘trust’ them unquestioningly.
But now as a mature adult I could make choices not limited to what I was being told by a loving parent but by the media and the government, who I knew didn’t bat an eyelid over human lives if they interfered with policy. To me, at the time, the masks, social distancing, empty hospitals, politicians still enjoying parties and then jab after jab was akin to Santa travelling across countless roofs the world over and delivering goodies to millions of children in a single evening: unbelievable.
The vast majority made a choice to believe what they were told and they will have to live with that decision. Let’s hope the reports that are coming out about saline solutions and placebos are true, because this will be the salvation for very many people who didn’t have the wherewithal to make the right choice.
Let the story of Santa Claus be a lesson to us all. We believe this sort of stuff when we are children, but when we grow up we should be able to think for ourselves and make choices that are appropriate to the far-fetched nonsense we are fed. The words of Paul ring loudly in my ears: ‘When I became a man, I put away childish things.’