It’s quite easy to gauge the world’s failed response to the Covid pandemic in terms of enlightenment versus religion, science versus dogma, or medicine versus influence. The irony is that when you break these arguments down, they sow a similar theme.

It’s February 2023, the fourth year of Covid-19, and the world has corrupted science and religion so equally that their commerce in buying and selling needs no hiding.

The equation is simple: Money less Values equals More Money. Put it another way, if you want to be rich, dump the truth and Covid-19 is a bottomless mint for the savvy to exploit. Prior to 2020 only religion’s social reach could rival it.

As a Gen Xer I grew up in the crisis-bled world of the 1970s, that led to the economic pain of the 80s, the greed of the 90s, that’s become the systemic theft of our 21st Century. Yet, through those 70s and 80s, as an Australian I received free school-dental care, regular immunisation, and pre-generic medication—while our adults fed on tobacco and TV-promoted booze, and we kids played with broken asbestos fencing crawling with Redback spiders.

It was a dangerous and corrupt world then too. Vietnamese patrol boats did not attack US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin in an act of war that sent a generation into the jungles of Southeast Asia as the media claimed; a US president was stupid enough to tape himself conspiring in crime; and every Sunday reverends graced our wood-panelled TVs to cash in on Christ, while Australia shook off a “White Australia” immigration policy.

Tobacco, booze, asbestos, church and race theory—the greatest corporate frauds of modern times. But it’s religion that reminds us that corruption goes back even further; that Covid minimisation had its potential set in the ancient.

Around 1000 BC King David wrote the following praise to God in what became the Bible’s Psalm 37:

“I have been young, and I am now old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.” David lived in a time when the “righteous” searched for a saviour from political might.

A millennium later, Jesus mirrored David’s further words: “Cease from anger, and forsake wrath … the humble shall inherit the earth.”

Even if we consider religion as nothing more than a glimpse into a thousands-year-old history, we see in 1000 BC our time today: of “wicked evil doers”; when the wealth of a few caused the masses to “fret” and be “envious” and rise in “anger” and “wrath”; only to spawn bloody reprisals from the police state.

David wrote, “A little that a righteous man has is better than the riches of many wicked men,” for “the wicked borrows, and does not pay back.”

He may have been looking at the billions in Covid-19 JobKeeper payments that corporate Australia has yet “paid back”. Witness the tarnished Qantas that only last week boasted a one billion-dollar half-yearly profit only to explicitly refuse to “pay back” its taxpayer-funded bailout.

The nutshell of Psalm 37 then, is no different to the meaning of life today.

You cannot die rich.

Few mega-wealthy or their political lackeys understand this truth. So, the grift goes on.

We know of course that in the millenia that followed Psalm 37, David’s Kingdom fell to Rome, which itself fell to Barbarians—and Roman Jerusalem to a new religion called Islam, whose occupation sparked waves of Christian Crusades leaving in their wake European anti-Semitic pogroms, eventually ending in a Nazi Holocaust giving rebirth to Israel nearly 75 years ago as modern day Jewish state now riven by the same corruption driving communist China, dictatorial Russia and a neo-Nazi USA—a superpower remarkably still reeling from its racial Civil War of the 1860s.

Talk about cause and effect but it’s the same pattern of societal decline punctuated by eras of hope. For hate is hate and fear is fear.

And chaos means money, even if short-lived.

© 2023 Adam Parker.