☀️Say It Again Sun

Friday, August 25 - 2023 Week 34

Aug 25, 2023

Good afternoon, Marysville! Is your summer spinning up, spinning down, or just spinning out of control? No matter, the Sun is shining on you.

☀️Masks: What More Can Be Said?

It was just a month ago that I responded here in the Sun to some of the nonsense going around about giving amnesty to government officials who didn’t know better in 2020 when they locked us in our homes and mandated masks over our faces. What’s worse than the length of the previous sentence is the length of time we endured under the “State of Emergency.” And as a great example of why such amnesty isn’t deserved, the “current” thing is about how mask requirements are expected to drop again in the fall (thanks to CNN for this example).

It’s a “new” (and improved!) variant of COVID. Did you expect different? It is curious, though, not only that it’s happening at the start of another presidential election cycle, but also that we already know this round is coming. Our best technology only enables us to guess when it’s going to rain in the next seven days, but we’re definitely going to get sick in a couple months? And if it’s COVID, then it’s still a respiratory virus, and those aren’t actually stopped by masking the public. It’s not epidemiology, immunology, or virology. Once again, even the New York Times acknowledged that masks aren’t based on science. Again, science says masks make no difference.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Let me think of some ways that masks are effective. The difference they do make is in crowd control. They do isolate. They do increase both anxiety and suspicion. They do mess with our own oxygen intake.

It’s convenient/timely/providential that I’ve started studying for a series of sermons in Romans 13 at our church. I’ve been teaching through the letter verse by verse, and we’ve reached the God and governors section. As Christians we do want to default to recognizing and not resisting our civil authorities. We also don’t want to qualify Scripture’s requirements into non-requirements. And yet, at least here in the United States, “we the people” are part of the process. Not only that, the governor is not God, which means that there are limits to any man’s commands.

So what more can be said about the possible return of mask mandates? If Dr. Suess were still alive he might have put it like this:

☀️Survey Results

The song “Rich Men of North Richmond” has now been viewed over 40 million times on YouTube. Here are the results from last week’s survey:

☀️City Growth

Watch Haylie Miller, the Community Development Director, talk for a couple minutes as she introduces the Growth Management Act and how Marysville has begun planning to add 20,000 new residents over the next 20 years.