Plagues, locusts, and floods

The following is an excerpt from an email from someone named Wyoming Doc who is married to a Chinese woman. Wyoming Doc frequents Rod Dreher's weblog.

I have not been able to comfort my wife in some time. I have never seen her like this. She is a profoundly educated and worldly-wise woman. However, she has now reverted to her people’s former religion of Zen Buddhism – in a way that I find beautiful and scary at the same time. Her grandmother made sure she and her siblings knew their old ways, even in the Maoist China in which she grew up.

She has made from scratch these beautiful garments for herself and our kids. She calls them “mercy garments” — I get the feeling it is something like our version of “sackcloth and ashes”. When this all started, she looked me right in the eye and said, “We Chinese have forgotten our old traditions and our blessed ancestors. They are now telling us that they have not forgotten us.” She has constructed a Buddhist shrine in our front room – pic enclosed – and every evening it is covered in votive candles – and she and the kids bow and perform rituals, and chant. It is like Gregorian chant – but a bit different.

This weekend, I saw the look from the abyss in her eyes once again. If you recall, when her fortune teller wrote her last fall, he stated that the plague would begin in the winter and that Lunar New Year would not be celebrated. The next thing he said would happen would be the complete destruction of the crops — and this would be accomplished with locusts.

You can only imagine the look in her eyes – and the gushing of tears – when Mandarin TV announced that the locust swarms from Africa had arrived in Xinjiang, were gathering strength, and had not been this bad in decades.

[Rod Dreher: The locusts really are there. Here’s today’s agricultural news.]

The Industrial Heartland is now on its knees. If this locust plague begins to spread from Xinjiang into Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia and Sichuan, that would put the Chinese breadbasket on its knees. That is where all the rice and wheat and other grains is grown. My wife’s fortuneteller by the way, stated that after the crops were ruined in the spring, the flooding would begin in the summer.

Again, my wife is a highly educated woman — a degree from their premier university — and up until now has been very secular in her life. I have this feeling that if my wife is behaving this way, it is probably going on all over China.

What is that going to mean for Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic? What would happen in America if large parts of the “Tribulation meme” inexplicably started to come true — what would that do to our cultural and civic life?

Now that China is the 2nd largest economy in the world – what effect will be had when things start to crater? What would the world be like with 1.5 billion Chinese in rebellion or even a Civil War?

[Rod Dreher: I remind you that Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, is one of the places in China where the persecution of Christians by the Communist regime was most severe...This could be a turning point in Chinese history. The early church gained respect and affection among the Romans in part because of the compassion its members showed the sick and dying during a plague time.]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/camus-church-china-the-plague-covid19