Humility: The Unfashionable Virtue

Here in the land of the short poppies as I follow the ever-senseless juggernaut of deviance and oppression around the world, I was struck by two stories.

The first concerned a Dr. Jay Varma, the chief health adviser to New York City’s Mayor De Blasio during the covid lockdown and vax mandate period from 2020 to 2021. Dr. Varma can be seen and heard bragging about convincing the Mayor to mandate covid jabs. He was also preening about the Bacchanalias he held with his drug-and-sex happy cohorts, while mere grunts were holed up at home and forbidden from gathering with clothed friends for less salacious encounters in numbers comparable to Varma’s orgies.

You can watch and listen to this dictatorial hypocrite here, and read about what’s percolated even into the MSM here, if you have the stomach.

The other concerned the well-known popular cultural figure, for whom I needn’t provide any citations because news and gossip and speculation about his indictment seem to be everywhere. Like the good doctor Varma he too was fond of sexual exploration, and like Varma he had an appetite for wielding power. The matters for which he was indicted are grave, but he is innocent until proved guilty in a court of law. As I made my way through a smattering of reports and watched the accused in the flow of his monied power, humility was not the word on my lips.

Yet it — humility — is an interesting word, derived from the Latin ‘humus’ — earth, soil — and earlier Indo-European roots meaning the same — and indicating a ‘lowliness’, a connection with the ground. Is it a virtue to be low, to be common, to be one of the many scrambling for life, while those with the advantages of wealth and authority are free, in their elevation, from the fetters that constrain the less advantaged?

Today I attended the funeral of a man I had come to know over the years from occasional encounters related to my professional capacity — but no, he was not a patient. I was going to write that I knew him ‘slightly’ but this wouldn’t be true. Though our meetings were few they were sufficient to impart to me the substantial resonance of a deeply kind and humble man, devoted genuinely to his family. During the vax apartheid here in Wellington I literally ran into him after I exited a washroom connected to a cafe that allowed me access despite not having been jabbed, and I then learned to my delight that he was one of our own.

Several months ago I had the privilege of being hosted by him and his lovely family at their home. We talked of this and that, of his emigration from a foreign land many years ago to New Zealand, of his ties by language to another world in his bones.

At the Orthodox Christian church today, where the funeral ceremony was held, icons of the saints and of Christ, the anointed, lined the walls. I gazed at the mourners, I offered my condolences to the survivors, I listened as the prayers were recited, song-like, and breathed in the incense wafted from a thurible by the priest over the deceased, and over us. A necessary coming together, a beautiful one.

As I made my way out of the church to await the transportation of the coffin to the hearse, and thence to the cemetery , I spotted another image on a wall near the entrance, an icon of a very different kind.

The familiar and garish yellow-and-black color scheme gave it away as a government creation: an official covid-19 poster advising us to cough or sneeze into our elbows. I thought of the time a few years ago when these posters, so similar to hazard warnings for radioactivity, were inescapable. They told us to unite by staying apart, to mask up, to get jabbed, to isolate … They were everywhere, even painted onto the sidewalks to make sure we kept our distances. Today, in church, there was thankfully only this one relic.

And then, in the aftermath of this poignant ceremony honoring a decent man, beloved of his family and friends, I thought of the time when we would have been forbidden from gathering to mark his passing.

And why? Was it really because the virus was deadly? Well, ask Dr. Varma on his way to an underground assembly of unmasked and unclothed people, how deadly he truly thought it was.

I reflected on the abomination of depriving us of one of life’s most significant moments: grieving, keening, honoring and celebrating the passing of one who has been dear. Where did the grief go then?

I reflected upon the brutal and unnecessary suffering caused by meretricious impositions of arrogant, heedless, boastful people at the helm of our governments, none of whom could countenance any views in opposition to their fiats.

And even now, despite the ever-clearer exposure of the deceptions and hypocrisies, they’ll never admit that they were wrong.

Humility is not much more or less than knowing one cannot know everything. Unfashionable it may be — but how essential and refreshing.

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

September 2024