There are quite a few stories of people encountering something frightening in the woods. Loud footsteps, weird screams, bad smells and ominous feelings of impending doom – followed by a swift retreat minus camping/fishing gear. A few so scared that they never went back for their stuff.
It’s funny (well, not to them) if it turns out that they got scared off by a rutting deer or a determined raccoon. A little less so when we can’t explain the events. But still, getting so scared that you run off and leave everything? Sounds ridiculous – in the light of day.
But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as a nation since early 2020. We’ve run scared from a virus – so scared that we’ve left our rights behind and trampled the rights of others.
Let’s assume the absolute worst – that C19 is highly infectious and has a high mortality (there’s a lot of very good evidence that neither of these things are true as stated). Would it then justify any and all measures to stop it?
Well, let’s look at the measures. Lockdowns do have a historic precedent – the Black Death. Cities were ordered shut (having huge gates making this actually doable) both to keep the plague out – and in. And for the most part, it didn’t work. to be fair, had they had Internet instead of troubadours, it might have helped the farthest cities but by the time a city knew of the problem, it was already too late. And the Internet didn’t help us that much, either.
What it DID do was insure higher death rates in those cities and surrounding areas both from disease and starvation. And there’s no real pattern to where the plague just skipped – at least in a given outbreak. So did the lockdown practice prevent some spread? Maybe – but it could just as easily have been travel patterns or even weather patterns in a given area that spared it. We simply don’t know.
We do know that most weren’t spared – which kinda doesn’t help the case for lockdowns.
So, would lockdowns that abuse civil rights and defy the Constitution be justified? Well, clearly not when they seem to have no observable effect. What if they did work? Would that justify the increased death rates in the areas affected? What about the increased suicide and violent death rates? Is it okay to protect some people while costing the lives of others? What if it’s your life being sacrificed?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
Who gets to choose who lives and who dies? If we are so afraid of a virus that we are willing to cause other people to die for our sake, we DANGED WELL better have an answer. Who chooses? And whose unalienable right do we steal?
The correct answer is no one – this is why rights are so very, very important. Because as a fearful mob, we see only black and white – it never occurs to us that there might be another way. But when we are held to account – when mobs don’t rule – when the minority opinion has a chance to be heard, that’s when we have the chance to find BETTER solutions. Much better, and before we have done things we can’t undo.
We’ve let our fears govern us instead of governing them – and there’s going to be a terrible reckoning eventually when we find out just how many people we hurt in our rush to find safety. We’re not going to like what we see in the mirror – and we’re going to be even more angry with those who lied to us.
No one can fix the past – but we can create a better future. But only if we STOP being ruled by fear. Stop trampling the rights guaranteed by the Constitution – which come, as Jefferson stated “from Nature and Nature’s God’.
Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. All the more so if we let fear make monsters of us all.
