Should your pursuit of liberty be an existential threat to my pursuit of life? To hear Republicans and others tell it, yes, absolutely. If I don't want to vaccinate myself against a viral disease that has killed millions around the world and significantly compromised the health of millions more, I don't have to. Nor do I have to tell anyone and no one can prevent me from doing my work,, at least according to some courts. The Constitution allows me to do this. But, does the Constitution guarantee this in all cases? Well, I guess we'll wait and see.
Protecting the rights of the minority has long been a way to ensure that the majority does not stifle their voices, however in the case of war and other life-threatening situations such as natural disasters or crying "fire" in a crowded theater there are limits. Certainly in the past when epidemics have broken out, this has been a bone of contention. So when exactly does the public good supersede the individual's rights? Apparently, the answer has been: it depends.
In many ways, this is a challenge. Fundamentally, I believe most of us value our freedom of choice, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are as ingrained as part of American culture. But when we are talking about how our actions impact others, can this attempt at rationalizing our heritage for our selfish act truly be just? We have successfully stopped smokers from smoking everywhere and chemical plants and cars from belching toxins without regard, but the idea of reducing the national risk of a devastating global pandemic is a line that can't be crossed?
So let's consider the exceptions first. I won't do this for religious reasons. Well, major religious leaders are calling on their memberships to be vaccinated except for health reasons. Typically those religions that do not "believe" in vaccines are relatively small in number. But, what of those "unaffiliated" religious people or those who use religion as a reason why they don't do anything they don't want to do? To them, I simply ask, what would your God want you to do?
And what of those for whom vaccination is dangerous to their health because of pre-existing medical conditions? To them, I say get a medical exemption and then think about how you keep yourself and others safe as you could be or become a carrier, even if you don't contract it yourself. How are you going to keep your family or people you care about well? Use your freedom to figure that out.
However, to the greatest number of people who are not vaccinated, who'll I'll categorize as the stubborn, the arrogant, and the patently misinformed, I ask, are you that nihilistic or sociopathic? I refer to the kind of people who won't evacuate during a hurricane because they'd rather ride it out (remember those rooftop evacuations during Hurricane Katrina?). They are the people who think the government is trying to control them (e.g., microchips tracking, vaccines actually giving them the disease) and treat Facebook "expert" posts as the gospel while warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fall on deaf ears. These are the same people who also don't want to or won't wear a mask or do other things that mitigate against COVID-19 and its variants. These are those who gleefully point out that vaccinated people have gotten sick, never taking into account the difference between illness and death--the lion's share of which has happened mostly to the unvaccinated. If this number were 1% or even 10% of the country, chances are they wouldn't matter so much, but because their numbers, while a subset, are so large (about 40% according to the CDC), they are not ignorable.
From a societal perspective, you can argue perhaps it is good that there is all of this controversy surrounding vaccination because it does attach itself to what democracy is supposed to be about, that is the people deciding their course of self-rule. And that is the missing ingredient in the discourse--self-rule as a nation. Through our representatives, we make laws all the time that dictate what color paint you can use in a gated community or what side of the street we can park on, or even what your variable tax rate will be scaled at. We trust regulators to keep us from getting sick from the milk we drink to issuing warning labels on plastic bags so our kids are not accidentally suffocated. We do this because democratic rule is not the same thing as anarchy or libertarianism, it is a series of debated concessions we make so that we all can experience the closest thing to life, liberty, and justice for all. Because it is an ideal and not a fact, democracy is a process, not a status quo.
Democracy is a governance that is built on justice. Justice is an important facet of liberty. Justice insists that everybody gets a fair shake at a decent life. Justice needs to be supported by not giving in to the whims of people who regard their lives as more or less disposable than others. We don't have to understand everybody's motivations to know that life is valuable and that conceding some of our autonomy to serve that end is a tradeoff for our freedom. If we really believe that justice for all is guaranteed by the Constitution, we have to willingly sacrifice a small amount of freedom so we can all have a better shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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