Wednesday, June 24, 2020

The "face" of freedom in this country


As I have said in previous posts, I am not particularly impressed by the kind of protesting that devolves into mindless violence and destruction regardless of how the perpetrators try to justify it. After several incidents involving firearms, in which one person was killed, the “kids” are finding out that setting up your own “autonomous” playground free from oversight by grownups is not a “game.” The city of Seattle has decided to “take back” the “CHOP” zone in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, and frankly let’s hope that both sides have learned an important lesson: “freedom” doesn’t come “free.” For police, they are not “free” to abuse their authority, and for the citizenry, freedom to go about their daily lives is threatened when confronted by people who feel “free” to act on impulses outside the usual societal norms (like arson and looting)—which in turn has a tendency to lead people who feel the victims of that kind of “freedom” to feel themselves “free” to act out in their own way to defend their “freedom” to feel and act the way they want.

Such “freedom” can be acted out in domestic terrorist incidents, or the “imagining” of such action, such as the Associated Press report on the firing of three police officers in Wilmington, North Carolina—one of whom felt that “a civil war is coming and that he is ready” to buy an assault rifle and “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering them (expletive concerning blacks). I can't wait. God, I can't wait.” The officer went on to say he couldn’t wait to “wipe them off the (expletive) map. That'll put them back about four or five generations.” Probably not the kind of police officer you want to give the “freedom” to have a gun.

The reality is that there really isn’t anything that can be called true “freedom” to act in any way one wishes; the lyric in the song “Me and Bobby McGee”—“Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose”—isn’t just a throwaway line that sounds good. It suggests that to be truly “free,” your actions no longer have any meaning to anyone or even to yourself; the only true “freedom” is to be dead to the world, or simply death itself.  But there are other kinds of “freedoms,” such as those of purposeful ignorance, inaction or indifference. Look what happens after yet another mass shooting; we see inaction from those who think we should have gun laws, and the indifference of gun fanatics concerning the carnage. This country’s infrastructure is in desperate disrepair, yet bridges continue to collapse after decades of inaction. “Fenceline” communities suffer from environmental hazards because better-off white communities are indifferent as long as the suffering is “NIMBY.” 

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are demanding their “freedom” to get sick if they want to, although generally in the belief that they are personally immune from the virus. It may surprise some people that the Constitution technically allows people the “freedom” to ingest any substance they choose to inside their bodies, which is why drug laws are tailored to make it illegal to manufacture and sell certain “recreation” chemicals, and thus the purchase of such chemicals for personal use is also made illegal.  The requirement of wearing of facemasks, on the other hand, attempts to get around “constitutional” freedom rights by making an individual accountable for actions that harm another person; being sick by the COVID-19 isn’t a “crime,” but being sick and deliberately acting in a way that makes another person sick is an “actionable” offense. 

Thus Washington Governor Jay Inslee promulgated an order this week to take effect on Friday requiring everyone over the age of five to wear face coverings in any indoor or outdoor public space. The order exempts people who are outdoors and can maintain a six foot distance—which of course many people will take as license to walk about city streets that are not too crowded without masks simply because they do not want to wear masks at all, anywhere. I was riding the bus home last night when I noticed that most of the usual passengers had decided not to wear masks, despite the fact that Metro had not changed its policy requiring the wearing of facemasks while riding the bus; they apparently decided to use Inslee’s order as an excuse to take a holiday from wearing them until Friday. 

I pointed out the incongruity of not wearing masks when the governor’s order was instigated by a rise in COVID-19 cases, and was intended to get into people’s heads that they needed to start wearing masks now, and giving hardheads a chance to “prepare” themselves. On Friday, people who are not wearing facemasks in public spaces as required will allegedly be subject to tickets for a misdemeanor offense, but whether this will actually be enforced, or arbitrarily enforced subject to how a police officer is feels at the moment, is another matter. But what this shows is that even in “liberal” cities like Seattle, it is very difficult to force people to do the right thing if it infringes on their “freedom.” When I arrived in Seattle to go to work today, I encountered 233 people on the sidewalks in an area encompassing downtown toward Capitol Hill; only 88 were wearing facemasks. Unless there is real enforcement, this won’t change, protests or not; since the lockdown began—and Inslee’s order will probably lengthen it—Seattle police seem to be avoiding being seen by (let alone having contact with) the citizenry at any and all times. 

Meanwhile, in California, Arizona, Florida and Texas where there has been record spikes in virus cases since lockdown rules have been eased have forced the governors of those states to reevaluate moving too rapidly toward “normalcy,” but “requiring” the use of facemasks has predictably led to anger among certain constituencies who simply cannot abide by “restrictions” on their “freedom” to act without regard to their fellow humans. That is the incongruence of “individualism” that is supposedly one of the trademarks of American culture: by acting in accordance to their own sense of “freedom,” some people simply do not care about how their own actions reduces another’s person’s freedom.

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