But Muh Freedumz!!!

Me, wearing a mask before it was mandatory

Well, friends, it’s finally happened: somebody at work has been formally diagnosed with COVID-19. This is actually my jobsite’s second confirmed case, but the first that involves a worker who spent a protracted amount of time indoors, working in close proximity to others. His official paperwork says he was asymptomatic until this past weekend; but one witness confirms this employee was coughing and sneezing, in public, all last week.

Watching the news recently, it’s become clear how widespread willful blindness has become. Celebrities and politicians think we should reopen the economy. Several governors, including mine, are refusing to issue shelter-in-place orders, believing their states are somehow immune to consequences. Construction somehow remains an “essential job,” even though Grand Island, where over half of my co-workers commute from, has become the COVID capital of Nebraska.

Most important, individuals remain aggressively blind to community responsibilities. I’ve been voluntarily wearing a face mask at work for two weeks, but I was the only one for some time. Others kidded me for it. When the general contractor strenuously recommended masks, my co-workers dismissed it, complaining that it fogs their safety glasses. I was the only one covering his face, until the company made masks mandatory… on Wednesday.

This means the co-worker who coughed on everyone all last week exposed literally everyone except me to COVID. That’s seventeen guys, most with families and children. And, even knowing they’ve all been exposed, these guys continue finding ways to subvert the safeties. Even after the company made masks mandatory, and after we learned COVID existed inside the building, I watched co-workers standing around, jawing, with their masks on their chins.

I keep hearing claims about freedom and liberty ballyhooed to justify this willful disregard. My co-workers think safety precautions are an undue imposition upon their work conditions. I hear “religious freedom” tossed around to justify reopening churches ahead of schedule, even though, as I’ve written before, church is one of the leading vectors of infection. Freedom, freedom, the drumbeat goes. I have the freedom to ignore precautions whenever I want!

This really feels like a profoundly deficient definition of freedom. It limits freedom entirely to individual desires, with complete disregard for others. It’s my personal freedom to buy and sell, to gather with friends, to behave as though nothing has changed. It certainly isn’t others’ freedom to not die of a preventable contagion. This definition of freedom is entirely egocentric, individual, and narcissistic. It’s the freedom of a psychopath.

Dr. Phil claimed, Thursday on Fox news, that COVID deaths are negligible compared to swimming pool drownings, fatal car crashes, and smoking deaths. Although his numbers are demonstrably specious, they reflect common talking points among the freedom-and-liberty crowd. If there’s something worse already out there, these nincompoops cry, we shouldn’t do anything about the problem at hand. Why, oh, why, aren’t we addressing these problems?

Except, of course, that we are addressing these problems. We require liability insurance and lifeguards at swimming pools. We have rigorous traffic laws, and police assigned to enforce them, and people who chronically flout these laws get their driving privileges revoked. The ATF recently adjusted America’s mandatory minimum smoking age to 21, and the number of places you can legally smoke continues to dwindle in the United States.

This weekend, “protestors” angered at continued safety orders decided to barricade severa state capitals, in an organized effort informally titled “Operation Gridlock.” As protests go, it was sloppy, ill-informed, and driven by mutual outrage without much sense of what it would accomplish. The protestors demanded a lifting of mandatory safety precautions, while ignoring basic social safeties. One telling Denver placard reportedly read “Your ‘health’ does not supercede my right.”

Such a narrow, self-centered definition of “rights” goes hand-in-glove with a distrust for experts and science. “I don’t trust the CDC,” one of my co-workers said on Friday, while not wearing a mask. Scan any news about the story, and you’ll find a noisy minority who believes that epidemiology is a massive conspiracy to impinge upon individual freedoms. This sounds especially ignorant after an infected individual already coughed on everybody.

Thankfully, these organized heel-draggers remain a minority; over four-fifths of Americans believe continued action remains necessary and beneficial. But my anecdotal experience suggests the attitude of passive resistance is most concentrated among workers most likely to suffer if the pandemic continues. Workers resisting protective measures even after exposure are actively dangerous. And their definition of “freedom” is the freedom to die uselessly and without meaningful reward.