If, prior to the pandemic, you had told me that public health could become a partisan issue, to the point at which one side would openly declare war on science, I would have been, to put it politely, been skeptical. Science, so far as I am concerned, and as far as the majority of as are concerned, is science, and that includes medical science, the science we rely on to live. True, we have political dust-ups on some science-related questions, such as when life begins, and the extent to which the Bible can be relied on as a literal record of human history. But I had thought of those dust-ups as exceptions that prove the rule: namely, that if science says X, we don't immediately take Democratic versus Republican positions for or against Y. We may have debates about how to address X, or about exactly how important X is relative to other things. But we don't debate the truth of X.
We do now.
Face masks have suddenly become the new flashpoint in the culture wars that seemingly have no end. Face masks. A simple, affordable, highly practical way of containing the spread of a virus that is, to put a fine point on the obvious, a respiratory virus. A precaution not merely endorsed, but strongly encouraged by every medical official with anything to say about COVID-19. A precaution endorsed by the Trump Administration's own health officials.
But not, alas, by President Trump himself. Somehow, he has conceived the idea that wearing a face mask is a kind of cowardly act, something that only fearful, gutless, liberal weaklings need to do. Which is why he doesn't wear one. Why he has managed to intimidate those who know better to let him refrain from wearing one. And, worst of all, why he has managed to rally his supporters to intimidate others from wearing them.
As I understand it, the requirement mandated by state and local governments to wear masks in public places is seen as an affront to individual liberty--and, in the context of worship services, an affront to religious liberty. Somehow, the notion that individual liberty also mandates that others be protected so that they can live their lives as they see fit seems to have never come up in this analysis of what it means to be free. Not even from the angle of thinking about what it means for protecting the mask opponents themselves, so that they can continue to enjoy freedom.
In fact, some of the anti-mask folks have gone so far as to co-op the liberal argument for reproductive freedom for their purposes: "It's my body and my choice."
Hmm.
If I thought that there was even a chance--a tiny, tiny one--that the mask foes could be successfully co-opted into becoming pro-choice (which I'm sure they aren't now) by my accepting their embrace of this argument, I just might do it.
Because I would still argue that we should all wear masks in public, by co-opting one of their war-on-terror slogans: "Freedom isn't free."
This means that, in the face of a public emergency, one that threatens every member of the public, the government has not merely the right, but the obligation, to take whatever reasonable and necessary steps are available to protect the public from the emergency and allow them to otherwise live their lives as they see fit. Government is not the tyrant here; the virus is the tyrant. Viruses do not care about borders, constitutions, theories of natural law or Biblical verses. They're viruses. They do what they want. We fight the virus on its terms, or we lose. And, if we lose, freedom will no longer something we will be in a position to think about, much less exercise.
Perhaps this is the influence of the Boomer generation, of which I confess to being a part, but one of the things about the present age which worries me the most is what we have done to concepts such as freedom, to say nothing of citizenship. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that freedom is not merely an individual experience, but an experience that we share as part of a free society. Society exists because government exists--and, so long as government is ultimately controlled by the whole people, freedom isn't threatened by government, and government is able to take whatever steps are necessary at different points in time to protect personal and social freedom.
Freedom, to put it another way, is not simply about what I want, but about what each one of us wants. This is way we we were willing to tear apart our nation in the nineteenth century, so that it could be put back together as a nation in which no one had the privilege of infringing the freedom of others based on the color of skin.
That is why freedom is never free.
And it's why it may be about your body, but it's also about thwarting the virus' choice.
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