Restoring freedom after a year of perpetual emergency
If many Americans were skeptical of the CDC’s “guidance” calling for everyone to wear cloth or paper masks both indoors and outdoors, it looks like many other people are skeptical of the CDC’s “new guidance” saying fully vaccinated Americans do not have to wear a mask in most places.
On Thursday, PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff questioned CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky about the new policy. “This is a big change,” Woodruff began. “What is the new information that led to this? And how do you know it’s right?”
Walensky cited research that shows the effectiveness of vaccines. “If you are vaccinated, you’re very unlikely to be able to get asymptomatic disease, and therefore, transmit to other people,” she said.
Logically, if vaccinated people are “very unlikely” to get or transmit COVID, it shouldn’t matter to them whether anyone else is wearing a mask. But watch this train go off the tracks.
“Dr. Walensky,” Woodruff frowned, “I’m sure you know people are concerned.” Woodruff said people will wonder if “others without a mask” are fully vaccinated. When Walensky said the risk to the vaccinated person is “extraordinarily low,” Woodruff fretted that this is “an honor system,” and that President Biden said “there aren’t going to be enforcement mechanisms.”
It’s time to decide whether we are going to be a free country ever again, or whether we will accept a new standard of allowing the federal government to regularly issue “guidance,” which is then enforced on private businesses through local orders backed by heavy fines and the threat of the loss of operating permits.
Emergencies cannot be permanent. The disruption cannot become the default.
We’re on the verge of allowing that to happen. If the United States is going to be a free country, we have to think carefully about how we permitted the government to override everybody’s freedom, and exactly when we will force the government to get back in its box. Freedom is a condition that exists under a government of limited power.
That doesn’t mean free countries don’t have a government, it means the government is restrained. For example, the government may exercise power over an intersection to maintain traffic safety. The appropriate level of control may be a stop sign. Or it may be a stoplight. But it’s definitely not a checkpoint with armed and uniformed government agents checking to see who’s in the vehicle, where they’re going, whether they have legitimate business there, when they are due back, if they’re current on their taxes and whether they’ve been vaccinated.
Watch that slippery slope. During the early months of the lockdown last year, the L.A. County sheriff said his deputies would patrol public transit to make sure every passenger had an allowable reason to travel, and the mayor of Los Angeles reacted to pictures of lockdown-defiant beachgoers by warning, “We know who you are,” a statement that seemed to suggest the government was collecting cell phone identifiers ahead of what Judy Woodruff might call “enforcement mechanisms.”
There will never be a time when the world is completely free of danger. This fall, we may see a bad flu season or a surge of a new COVID variant. What is the appropriate threshold for the government of a free country to take extraordinary actions to limit movement, commerce, education and every other human activity?
If we don’t set limits on the government’s actions, we’re at risk of something far more dangerous than COVID.
There are three things that will help us chart a path through danger without losing our liberty: mandatory transparency, an automatic sunset, and fundamental respect for individual rights.
Transparency means the government must show its data, continuously, to prove the danger of the situation and that the rules it puts in place are effective. Everything must be evidence-based. Freedom cannot be shut down because government officials assume or guess that what they’re doing is necessary or working.
An automatic sunset means the emergency limitations on freedom must end on a date certain. The government must be forced to assess the situation anew and make the case, with data and evidence, that an emergency is still or again justified. We cannot allow a “new normal” based on the premise that we need the government’s permission to be free. Government needs our permission to be restrictive.
Most important of all, if we want to preserve freedom, is respect for individual rights. The United States was founded on the idea that individuals have “certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In a free country, the core purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals. Rights are not government-granted privileges. They may not be revoked arbitrarily, routinely, or lightly.
Recently in Gaza, a 26-year-old female Palestinian journalist, Rewaa Mershid, said she was beaten with a tree branch by a member of the Hamas-run border patrol for not wearing a hijab, a headscarf worn by devout Muslim women. Mershid said she loves journalism and now is looking for “any opportunity outside Gaza.”
Fortunately, there’s still somewhere to go where individual rights are valued more highly than “enforcement mechanisms.” But we have a lot of work to do if we’re going to keep it that way.
Susan Shelley is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. Susan@SusanShelley.com. Twitter: @Susan_Shelley