COVID AND CHOICES, By Ken Burrows: Freethought Views, September 2020

 

COVID AND CHOICES

By Ken Burrows

 

It’s been said that in war, truth is the first casualty. This insight is proving applicable to the war against COVID-19, wherein the facts as provided by virologists and numerous other health experts have in many cases become casualties lost to political partisanship, conspiracy theories, religious sentiment, and myriad myths about COVID risks and “cures.”

 

But there’s danger in abandoning the truths of reason and sound science while turning instead to unfounded suppositions and the fables of various fantasizers and factions, including a science-denying administration regularly at odds with truth. Because when misleading falsehoods gain acceptance in a war against a contagious and lethal virus, truth is merely a first casualty. The ruined health and silent corpses of human beings follow closely behind as casualties too.

 

COVID-19 indeed requires us to make difficult and fateful choices. Choices about our own health and safety but also—if we adhere at all to the golden rule and value the common good—choices about the fate and well-being of our fellow community inhabitants. To the degree that we follow social distancing, face masking, and other measures recommended by experienced professionals in disease control, we do well on both levels of choice. If we ignore or actively violate these measures, we sacrifice the common good to whatever lesser priority or non-rational belief we’ve opted to embrace. A choice to abandon truth has consequences.

 

Protesters of stay-at-home orders in some cases shouted “Fire Fauci,” effectively rejecting science and instead acting on misinformation, their impatience, and/or their personal ideologies. They also often amassed in close proximity, jeopardizing their own health, that of their group members, plus all their subsequent contacts. In other cases church pastors flouted group gathering limits and held crowded services, insisting it was their religious freedom right to do so. At one such gathering, a participant was asked if she was concerned about getting infected or potentially infecting others. “Not at all,” she replied, saying her faith protected her. Here she rejected science in favor of her chosen religious belief, elevating the prerogatives she feels it gives her over the medical welfare of others.

 

Freedom isn’t free, goes the time-worm adage, meaning it has been won and is sustained through effort and sacrifice. Citizens protesting COVID-inspired limits regularly lamented their freedoms were being trampled, even though such limits were imposed in the interest of saving lives in a uniquely perilous pandemic. But even in a free, civilized society, freedoms are not “free” of all restraint. They are not unfettered licenses to do harm. When protesters and other dissenters made a choice to reject scientifically sound measures to protect public health and chose unsound, life-endangering alternatives, they were making a conscious choice to do harm or at least turn a blind eye to the risk. That abuses freedom rather than protects it. It also dismisses the ideal of shared responsibility for the common good.

 

No less a defender of freedom than Rev. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it this way in 1805: “One object of civil laws is limiting citizens in the exercise of their rights so that they may not be injurious to one another [and] the public good may be promoted.” This do-no-harm principle is worth remembering when faced with the hard choices necessitated by COVID-19.

 

Published September 2-8, 2020 in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views column in the Colorado Springs Independent with the quotation below.

Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty.”
― James Madison