There is a war going on right now between those fighting to open America back up for the sake of individual freedom and the economy, and those fighting to keep America closed for the sake of the health of the community. Scroll down the Comments section of any related news article that still even allows comments and you'll see what I mean. Discussions on this issue among so-called friends on Facebook and among neighbors in the Next Door social-media app are as nasty and combative as any topic I can recall seeing. If you're for re-opening America, you're called "irresponsible," "a pig," "misinformed" and worse, If you're for extending shelter in place, you're called a "fear-monger," "a fascist," and "stupid." It's a civil war over the very meaning, the very utility of freedom - the freedom to do what one wants versus the freedom from infection and death.
I saw a thread on Next Door, started by a resident asking her neighbors if two small snakes she spotted in her garden were poisonous or harmless (they were harmless). But for some reason the thread quickly descended into a rancorous argument over this very issue. The rhetoric soon got so heated and so vitriolic - name calling devolving into actual threats of physical violence - that the administrators eventually removed the entire discussion from the app.
Georgia was the classic case of a state not ready to relax social distancing. As a prerequisite for opening states back up, public-health officials have almost universally called for widespread testing and contact tracing. They must grasp the extent of the spread to safely usher people out of their quarantines. But Georgia’s per-capita testing rate has been one of the lowest in the country.
Worse still, neither the viral pandemic nor the racial pandemic was under control in Georgia when Governor Brian Kemp relaxed restrictions on April 24. The day before, five of the nation’s top 10 counties with the highest deaths rates per 100,000 were in southwest Georgia. Black people were the largest racial group in all five of these counties, in and around Albany, Georgia.
On Wednesday, in a study of hospitalizations in Georgia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than four-fifths of hospitalized coronavirus patients were black. As of Friday, black people composed 40.76 percent of the known coronavirus cases in Georgia and 53 percent of the coronavirus deaths, while making up 32.40 percent of the population, according to the COVID Racial Data Tracker.
Public-health officials fear a surge in deaths in states that open prematurely. If current racial disparities are any indication, then people of color are likely to bear the brunt of the infection and death surges in the 18 states that have reopened, as of Friday. In 13 of the 16 reopened states that have made racial-demographic data available, people of color are suffering disproportionate harm from COVID-19.
“Georgians are now the largely unwilling canaries in an invisible coal mine, sent to find out just how many individuals need to lose their job or their life for a state to work through a plague,” Amanda Mull explained, also in The Atlantic.
Kendi went on to point out that it's not wrong to long for your favorite restaurant or bar or stadium or nightclub or mall or lecture hall. It is not immoral to want to stop with the homeschooling already, to want to go back to work, or to hang out with loved ones you haven’t seen in a while. It's natural for an individual to want to free their social self from the agony of social distancing.
However, the freedom of an individual should never come at the expense of deaths in the community. No individual should have the freedom to infect a community. No one. Not me. Not you. Not even Vice President Mike Pence. He should not have the freedom to stroll through the Mayo Clinic without a mask.
The individual should be restricted from harming the community. But some Americans want to live in a society that frees them, as individuals, to subjugate the larger community. The freedom to infect others if it furthers their individual goal. This is the ultimate in privileged entitlement. When a business owner decides their profit is more important than their workers earning a living wage, that's not a viable business plan - it's privileged entitlement. When a bunch of frat boys decide to throw a kegger in the park at this tenuous time, that's not exercising the freedom to enjoy your own private life - it's deciding that your own personal enjoyment takes priority over the welfare and health, even the lives, of others.
I want to live in a society that grants me, as an individual, the freedom from subjugation for the benefit of another. The freedom from versus the freedom to.
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