I have several thoughts....
1. There are certain necessities for some people which will run counter to the intended spirit of the restrictions. SOME people—particularly single people living on their own at the lower end of the wage scale—aren’t logistically prepared for this kind of thing, and they lack the financial means of becoming logistically prepared in the short amount of time that these restrictions have been put in place. They don’t
have 2 weeks of food stored up in their homes....let alone a month-or-two's worth. They have always depended on being able to make smaller, more frequent grocery runs, or going out for fast food. I will grant that many of these people are also not immunized against bad decision-making, and they'll suffer the consequences thereof to a greater extent because of it. But there isn’t
time enough right now for them to learn how to change their habits as we head into these restrictions.
I am NOT proposing that we do anything to, for, or about these people. What I
am saying is that it is unrealistic to expect that most of them will stay home and keep to themselves. They will go out to eat. They will go out to socialize. They will go out to buy groceries. That’s just a fact, and I don’t see what can be done about this particular social stratum, other than locking them up ... which shouldn’t happen anyway.
2. One of my very favorite commenters/observers of humanity, second only to Jesus Christ, and on the same level as Samuel Clemens, is H.L. Mencken—who had MUCH to say about liberty. One of his quotes goes thusly:
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
"Why Liberty?”, in the Chicago Tribune (30 January 1927)
In another one of my favorite quotes, Suzanna Gratia Hupp said, speaking of the 2nd Amendment:
How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.
If you substitute the word "liberty" for "2nd Amendment", she’s expressing the same sentiment that Mencken does, but she adds something—the notion that liberty cannot exist without gov’t's acceptance of the citizenry as trustworthy and productive. The meaning of "productive" is self evident....the meaning of "trustworthy" may seem a little more cloudy, but it’s not. Not really.
My personal understanding of "trustworthy"
isn't framed by asking "do I believe that
most people,
most of the time, will want and/or try to do the right thing"? Because the answer to that question is definitely "no, I do not". What I
trust them to do is to act in what they (rightly or wrongly) perceive to be their own self interest most of the time, and to hades with the consequences to themselves or anyone else. The problem is that I cannot curtail their liberty to act according to those perceptions without subjecting myself to the same curtailments.
I believe that my family is adequately prepared for
total isolation should we need to do so. So far, my wife and I are only making limited forays out and about, and my son and DIL are still having to report to their jobs. Our grandkids are are home because the schools are closed. My grandson's 4th birthday party was supposed to be this Sunday. We canceled it this morning, which is kind of sad, but we'll make it up to him. He’s 4. He'll remember that we threw him a family birthday party. He won’t remember that none of his cousins were there.
My son's niece is currently undergoing chemotherapy following removal of a brain tumor. She's 6. Her life is already hard right now, and she has a very compromised immune system at the moment and has dealt with a series of resultant infections. She’s on pretty strict isolation right now. Her family has had to ship her older brother off to live with their grandparents so that he doesn’t bring something home that could kill her.
Responsible people are having to really change their normal routines to deal with this thing. I do understand that not everyone is in a position to self-isolate, but I think that it’s pointless to be in denial about the risks. The incubation period means that it is possible to be exposed,
catch it, and walk around shedding viruses for 2-4 weeks after exposure without even knowing you’ve got it. How would you feel if you were that person, and then 3 days after having visited your elderly parents and hugged them goodbye, you start showing symptoms? Sure, you’re relatively young and in good health. You’ll likely feel like you have a mild flu, and that’ll be it. But your elderly parents might
die because of your irresponsibility. Are you ready to live with that,
knowing that you could have taken steps to limit your exposure, but
chose not to?
What are you going to do if you go to a movie, and halfway into it, the guy sitting behind you develops a cough, and you find that you’ve been breathing in his little virus-infested droplets? Now you catch the disease, and he infected someone else, because
neither of you were willing to put up with the
temporary inconvenience of getting your entertainment at home instead.
One is a case of putting someone else you love at risk; the other is a case of having been put at risk by a total stranger. BOTH are cases of infection due to social irresponsibility. Forget the moral implications and consider just the facts: it’s the equivalent of unprotected sex with total strangers—fun for a short while, but spirochetes don’t care about your fun. They live ONLY to replicate themselves, and they’ve taken evolutionary advantage of the human tendency to prefer immediate gratification over wisdom. COVID-19
also lives only to replicate itself, and it will take advantage of any opportunity YOU give it to do so.
I’m 67, and I’m not in the same robust health I was in as a young man. Right now, my son and DIL
have to go in to work, but I’m grateful that they’ve begun staying home and avoiding crowds when they don’t have to be at work. My wife and I are staying home as much as possible. Our church is still having services, but we’re holding them to an empty room, and webcasting them. Our Lifegroup is suspending meetings until next month. All of this serves TWO purposes.... it protects US from sick people, and it protects OTHERS in case we’ve already been exposed.
Right now, nobody
sane is suggesting that you
have to stop living your life. But,
sane people ARE suggesting, and for good reasons, that you
should modify your daily routines for a temporary period. In so far as it is within your ability to avoid doing so, don’t be a jerk about it. If most everybody gets on board with voluntary self-isolation, the situation will be
TEMPORARY. If enough people are careless about it, and that careless behavior can be determined to have prolonged the
public health crisis, then look for the the crisis to become a
political and
legal one. I’m a "small L" libertarian (actually, a minarchist), but one of the things that is sometimes off-putting to me about libertarianism is that so many of its adherents seem autistic when it comes to ideas like social contracts. Remember that authoritarianism LOVES a crisis like this because it always provides the statist reasons to further curtail liberty in the name of "safety"; and it will always rush in to cease control wherever the boundaries of social contract become too permeable to antisocial behavior.
Freaking out about this stuff serves no one. Panic never serves any purpose but that of getting people killed. But the flip side of that is that stupid is painful. The problem is that it isn’t always painful to the stupid person. Sometimes it flattens the poor sod who had the misfortune of simply being in stupid's vicinity, and that’s an injustice that could easily be prevented with an advance application of smarts.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
