"Give me liberty or give me death." We have all heard it, and it's both remarkable and discouraging how our views of liberty have changed. This became especially obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic.
States quickly embraced all kinds of restrictions. They forced numerous businesses to close. They made certain public spaces off limits. Predictably, freedom-loving Americans protested authoritarian government overreach. Although the right to protest is protected by the U.S. Constitution, many insisted that the pandemic suspended rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
As time progressed, authoritarian governors went even further. They demanded that all businesses should enforce mask mandates, which played a major role in turning masks into a symbol of oppression. Even before full FDA approval, they issued vaccine mandates. We were required to carry around medical paperwork everywhere we went just to live our lives.
Even towards the end of the official pandemic, there were complaints that the government should have gone further. I kept reading about a "proper lockdown." There were complaints that restrictions came down too fast.
What's more important, the amount of time in which we have a pulse or fundamental human rights and freedoms? Technically speaking, this is a matter of opinion. Personally, I would prefer that people live long and free rather than even longer as slaves to the government. There is no mandate they I must value life over liberty. I should probably mention that I also believe that life lost as a result of harm caused to mental health is not justified by a larger number of lives saved from COVID-19.
I was open to risks to my life during the pandemic if that was what it would take for future generations to have more rights and freedoms. According to Democrats, that makes me selfish. Obviously, I disagree with Democrats regarding what it means to be selfish. I do not believe that it's selfish to risk your life to fight for the rights of others. By contrast, I fully believe that it's selfish to demand others to abandon rights and freedoms to protect your life.
We have linked a lot of these discussions around individualism versus collectivism. We insisted that anyone who resisted government constraints was guilty of "rugged individualism." By the way, people who didn't get vaccinated because they allowed those around them to dictate personal views weren't truly embracing individualism.
What we saw during the pandemic is evidence of increasing collectivism. Instead of living the lives that we believe are right for us, we turned to the government to control our lives based on what they believed was good for a collective society. I wish we had rugged individualism. That would be so much better than authoritarian collectivism.
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