Your Freedom Doesn’t Exist In A Vacuum
Unless your name is Jeremiah Johnson, you derive your freedom from everyone else.
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In this world, we all have some level of freedom. For many of us, we’re free to travel, free to be left alone, and free to take care of ourselves. Many of us have found freedom in our minds. But there are still some people who think they should be free to not wear a mask, to not get vaccinated during a pandemic. The willfully unvaccinated and unmasked seem not to understand that their freedom is dependent on the freedom of everyone else.
There are people who would have us believe that it is their right to put others in danger or in peril by not wearing a mask and not taking the jab. I can understand why they might think that way. They fear the vaccine. They believe that the vaccine causes too many injuries or deaths. Yes, there are some adverse reactions. Yes, some people have died from vaccines. There is a national fund just for the purpose of providing compensation to those left behind when someone dies from a vaccine.
But in the bigger scheme of things, those deaths by vaccine pale in comparison to the deaths of the unvaccinated. We’re now approaching 700,000 deaths from the coronavirus and its variants. We’ve been at this for a year and a half now. If we’re going to bring the pandemic to an end, we’re really going to have to work together on it.
Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been mostly sheltering in place. I work from home. I go for walks on the trail that winds around my subdivision most days now. I ride bikes with my kids. I walk them to the school bus when they have school. I run errands from time to time. I mask up when I’m indoors in public places.
When the pandemic ends, some say that it will take about 4 years to work its way through all of us, I’ll come out more. But until then, I’m here waiting, working, tending to my family. To me, that’s freedom.
When I mask up, I am respecting your freedom. And when I got vaccinated, I was respecting your freedom again. If you’re sick you are not free. If you’re in an intensive care unit, you’re not free. Freedom is but a ghost when we’re seriously ill. Freedom doesn’t matter in a hospital bed. Freedom doesn’t matter if your friends and…
