Jackass freedom
On the one hand, real freedom – freedom to get an education, to work, to leave the house, to travel, to be around other people, to be godless. On the other hand, fake freedom – to refuse to wear safety belts in cars, to refuse to heed warnings about building in flood zones or fire zones, to refuse to wear masks during a pandemic.
The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, will temporarily be allowed to enforce an order banning mask mandates, the state supreme court ruled on Sunday.
So the governor is free to force other people to risk their health by allowing third parties to risk the health of their employees and students or patients or customers by not mandating masks. It seems like a very perverse and frivolous kind of “freedom.”
However, the ultimate fate of mask mandates in Texas is far from clear, as school districts and localities fight to maintain control of public health orders and Covid-19 caseloads driven by Delta variant infections among unvaccinated people surge.
They want to have mandates, and the governor wants to ban mandates. Whose freedom is more important here? Yes, having to wear a mask is an interference with freedom in a sense, but then so is being on a ventilator. Freedom from COVID is a more profound freedom than freedom from wearing a mask.
Abbott has said his order does not ban mask-wearing.
“Anyone who wants to wear a mask can do so, including in schools,” he said in a tweet on Sunday.
Cute, but since wearing a mask protects other people more than the self, that’s not as consoling as it might sound.
Meanwhile, some nurses in Winchester, VA, are protesting for their freedom to work without getting vaccinated. Absolutely infuriating. My mother was a nurse, and she would’ve been one of the first in line for the vaccine because she actually cared about her patients. (She was also pro-choice.)
Note too that the hospital allows for exceptions for medical and religious reasons, so the protestors don’t even have that excuse. (Religious exceptions are bullshit, of course; everyone whose life isn’t endangered by the vaccine should get it.)
I think it’s the same kind of freedom as the right to sit in a frozen apartment so the power companies don’t have to comply with regulations and then having the privilege of paying a $10,000 power bill when it does come back on.
That kind of freedom. The freedom to dump your oil change right where it’ll seep into the neigbhors yard. The kind of freedom to shoot your gun up in the sky on New Year’s Day even though bullets don’t go at escape velocity and return to earth with enough velocity to kill someone. That kind of freedom.
“Freedom” is one of those words like “inclusivity”, good for generating warm fuzzy feelings, while actually saying very little.
Whose freedom to do what to whom?
Whose freedom from having what done to them by whom?
If there’s a conflict, whose freedom prevails, and why?
Without answering questions like this appeals to “freedom” mean nothing.
What are you? Some kind of librul elite?
I’ve known a lot of nurses over the years (a couple of friends married nurses and while I’ve been lucky enough to largely avoid going to hospital myself I’ve spent far too much time in them visiting). As a class, I have to say that I’ve found nurses and many doctors to be very good at not following basic health advice. Higher than average incidence of smoking, heavy drinking and obesity. All symptomatic of people in high stress environments with unhealthy working conditions to be sure. I also know one ex-nurse who is an absolutely rabid anti-vaxxer and was long before Covid. She was tipped by what she saw as the greed and unethical behaviour of Pharma in the health system. That somehow morphed into distrust of all pharmaceuticals and mainstream health advice.
I am a rugged individualist, and a taker and a grabber, like my hero Donald Trump. I grab whatever I please, when I please, and further maintain that I should be free to drive on whatever side of the road I choose, and to go wherever I choose to, knocking down whatever doors and other barriers might be in my way. After all, ” there is no such thing as society.” That wonderful luminary Margaret Thatcher said as much. So, no masks for me. Covid is all a conspiracy anyway, as are lockdowns.
I would bust into one of Doanld Trump’s tasteful palaces and grab whatever I chose (including Stormy Daniels if she was there) except they are all too well guarded.
Trump knows himself, and that gives him powerful insight into everything, making him the most stable genius who has ever been. If only there could be more like him. Millions more. Billions more …. (I could go on.)
Nursing has been deeply infiltrated with quackery and woo. The second-class status and low pay are generators of resentment, so why not use your extended education requirement to bone up on Therapeutic Touch, Homeopathy, acupuncture, etc.?
Meanwhile, in Texas: Texas requests five mortuary trailers in anticipation of Covid deaths.
But it’s ok because they’ve still got their freedom.
Jeeeezus.
Christ help America!