Americans cherish personal freedom. Lady Liberty’s majestic crown is the Bill of Rights set forth in the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. It is a watchtower guarding personal liberties, including the core freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. On her tablet is inscribed July 4, 1776, commemorating the Declaration of Independence. It professes self-evident truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Her torch radiates the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Her pedestal rests on rock solid self-determination, not regimented conformity. Individuals have the right to make personal choices affecting their personal lives, be they wise or stupid. Freedom would be illusory if choices deviating from officially prescribed criteria of propriety were prohibited.
Examples of choices to act stupidly include smoking tobacco, alcohol and substance abuse, subsisting on junk food, and random unprotected sex. Possibly the most dimwitted example of daftness is voting for a politico who wants to give away the farm to feed the nation; or a narcissistic, vainglorious, madder-than-March-hare yahoo. The freedom to make stupid choices however is not without outer limits. Lines are drawn marking off a threshold where your freedom to act ends and my nose begins. Lady Liberty is the mother of Pinocchio. Her nose keeps on growing. The stretch of our freedoms is getting shorter and shorter as her nose is getting longer and longer, progressively extending the scope of civil rights and political correctness. This is nothing to sneeze at. Lady Liberty’s elongating proboscis has a face mask. It filters out viruses causing infectious societal maladies, whether afflicting race, ethnicity, creed, culture, sex, or accommodatable physical and mental challenges. Denying equal, nondiscriminatory opportunities in education, employment, housing, as free access to the electoral process, too is taboo. Such discriminatory choices once were shielded by the freedom of stupidity.
The reader may now pierce the funny bone of this writing and get to the nitty-gritty marrow. Notwithstanding overwhelming scientific and statistical evidence establishing the COVID-19 vaccine to be safe and effective, an appreciable number of Americans make a personal decision to not get vaccinated. The risks associated with the vaccination are extremely low, the countervailing benefits disproportionately enormous. The right to make improvident decisions affecting one’s personal health arguably requires Lady Liberty to keep her long nose out, however ill-advised and uninformed the choice may be. Is not the decision to reject injection a constitutionally protected exercise of the freedom of stupidity?
The delta variant of the novel coronavirus is “hypertransmissible,” 60% more contagious than the formerly dominant alpha variant. Clinical evidence indicates that readily available vaccines are exceedingly effective in thwarting or mitigating currently spreading this hypertransmissible variant. Other mutant variants of the virus are now incubating throughout the world in the fertile petri dishes of myriads of unvaccinated individuals. A vaccine resistant pathogen doubtless is brewing in this viral stew. Such a rogue virus could spread globally like wildfire, infecting millions of people in a heartbeat, whether vaccinated or not. If herd immunity is achieved by vaccinating a minimum percentage of the population, factoring in both relevant demographic factors and the hyper-contagiousness of the variant, a more devastating neo-pandemic caused by a vaccine resistant variant could be avoided, or at least delayed. This would permit additional time for research, development and the distribution of an effective reformulated vaccine. It is inevitable that sooner than later such a scourge will emerge if nothing is done. Is it not a matter of personal choice to reject inoculation, however ill advised? Isn’t the freedom of stupidity beyond Lady Liberty’s legitimate reach? This logic is deceptively appealing.
The decision not to be vaccinated clearly impacts Lady Liberty’s extended nose. Mandating COVID-19 vaccinations is justified because it directly affects the critical health and welfare of the nation, as the world. Vaccination should be a requisite of classroom attendance, close contact employment, mass transportation, public gatherings, and events. The stakes attending the failure to get vaccinated are too high, the consequences too broad, the nose too long.
Ralph Josephsohn is a longtime resident of Longmont and a semi-retired attorney.
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July 12, 2021 at 07:08PM
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Ralph Josephsohn: Freedom of stupidity - Longmont Times-Call
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