Interdependent Days

Go with a loved one this 4^th of July to a Lake Superior beach and Covid-19 won't find you. This dread virus isn't so novel that it lurks there waiting to kill.

For that you'll need neighbors. Fellow citizens, mostly.

Specifically, you'll need neighbors whose terminal self-regard demands they endanger your life for their convenience. They're also blind to how liberty works. That's a deadly combination.

Certainly, individuals have every right to risk their own lives or even waste them, as they choose. More critical to liberty's cause, no one has any right to risk your life for you. Otherwise, thus do demagogues rise to dictators and democratic republics fall.

The hard case is that politics and plague notwithstanding, the personal liberty angrily claimed by the most recalcitrant among us isn't theirs alone. It belongs to us.

Together we empower and sustain American style liberty. You simply can't hold that ground on your own. Today, anyone still in possession of even half the good sense they were born with knows that in their bones.

The word for acting in total disregard for your neighbors isn't liberty, it's license. Of the fabled Deadly Sins, that's an operative in six of seven and even sloth is basically a libertine's choice.

Ants don't know from license. Intuitively, each ant at its core understands and accepts that continued ant success requires they each pursue collective purpose.

Of course ants aren't an ideal metaphor for humans. Their slavish devotion to royalty alone ruins the notion, as the Declaration of Independence reminds us.

Except humans believe themselves exponentially better in all ways than ants. Right?

If you claim the liberty that's yours as a human being, prove it by being better at living together than ants. Exercise your individual will to pull with the rest of us in the only viable direction left.

Remember - it's life then liberty as recorded in freedom's Holy Writ, after which comes everything else. Only with the first can the second exist, much less we get to chase after happiness in our spare time.

So wear a damned mask. Then maybe you'll still be around to help when we the people once again make something necessarily new out of the old, outdated us.

Choose instead to place your neighbors at risk through your moral vanity and - provided you don't first die of stupidity - in the future you'll be on your own. Because those free people who survive as witness to such aggressively ignorant folly as yours, they'll remember.

Expect a run on sackcloth. There'll be no shortage of ash.

#wearthemask #independenceday #liberty