Your right to risk infection ends six feet from your neighbor
To The Times:
Legend has it that a defendant in an assault case hearing taking place in a 19th century Indiana courtroom claimed that the U.S. constitution gave him the right to “swing my fist wherever I choose to thrust it.” According to courtroom lore, a wise Hoosier judge retorted: “Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.”
On April 20th, several hundred restless, reckless, and remorseless Pennsylvanians gathered at the Capitol in Harrisburg to demand their “right” to risk infection by COVID-19 and to defy the governor’s rational and reasonable public health orders. For the record, there are approximately 12.8 MILLION people who live in Pennsylvania and nearly 12.8 million of them were NOT at the Capitol that day.
As feckless as this crowd of rebels without a clue may have been, the truly alarming aspect of this bizarre news story is that the President of the United States has been encouraging them, and others of their ilk, to “liberate” Pennsylvania and other states around the nation by flouting public health advisories that the President himself had issued. Not surprisingly, the President only seems interested in “liberating” states governed by Democrats.
President Trump came to office pledging to “Make America Great Again” and to restore our nation’s number one ranking on the planet. Congratulations, Mr. President. The USA is now number one in disease and death caused by the spread of the novel coronavirus. While the U.S. accounts for about 4.5 percent of the world’s population, we now have 31.7 percent of the world’s reported COVID-19 cases and nearly 25 percent of all reported COVID-causal deaths.
According to the President’s own federal health advisers, ceding to the demands of these tiny bands of disgruntled anarchists, libertarians, white nationalists, and anti-scientific zealots to “fire Fauci” and “reopen the economy” prematurely could unleash a new wave of disease and death across the nation that will make the current gloomy statistics seem paltry. Yet, Trump encourages these lunatics and, in doing so, dog whistles to millions more of his supporters to follow their perilous example.
Be that as it may, those of us who are a part of the solid majority of Americans who trust Dr. Fauci and our medical scientists more than we trust Fox News commentators, the NRA, and the KKK, have a message that we want the outnumbered, ill-informed, and/or immoral carriers of anti-American propaganda to hear loud and clear: “Your misnamed right to risk infection ends six feet from your neighbor.”