By Mike Cronin

“If it saves just one life, isn’t it worth it?” Not when it means diminishing freedom – for at least two reasons:

1. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson. Hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women paid with their lives to give us our freedom; it is unconscionable to insult those sacrifices by letting freedom go for everyone on the chance that might buy a few lives. Especially when you consider that…
2. …Whatever loss of (other people’s) liberty you propose to trade for a life, or a hundred, or a thousand, could just as readily cost as many lives and livelihoods as you think it might save. For example, you might save someone from COVID 19 with the lockdown, but condemn another to die at the hands of an abusive spouse, or of an overdose, or from suicide. And people have already died from not getting elective surgery.

“Not wearing a mask is selfish.” You make that sound like a bad thing. If “selfish” = concern for oneself, and wearing a mask is ineffective and potentially worse than not wearing one, then of course not wearing one is selfish. Guess what? Wearing a mask can be a form of virtue signaling. “Look at me, I’m a good person who has to be seen to be doing the pseudo “responsible” thing and giving the appearance of protecting others from my germs. That makes me feel good about myself.” That’s selfish, too, so what’s your point?

“Opening your business and “forcing” your employees back to work is greedy and exploitative.”  The funny thing about private business is that they can’t force their employees to do anything.  Another funny thing is that small businesses typically operate on small margins. Both the owner and the employees need to eat and pay the rent, so they need to work! And a big business owner like Elon Musk may not need the profit from his enterprise, but the employees and suppliers still do.

“Protesting the lockdown is white privilege.”  If all we have to go on is the mainstream media photos of the protests in the US, it might look that way. But it’s not:

In Wuhan, China, some people tried to resist the lockdown, and the government welded them into their houses:

And there have been lockdown protests around the world. Korea:

Italy:

Brazil:

Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, India…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/coronavirus-protests-lebanon-india-iraq/2020/04/19/1581dde4-7e5f-11ea-84c2-0792d8591911_story.html