Virtual President – Covid-19 (Pitting Liberty vs. Security)

Full Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr6iw5q29gQ&feature=youtu.be

 

Full Script:

Many of you will recall, back before the events of September 11th 2001, when air travel was far less restricted than it is today.  Then, the World Trade Center was attacked; and two months later, the Bush Administration created the Transportation Security Administration – or TSA.  In the years that followed, we all became accustomed to extraordinary invasions of privacy, violations of due process, and degrading acts of indignity – everything from taking off our shoes, to walking through x-rays, from having our luggage ransacked, to watching the elderly get groped, and mothers having to drink their own breast milk.  We were encouraged to rat on our neighbors, to curb our own speech, and forget about bringing your handy-dandy pocketknife on board.  

All this we did in the name of safety and security.  And what was the result of such draconian measures?

We had to witness report after report come out highlighting that the TSA had utterly failed to stop any acts of terrorism.  Thus, it would seem these extreme measures were nothing more than a waste of time, resources, and humanity.

Worse still is that we all knew full-well who the assailants were.  We’d been given intel warning of this imminent threat in the months leading up to the attack, but the Bush Administration chose to ignore it for reasons I’ll not get into here.  We also knew that the risk profile of other would-be attackers was not equal across all demographics.  A Tibetan grandmother could hardly be regarded as an equivalent threat to a middle-aged male from Saudi Arabia, for instance.  Yet both had to bear the same level of scrutiny, because we were told that to do otherwise was racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and other various shades of bigotry.  Obviously, that’s not to say that every Muslim male from one of these countries is guilty or ought to be suspected of acts of terrorism.  In fact, the odds of a random person being a terrorist even among the high-risk profile is still vanishingly small.  And they of course have the same rights to presumption of innocence, privacy, and due process as anyone else.

However, I am merely pointing out that the solution the powers-that-be came up with was to make everyone equally miserable in order to avoid making a relative handful of people miserable.  All had to feel discomfort in order to prevent some from feeling uncomfortable.

Does that seem fair or just to you?  Does that seem rational or proportional?  Does that make our country safer, or does it just piss everyone else off and squander valuable resources better spent trying to catch the actual bad guys?

And the option to have no one feel discomfort was not a viable option at the time, because in the wake of 9-11, we all agreed that something had to be done.  No one wanted a repeat performance, after all.  Thus, we begrudgingly grit our teeth and bore it together, because we were told it was good and necessary to protect ourselves and our country.  That we must sacrifice our liberty on the altar of security and hold our noses while things like the NSA, the DHS, and the PATRIOT Act got passed, and children were blown up in wars for profit waged in our name.  We all collectively debased ourselves to the lowest common denominator, rather than face the cold, harsh truth that for all of our idealism in saying everyone is equal, the reality is that not everyone necessarily is in all respects.  There are times when people are different and those differences matter.  Moreover, we are not mind-readers, such that we could peer into a person’s soul, divine their intentions, and easily tell who is who.  So sometimes, the process is messy, and reasonable assumptions and inference must be made to narrow down the possibilities.

Any sane, rational adult ought to be able to acknowledge both sides of this.

 

You might be wondering what this has to do with Covid-19.

Much like with the TSA and terrorism profiles, we know that not everyone necessarily shares the same medical risks for contracting and spreading coronavirus.  That the elderly, the immuno-compromised, or those with certain pre-existing conditions affecting the lungs, are more likely to catch it, to spread it, and to suffer and die from this virus.  Much like with the TSA, we might have forgiven our leaders for initially having to blindly walk into unexplored territory and solve a hard problem with little-to-no data on whether their particular solution would work; and so, we might have allowed them a honeymoon period to make good on the public trust we endowed upon them.  However, much like with the TSA, we have sufficient data now to say with confidence that this initial approach no longer is serving us – if indeed it ever was – and moreover, that it is in fact making the situation far worse, doing greater harm to the very people it’s trying to save.

Half the country cries out, “Please!  Lock everything down.  Protect us!”  The other half shouts, “Do not tell us what to do!  We don’t need your protection!  We’ll manage on our own.”  And these two are in conflict.  Mutually exclusive.

I’d like to tell you it were possible to have perfect liberty and perfect security, but that is simply not the case.  They are trade-offs, and you must each decide for yourselves which one you value more at the expense of the other, knowing that half the country will likely prefer the opposite; and then do the hard work of figuring out how to live together with them in harmony.

So long as we continue to believe that a one-size-fits-all policy is the answer, half the population will continue to suffer needlessly under the tyranny of their fellow citizens.

As a public servant, I am meant to be the arm of the body politic: “Your will, my hands.”  An extension of the collective spirit of the people, embodied and encapsulated in a single person.  Yet the people themselves cannot make up their mind as to what is to be done in their own name; and thus, to cite a maxim of law: “In doubtful cases, it is often better to err on the side of liberty.”

As Thomas Jefferson once said: “I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”  I imagine many of you feel the same way.  That you would rather suffer the evils of too little intervention than too much.

Should that advice ultimately prove incorrect, the real-world will quickly reflect that; and with this new data, we’ll know definitively one way or the other.  Armed with this new knowledge, we can then alter our behavior and our policies accordingly in real time, with greater leverage to build and present a convincing case to the other side.  That is the only way to rebuild trust and credibility.

For a brief moment, following any crisis of this magnitude, there is unity of purpose.  We all agree who the enemy is.  But such opportunity is both fragile and fleeting and ripe for exploitation by those who lust only after wealth and power.  Unfortunately, the United States has squandered more than its fair share of opportunities for true unity – from Hurricane Katrina, to 9-11, to the promise of flattening the curve – and seldom is liberty ever restored once lost.

The government’s collective Covid response has become a cure that is worse than the disease; and thus, we must change course and apply a more surgical method of dealing with this great and terrible threat, which kills regardless of ideology, creed, or political faction.  We cannot escape the often cruel and abusive tyrant that is Mother Nature; but we can ensure that we do not fall into the same pattern of cruelty and abuse ourselves.

Our federal system was designed in such a way as to be a petri dish of sorts, with each State experimenting in different methods and policies.  While we all acknowledge that every death due to Covid is tragic – and even for those who survive, the long-term effects are still unknown, but certainly far from pleasant.  Still, many who are not within the high-risk profile find themselves wondering why they must go along with these draconian measures as though they were equally-likely to contract and spread the disease.  We are told that it’s prejudicial to treat people in different ways, when in fact, the real prejudice is not only to deny the existence of these individual differences, but to deny that these are in fact rational and reasonable grounds for difference in treatment when it comes to health and medicine.

If bigotry is falsely assuming that everyone is the same, then surely, this is the height of it.

Failure to acknowledge these important physiological differences will, in fact, lead to a great many preventable deaths as we prioritize the wrong things and divert resources from where they are most-needed and effective.

New data is coming in everyday, generating new hypotheses while weeding others out, and we expect to always be updating our approach; but looking back on the previous year, and in considering various State and national policies and outcomes, we can glean a few key insights and deduce a few clear patterns that ought to inform our policy going forward.

For one thing, we know that shutting everything down hasn’t worked, and so I call upon the various governors of the several States to open back up once more.  Let the people get on with their lives, while we focus on protecting the most-vulnerable among us.

Right now, there is strong evidence that natural sunlight, vitamin D, healthy diet, exposure to the outdoors, and proper circulation of indoor air are all effective methods of bolstering the natural immune system to fight against this infection.  Your body is a self-healing machine designed for this very purpose and requires only that you maintain it.  Thus, the best thing you can do, if you care about Covid-19, is to do those things that would improve your own health in general.  This includes proper diet and exercise, breathing techniques, managing stress, removing toxins from your body, staying hydrated, getting adequate sleep, and so forth.  

To whatever extent you are able, we encourage such activities as a first-line of defense against not just this pandemic, but against disease more broadly.  For those of you with more specific needs, you’re better off consulting with your own doctor than with the government.

For those in one of the high-risk profile groups, or for those who instead prefer security over liberty, you are perfectly free to self-quarantine.  Isolate yourselves, stay at home, continue to wear your masks, maintain physical distance from strangers or anyone else whom you suspect might have had Covid at some point.  

Those that wish to get vaccines shall have them as rapidly as they can be made available, and we shall continue to monitor the results with great hope and anticipation.  However, it shall be the policy of this administration that we shall not require them of anyone, or deem them mandatory, apart from a handful of federal officers and agents directly under our purview who have a sufficiently-high risk profile.

We encourage all elected officials to do likewise and adopt a similar attitude with respect to their own people.

In situations like this, the government is generally not comprised of experts.  Politicians and executives and bureaucrats are not doctors or engineers or virologists – and thus, the best thing that this administration can do is to get out of the way of those people who will go about doing the real hard work of finding cures and treating patients.

They shall have what resources this country can provide to them, along with our eternal gratitude.  For everyone else, we must do our part to keep society functioning in order to sustain them – be it financially, socially, spiritually, emotionally, morally …  This administration will use the bully pulpit of its office to highlight and promote information, research, persons, and ideas that we deem factual, relevant, useful, safe, and effective for you the general public; but we will trust you to make your own decisions in the end as to how best to utilize such information.

Our country is strong.  Its people resilient.  We have conquered greater dangers than this before – greater challenges – and we shall conquer this one too.  We shall rise above this pandemic and the virus of petty tyranny that it breeds, because our country’s immune system is healthy, and our Republic was designed to withstand it.  All that is required is that we maintain it.  “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

In this way, we shall make America greater than ever and build a future of freedom for all.