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I have been watching and reading less news in recent months. Relax, I haven’t been canceling subscriptions that have piled up on my tab or anything drastic like that. But while I am continuing to pay for an abundance of news outlets, I’m glued to my screens far less than I was.
What once served as my daily background noise can largely be described in one of two ways lately: predictable or angering. Or the really intolerable type: predictable and angering.
The country has slipped backward into emergency mode with COVID-19, and there is no one to blame but ourselves. I wrote last year about our greatest weakness in battling the pandemic, and a year later, with vaccines available and abundant here, that same weakness is as powerful as the delta variant. That weakness is selfishness.
The “freedom to choose” argument for not getting vaccinated is one of the most selfish perspectives on the issue of community I have heard in my lifetime. However, that same selfish mindset already exists in plenty of other areas. So much so, it should have made the slow vaccination rate of 2021 less surprising than it seemed to be to many.
In Indianapolis, the scourge of gun violence has been rocking neighborhoods like no other year in recent memory. But the inability to unite on any kind of movement toward collectively addressing it feels similar to the city’s low vax-rate. Again, it is a classic struggle between an individual’s freedom and a community’s clear need.
For fans of the classic movie “Tombstone,” the gun control measures Wyatt Earp enforced in the old American West were the result of how that “freedom” was actually making people less free. That is often how individual freedoms become conditioned, regulated or lost. The “no guns inside city limits” rule was the response to the problem in Dodge City, Kansas, and in Tombstone, Arizona, all those years ago. Earp would have had no chance today.
I think of the nation’s response during World War II, specifically with regard to the rationing of goods. According to the National Park Service, “On August 28, 1941, President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8875 created the Office of Price Administration (OPA). The OPA’s main responsibility was to place a ceiling on prices of most goods, and to limit consumption by rationing.”
Ration cards first made it to Americans in May 1942, limiting sugar purchasing first. Meat, dairy and the one that scares me most, coffee, were among a list of foods consumers did mostly without during the war.
How often would I be willing to get vaccinated to avoid the government limiting my coffee habit in any way? Weekly? Daily? Imagine the people in our nation’s hot spots with low vaccine rates giving up burgers, eggs and milk until this war on the pandemic passes—assuming it will pass.
I had a day last week spent entirely in my basement office. I stared at my laptop while torturous news coverage played in the background, eventually forcing me to turn it off early in the afternoon. Three-quarters of the content seemed to be dedicated to our failings with the pandemic and the lack of any epiphany from our leaders to magically solve it. The other quarter was divvied up among the Olympics in Tokyo and the other games being played by embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
The challenge with today’s crisis is that no president, governor or doctor has any such epiphany. The problem is not even really about vaccines or masks. It’s about selfishness, which is much harder to solve.
Too many Americans think their individual freedoms are more valuable than the community that exists to provide those freedoms. And that, specifically, is how communities and nations die.•
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Leppert is an author and governmental affairs consultant in Indianapolis. He writes at MichaelLeppert.com. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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