"Live Free Or Die" (?)

The title of this post is the slogan of New Hampshire.  It's on all their auto license tags.  It's clearly a matter of pride, and independence.

The United States -- "America" -- is like that. The esprit, or even ethos, of the country is thought of as being built on a powerful urge for independence.  Either we're so comparatively close to our own independence revolution that the exuberance hasn't subsided, or many of us have simply decided that we don't want to get over it.  Besides, we've made a career of being independent, and ambitious.  We've even jettisoned our spirit of connection or commitment or certainly obligation to other people.  We're the greatest, most powerful, most productive country.  We feel like we're on a winning horse, and many of us don't want to dismount.

The problem is that we can't see past our own exuberance, or self-inflation.  Nothing, except our own fierce independence, should apply to us.  For the past 3+ years, we've been living a caricature of that philosophy.  It's "America first," and we resign from clubs that include other countries, especially if we have to care what they think, or even more so if they could possibly outvote us about something.

So, how does a country like ours handle something like a worldwide epidemic?  It's not like we can go beat someone up over it, although it's true that gun sales dramatically increased during this pandemic.  Find someone to blame?  Sure!  It's the specialty of our current "leadership."  But then what?

So, we're left with a problem.  The coronavirus doesn't care about politics, and economies, and individual people.  It's a very primitive beast, and it just infects anyone who comes into contact with it.  The only thing anyone can do is don't contract it, and if they do, then don't expose anyone else to it.

And there are available, theoretical, mechanisms to avoid contracting this communicable disease, and to avoid or at least minimize the chance of passing it along to someone else.  And those mechanisms rely on restraint.  People who have come to expect not to be restrained, or not to restrain themselves, may have a problem with this approach.  Some people in this country have antipathy toward "government," because part of what it does is take and restrain, which people who don't like to be restrained resent.  (Curiously, and somewhat unnervingly, there are people who sort of recognize that part of what the government also does is give, but they don't want it to take what it then gives...back.  The best immediate example of this is the people who like getting stimulus checks from the government, but they don't like the idea of paying taxes.)

At the moment, we are at an apex of feelings of independence -- or a nadir of feelings of responsibility to others -- and this leads some of us to resist or criticize the idea of anyone restricting our prerogatives.  The silly caricature is those of us who engage in denial, and want to claim that the current pandemic is either a hoax, exaggerated, or not worthy of our concession, because it's someone else's fault.  But there are more subtle styles of resistance, too.  There's changing the focus, so that some of us propose to reframe the pandemic as an economic problem, because it has economic consequences (we're very proud of our economy), and it allows us to deflect the advice we get (or what we might unhappily experience as the rank that is pulled) from doctors.  Some of us don't like being told what to do, or what we should do, or what's best, for ourselves or even for anyone else.  That's how independent we are.

I should add that I don't know how the general public in other countries behaves, but in this country, it is very common that "patients" arm themselves in advance with whatever they can find online about medical matters.  They protect themselves from the feared superior expertise of doctors.  (If doctors didn't have superior expertise about medical matters, they wouldn't have any value at all.)

What we're left with is a current federal government -- the caricaturish one -- that offers no support, no common sense, no accession to proper experts, and no leadership in a time of crisis.  In some states, like ours, the state government is not one bit better than the federal government.  The only thing that could possibly be worse is a state like Georgia, where the governor has issued an edict that local municipalities cannot require citizens of those localities to wear face masks, even though the wearing of them is the minimal protection anyone can provide.  The governor of Georgia demands that no one can restrain Georgia citizens from jeopardizing themselves and everyone else.  That's how independent we are.

New Hampshire was close when they adopted the slogan "Live Free Or Die."  What they might more properly have said was "Live Free AND Die."  Or "Live Free, THEREFORE Die."