The cost of freedom

I suppose we can at least hope that one consequence of the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people to the monstrous war crimes being committed every minute now against them by the Putin regime will be a grim highlighting of the true nature of the disgusting narcissistic whining of the American right wing about the purported loss of their precious “freedoms.”

This summarizes things concisely:

If somebody had told me in 1985 that we would be depending on the lead singer of Twisted Sister to provide aphoristic political insights to help resist a fascist takeover of the country by Donald Trump, I would have . . . I have no idea what I would have done. Probably stayed drunk for the rest of the decade. Or at least started reading People magazine more carefully.

In any event, there’s nothing like actual sacrifice to throw a bright light on how absurd the claims of anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, etc. have always been and remain when they mewl that simply being asked to endure a minor inconvenience — to call it a “sacrifice” is an insult to actual sacrifice — is some sort of tyrannical imposition by an “oppressive” government.

This was driven home to me with special force yesterday when, at the same time that I was reading about Ukrainian schoolteachers fashioning Molotov cocktails as anti-tank weapons, I got an email from CU’s central administration, announcing that as of this coming Monday all mask mandates on campus were being rescinded.

Now I don’t actually know to what extent mask mandates even make sense any more, epidemiologically speaking — I should probably ask Richard Epstein — but that announcement, especially juxtaposed to the daily news from Ukraine, emphasized to me how, when it comes to the pandemic, we’ve simply given up as a nation now, and decided that a few hundred thousand more deaths this year is just the Cost of Freedom.

The real cost of freedom is something that the average American, including me of course, basically can’t even imagine.