What COVID Deniers Call ‘Freedom’ is Just White Privilege

You hear it all the time: the anti-vaxxer, and anti-masker, and outright COVID deniers proclaim that they refuse public health measures in the name of their ‘freedom’. They are not using that word in a way that I recognize as anything approaching our traditional American concept of freedom.

Freedom to enjoy life, liberty and happiness; freedom to participate in self-governance and the free exchange of ideas; freedom of conscience; freedom to make decisions about your own body and your family life, without undue restraints: these, I recognize as the conception of freedom we all were raised and acculturated to expect and demand.

I do not see those freedoms being transgressed by asking people to wear a mask in public spaces, or be vaccinated if they are to participate in activities with a high risk of transmission. What some people are actually claiming is the privilege of ignoring their duties toward their fellow citizens.

Everyone knows the old saying that my freedom to disagree with you ends where your nose begins. We don’t have the right to cause harm to others in exercising our freedoms.

Everyone knows and agrees that we don’t have the freedom to recklessly endanger the life and safety of others in the community, even if we are doing things that we are otherwise free to engage in. You might want to lift a couple too many and then jump in your car and drive home -both perfectly legal acts in themselves-, but doing them together imposes unreasonable risks on other people who have no means of avoiding that risk when sharing the public roads with you.

Requiring a mask in public, or requiring a vaccine to participate in public events, is not about restricting your freedom or violating your bodily autonomy. They are a necessity to prevent harm to your fellow citizens.

By refusing to comply you aren’t standing up for your ‘freedoms’, any more than a drunk driver is expressing his ‘freedom’ to drink and drive by killing your family in an accident. You are merely being a selfish, inconsiderate, and potentially criminally negligent jerk. We masked and vaccinated folks have no more choice to share public spaces with the reckless refusniks than to share the road with the drunken fool. Both could cost us, or someone close to us, health or life.

No. COVIDiots are not the new freedom fighters, they are demanding an old privilege. The privilege to harm others. The privilege to endanger fellow citizens’ lives. The privilege to extend and exacerbate a public health emergency. The privilege to kill simply because to prevent harm inconveniences them in a small way. I don’t recognize or respect any such privilege, and neither should anyone else, especially our governments.

One might look at the overwhelming demographics of the COVIDiots, and reasonably conclude that there is also an ethnic component to their claimed privilege. Sure, there is vaccine hesitancy among some ethnic and racial minorities (many for very good historical reasons) but this is an overwhelmingly WHITE privilege that we see playing out.

So, the next time a COVIDiot claims to be standing up for their own, or -even more implausibly- your ‘freedom’, know that they really mean they are standing up for their own ‘white privilege’ and nothing more. They don’t care about YOUR freedoms: your freedom to travel, to work, to associate, to educate your children in safety, and your families’ freedom from disease and death.

They only care about insisting on their privilege to take all your freedoms away with their ignorant and paranoid decision to live recklessly, heedless of the safety of their communities. They are reckless of our health and safety and must not be tolerated any more than we would tolerate a drunken moron getting behind the wheel.