Like a bad penny, bad policies keep coming around. This time it’s mask mandates.
Morris Brown College is a private liberal arts school in Atlanta, Georgia where both students and employees are now being required to wear masks in crowded areas such as hallways and classrooms for at least two weeks. Reports of positive cases among the student body have driven concerns that the new variant is going to cause a renewed boom in Covid cases not just within the college but around the country. This also means that there will be no parties or gatherings for that time, and social distancing will once again be implemented.
But Georgia isn’t the only place where concern over the new strand of infection is brewing. Government doctors in Seattle recently demanded that masks be mandatory in nursing settings again, in an op-ed posted by the American College of Physicians (ACP).
Look, the Constitution is mute on anything like required medical treatments or preventive measures, which means the Federal government has no authority to take any such action, in spite of which they have been doing precisely that since March of 2020. State governments? The constitutional aspects there are a little harder to parse; states have their own governing documents, laws, rules and regulations, which is how things are supposed to be. That’s called Federalism.
What’s concerning to me, as a good, honest minarchist, is how quickly many people bend the knee to these stupid ideas.
Whatever happened to civil disobedience?
In the years of my youth, there was much talk about the uses of civil disobedience to influence culture and policy. Rosa Parks was often (and justifiably so) held up as an example of civil disobedience in defiance of an unfair and arbitrary policy – forcing black Americans to sit in the rear of buses and also to give up seats to white Americans. But those days are long past us and the egregious and unfair policy and legal decisions, including but not limited to mask mandates, are largely coming from the political Left.
So when will conservatives and libertarians adopt the time-tested tactic of civil disobedience?
In response to any new mask mandates, or social distancing requirements, or anything else along these lines, my official recommendation is to employ four words in one clear, concise and intuitive statement:
I will not comply.
We are either a free people or we are not. Today, we are no longer a free people. Increasingly, government is pushing us away from liberty; we are forced to wear masks and take new and questionable injections. We are no longer allowed to associate with or disassociate with who we please. We are no longer allowed to solicit or refuse business as we desire. Our property is no longer really our own, and in 2014 a former Cabinet-level government official made the absolutely horrifying statement that “…we cannot let a minority of people…hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”
Did you get that? We must not allow people to hold an opinion?
Leftist nutcases will embrace these mandates, and will try to insist that we embrace them too. We need to tell them, simply, no. There is only one response to any possible policy resulting from such a laughable statement, and that is “I will not comply; screw you and the horse you rode in on, but I will not comply.”
Get used to saying that. I suspect we’ll be uttering it a lot in coming months.
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