To the editor:

I recently saw a sign on a local business proclaiming, “Liberty is worth dying for!” Given the timing of when this sign appeared, I suspect that the specific liberty being referred to in this case probably has something to do with resentment against mandates for masking and Covid vaccinations.

In my personal view, one’s liberty ends where a healthcare worker’s health and safety begins. Doctors and nurses and scores of other “essential workers” chose to go to work to treat and serve the members of the general public regardless of the vaccination status of those self-centered “patriots” who chose to roll the dice until, that is, some got sick and then sought out medical care.

America’s Covid scorecard is nothing to brag about. Nearly a million Americans have succumbed to Covid or its complications over the last two years; that’s nearly a million grandpas and grammas, moms and dads, aunts and uncles, and even some healthy young people unnecessarily, prematurely, gone. A recent report from the Lancet Commission asserts that roughly 40% of those US Covid deaths could have been avoided had the Trump administration not initially minimized the actual threat that they knew Covid likely posed to the U.S. population.

And just as we are hoping for an end, or at least a breather, in this hideous pandemic, another catastrophic threat emerges on the horizon. Another unhinged would be “patriot”, this time a Russian, is rattling his nuclear sword and threatening to effectively end all human life if he doesn’t get his imagined place in the annals of Russian history.

When will we learn that divided from one another, we are ultimately destined to fall; that our precious foundational stories and tribal myths that divide the good ones from the evil ones will, most likely, determine our ultimate undoing as a species? Probably, never.

Somehow, many Americans have come to think that freedom means that believing that something is true almost makes it true. Consequently, we’ve become a nation of the increasingly gullible being led to our ultimate demise by the increasingly unscrupulous.

Bring on the online gambling, let’s open a few more cannabis shops, Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Play ball!

On the current course, what we will leave to our kids and grandkids will be a pale and barely recognizable version of the American dream that we’ve lived. Or, perhaps, absolutely nothing at all.