Exercising our freedoms during crisis

In times of crisis, safety and freedom may seem like they’re at odds with each other. A society that respects individual liberty can’t implement the same kinds of drastic laws and policies that a more authoritarian one can.

This puts more of an onus on citizens of a democracy to make responsible choices. As we face a virus that we can easily pass on without realizing it, that may not cause any symptoms in those who are young and healthy but is potentially deadly to the elderly and those with preexisting conditions, we need to keep in mind that our independent media and civil society can be assets in this fight, as long as we balance our personal freedoms with care and compassion for each other.

Just last month, the coronavirus seemed like a rather distant problem, even though the first confirmed case in the U.S. occurred in late January.

It didn’t take long for the truth about the initial outbreak in China to come to light. Not that the Chinese government had been censoring information and violating civil liberties — that was sort of a given — but that censoring information and violating civil liberties actually made the outbreak worse.

China’s suppression of news about the outbreak prevented health care practitioners and individuals from being able to take appropriate precautions and hindered officials from being able to coordinate a response.

As this personal essay from an anonymous resident of Wuhan

put it, “Before this coronavirus, I always thought it was OK to sacrifice some level of democracy and freedom for better living conditions. But now I have changed my attitude. Without democracy and freedom, the truth of the outbreak in Wuhan would never be known.”

And while South Korea, a fellow democracy but one with less regard for civil liberties, was able to curtail its COVID-19 outbreak by forcibly shutting down a series of churches where the virus initially spread, it’s hard to imagine an American government official doing the same.

Our democratic approach means that we run the risk of our citizens not taking the warnings seriously. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie observed on Monday that, “There are still too many Americans going out to restaurants, bars and other public areas as if this is business as usual.” In a way, this is the cost of our freedoms.

We’ve been advised, whether we are healthy or ill, to practice social distancing, by minimizing contact with other people, limiting nonessential travel, working from home and avoiding gatherings. But for most of us, this isn’t a mandate. Instead, it’s a choice we make — every time we cancel plans, stay in our homes and forego human contact for another day. These decisions might not make much of a difference to your personal health and safety, but can have an outsized impact on the health and safety of others.

As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, has said, “I think we as a nation have to get into a place of not just thinking about ourselves, but thinking about everybody else around us, and particularly the most vulnerable people — those who are older and those people with chronic diseases. Young people may have a relatively low risk of serious illness, kids seem to have a very low risk, but if you want to avoid what could be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, then it is incumbent on all of us to severely limit our social interactions. We need to ask the question about every interaction we have and whether it is necessary or not.”

It can be quite daunting to realize that flattening the curve — slowing the rate of new infections in order to buy researchers more time to develop vaccines and give hospitals some respite — is a responsibility that falls on all of us as individuals. But the thing about democracies is that they’re fundamentally optimistic about human nature.

We give people civil liberties, knowing full well that some will abuse those rights, because we expect that, on the whole, most will use them wisely. We protect heinous speech, false information and pointless assembly from government crackdowns because we don’t want to risk infringing on valuable speech, information and assembly — and with that there is an inherent assumption that it’s worth it, that the good outweighs the bad.

There is no requirement that you exercise your freedoms responsibly, but the fact that you have them reflects the underlying belief that you will.