What freedom means now

When Patrick Henry stood before the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1775 and exclaimed “Give me liberty, or give me death!”, he wasn’t defending the right to walk around without a face mask amidst a deadly pandemic. (Those did happen to be the early days of a smallpox epidemic on these shores, during which the coloniststurned-Americans took extraordinary precautions, including inoculation in its early days and quarantine, to prevent its spread.)

Yet on this Independence Day, many Americans labor under the lethal confusion that all-American freedom, forged in the fire of revolution 244 years ago, gives them permission to walk around without a face covering, exposing themselves and others to a fast-spreading virus that has killed 130,000 Americans and counting.

Real Americans, even in gun-toting Texas, know that a healthy respect for the general welfare is not only compatible with, but inextricably linked to, personal liberty. As the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”

Refusing to wearing a face mask, one of the only methods known to slow transmission of an invisible virus that indiscriminately kills, isn’t a signal of manliness, or an emblem of any political party, and it’s certainly not a brave declaration of independence.

We hold this truth to be self-evident: If you wrap yourself in the red, white and blue this Fourth and declare yourself a freedomloving patriot, you should wear a mask in public. Anything less is selfish and, frankly, un-American.