Apples and oranges

Not a lot of Rosa Parks still around these days

THE YEAR was 1900, and Montgomery, Ala., passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race. It was another sad chapter in our nation’s history, which often moves at a pace most don’t recognize as progress.

Around 6 p.m. Dec. 1, 1955, a 42-year-old African American woman got onto a Montgomery City Lines bus. She took a seat in the first row of the “colored” section. You probably know what happened, not long after, to Rosa Parks.

As the bus filled up, eventually white passengers moved toward the colored section, and the bus driver, James F. Blake, told Rosa Parks (and others sitting with her) to move further back so white passengers who just boarded could take her seat.

The only direction this strongwilled lady moved was toward the window. When the bus driver threatened to call the police, she simply told him, “You may do that.”

Rosa Parks was arrested, and along with people like Bayard Rustin, Irene Morgan, Lillie Mae Bradford, Sarah Keys — and nine specific others in Little Rock in 1957 — would go on to have their names written in the history books as people who were asked to comply with a bad system but instead did something to change it.

Why revisit the story of Rosa Parks? Is it some kind of anniversary, or maybe her birthday?

No.

One, it’s a reminder that in a nation where people are sometimes still mistreated because of the color of their skin, we can always do better. Two, economist and member of a White House council on reopening the country, Stephen Moore, recently compared protesters demonstrating against stay-at-home orders during the pandemic to Rosa Parks.

“I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks—they are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties,” he said.

We are all dumber for reading that. Montgomery’s ordinance was not created to protect public health during a pandemic. It was passed to continue “correcting” the progress of African American men and women after the Civil War, a legal, if not just, way for white leaders of the city to keep the hammer down on other residents/Americans/members of the human race.

Stay-at-home orders and directives against large social gatherings issued across the country exist to protect elderly and immuno-compromised individuals who might otherwise die if infected with covid-19. And sometimes the damnable virus kills the young and healthy. Just read the papers.

Protesters in certain states who defy the law to gather angrily and demand the orders and directives cease aren’t taking the virus seriously enough. It is not injustice — or some sort of Tea Party-worthy burdensome government event — to be inconvenienced for a period of weeks so that a deadly pandemic can be slowed. And our hospitals not overwhelmed. Which is the whole point.

What has become painfully obvious over the last week is America’s biggest challenge to overcoming covid-19: that is, the ability of citizens to put community health above personal wants, even for a short period.

YEARS from now, anthropologists will study these movements and ponder differences between democracies such as America and South Korea, where societies acted very differently to government instructions on stopping the covid-19 bug. South Korea’s government tested, tested, tested, and quarantined, quarantined, quarantined, and got the virus under control in less than a month. On these shores . . . .

For goodness sakes, protesters against the lockdown clashed with health-care workers in Colorado over the weekend, and that’s not a joke. To be fair, dispatches say the health-care workers went to the drive-by protest, to demonstrate against the demonstration. That’s a good way to get hurt, walking among a group of cars driven by angry people.

But one of the anti-lockdowners (can we call them that?) waved a flag that read: Your “health” does not supersede my right.

Health in scare quotes. These people seem to be willing to die with their rights on.

These protesters are not the modern-day Rosa Parks. It takes more than being convinced you’re right to actually be right. And ignoring science to resume a life without temporary inconveniences is short-sighted, selfish, and a mistake this country might pay for later.

Ask somebody who’s lost an elderly member of the family, who did nothing more to deserve this death than to live a long time. Or ask somebody who’s lost a member of the family who wasn’t old, but decided to become a health-care worker serving others. (Arkansas just lost its first such worker to the virus this weekend, according to reports.)

How about another bumper-sticker slogan: Rosa Parks sat, nobody died. But these folks who violate social distancing without masks to make a point might lose more than their perceived freedoms. Good grief.