Canceled culture

Are we serious about masks yet?

Now it’s the state fair. For the first time since World War II, the Arkansas State Fair has been canceled. No concerts, no turkey legs, no fall nights screaming on the rides. According to Saturday’s paper, the general manager of the fair says the event has been canceled in the interest of safety:

“We always want to produce the best fair possible for the state of Arkansas and we felt we could not do that with the multitude of restrictions we would have to put in place,” he said.

At least we won’t have to worry about parking.

What else has the covid-19 virus canceled so far this year? Marathons for runners. The Tokyo Olympics. Broadway. March Madness. The Rolling Stones. Untold number of weddings and surgeries and even funerals. Funerals of those who have died from the virus have been postponed until it’s safe for the living to attend them.

It’s becoming less and less likely we’ll have college football this year. Some schools have already canceled all fall sports.

Every day, it seems, the United States sees a new peak in the number of covid-19 cases. This isn’t fake news. It’s math. There have been more than 3.6 million cases of the virus in the United States, with just over a million classified as recovered. But there have been more than 141,000 deaths, and those are just the ones that are officially counted.

Some thought the virus would become less deadly in the summer months, sorta like the flu. But that hasn’t happened.

Here are warnings from three United States senators:

“Regretfully, this is not over. There were some that hoped this would go away sooner than it has. And I think the straight talk here that everyone needs to understand is this is not going away.”

“All I can say is that if you believe wearing a mask is a sign of weakness, then you’re wrong. Nobody is asking you to go to Afghanistan and get shot — just asking you to use common sense.”

“People need to wear their mask. They need to be more conscious of it. I believe they are now. But remember, the hospitalizations we’re seeing today are the infections that happened two or three weeks ago. Hopefully, if we can begin to correct that behavior now we’ll see improving numbers as we move forward into the next month.”

For the record, those warnings are from Republican U.S. senators: in order, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.

And yet, and yet.

And yet some lawmen in this state, who took oaths to enforce this state’s laws, say they won’t enforce a statewide mask mandate issued last week by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, another Republican in good standing. Some police chiefs and other heads of law enforcement agencies say they won’t enforce such a mandate because they’d rather have constituents die with their rights on. As if there is a constitutional right to be a public health menace.

The best response to the governor’s order might have come from the

Cleburne County sheriff’s office: “If enforcement action is necessary, and if we have the available manpower to respond, it will be the practice of our agency to issue verbal warnings from a safe distance, so as not to detain any individual.” That’s the way it should be. NB: The governor’s mask requirement doesn’t allow for arrests anyway.

Still, we heard somebody on a shout program complain about constitutional rights, and how they’re being trampled by such mask requirements. We can only believe that particular person doesn’t understand the United States Constitution. Your rights end where others can be hurt. You have the First Amendment right to free speech, but you can’t yell fire in a theater when there’s no fire. You have the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but you can’t shoot somebody for no reason. Supreme Court decisions over the last couple of centuries say the 10th Amendment gives states full authority to take emergency actions to protect public health, such as forcing quarantines and restricting business during times such as these.

The folks on the shout programs really ought to brush up on their law. For example, Jacobson vs. Massachusetts.

Back in 1905, a man named Henning Jacobson refused a vaccination for smallpox. The state of Massachusetts fined him and he took the matter to court. The state’s compulsory vaccination laws infringed on his liberty, he argued, and besides he had a bad experience with earlier vaccines and may have even had a good reason to be frightened of them.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the compulsory vaccination laws didn’t violate the Constitution.

Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the court that “upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

In other words, if the threat to the public is serious enough, the state can force you to get a shot or penalize you for refusing. So a mask requirement— to prevent We the People from sharing droplets, or at least suppress the bug to the extent cloth can do so—isn’t trampling on anybody’s constitutional rights. Those who say it does are spreading fake news.

Unfortunately, this is where we are these days: Masks aren’t just the polite thing, they’re now a political thing. More’s the pity.

Folks can’t simply make up constitutional rights. Neither can talk show hosts. Those rights have to be spelled out in the Constitution (masks aren’t mentioned), or ruled upon by the courts (see Jacobson vs. Massachusetts).

The United States Constitution may be the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man (William Ewart Gladstone), but it’s also not a suicide pact (Robert H. Jackson).

Wear the masks. Protect the least among us. And be good citizens.

That’s also the polite thing to do. We’re pretty sure Mama would agree.