Do you want to exercise your rights? Do it with a facemask!!

And no, making you put on that mask in a crowd while you exercise your rights to free speech and to organize protests is not a part of the creepy commie globalist menace run by International Bankers and Globalists.

Just as we started a well-justified discussion of how long and to what extent a national lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic needs to go on, the one way you could definitely derail your argument for reopening the country is to follow the lead of various gun-toting and flag- and sign-waving yahoos getting a lot of recent attention for their rallies in places like Michigan, Washington, Ohio, and North Carolina among about two dozen or so states.

And planning to reopen the country is, in fact, crucial. It must be done very soon. Daily news updates on the COVID-19 crisis will, without fail, look at the ever-worsening economic situation. At this writing 33.5 Americans are unemployed. Those are people who, through no fault of their own, are unable to pay their rent, their mortgages, or their children’s education. To feed their families, they now need to stand in line at food banks and wait for handouts. Their frustration and fear of a disintegrating economy is understandable. We must keep this pandemic from forcing this country—the world—to relive the 1930s.

This link to a recent New York Times Magazine article about how imperative it is to restart the economy presents various points of view on the issue, including the ethics of weighing the potential death tolls against the devastation wrought upon lives and families by a collapsing economy. From bioethicists to economists and healthcare and civil-rights activists, the piece presents a roundtable discussion of how common sense can somehow let us try and deal with a crisis that will have no easy solution.

If you take a close look at strip malls or any shopping centers where grocery chains and Walmarts and Costcos stand open next to various other closed small businesses, the logic of pushing for reopening is obvious. I myself live next to a Walmart and a ShopRite grocery store, both of which have been open seven days a week throughout the entire pandemic lockdown. I also live next to a very long stretch of strip malls where tile stores, electronics shops, clothing boutiques, and a TJ Max have been closed for weeks. During this lockdown, one could always find more people inside the Walmart or the ShopRite than the tile store or TJ Max at any time before the pandemic. Of course, in both the ShopRite and the Walmart the sizes of crowds had been regulated and plenty of signage is encouraging people to keep at least six feet away from each other. Although neither store, up until now, has mandated that all people wear face masks when they enter, most people do. All of the employees of these establishments also wear masks and gloves at all times. By the same token we could protect the public health and work toward flattening the infection curve and allow more small businesses to open and send more people back to work. That, I believe, is just common sense. 

Common sense, however, seems to be at a frustratingly all-time-low supply in this country. The anti-lockdown protest movement gives evidence to this. One needs to take one look at their absurd signs waved around at the rallies—demanding the right to risk their own lives and those of others by refusing to wear masks—listen to their conspiracy theories about Bill Gates implanting people with microchips at the behest of the global fascist takeover, and any inclination to speed up the reopening of the country will evaporate from most sane people’s minds. The dialogue about the crisis of our times is being derailed, the argument for the need to restart the economy as soon as possible has been poisoned by, hijacked by a conspiracy-addled lunatic fringe. This is a lunatic fringe that insists on living in its own self-aggrandizing fantasy world where they see themselves as collection of action heroes saving freedom and democracy from jack-booted forces of evil. 

To be sure, this anti-lockdown conspiracy crowd is relatively small and their position is not shared by most of the country. The majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, support precautionary measures against the spread of COVID. Yet the reckless gatherings of these “patriots” where a lack of precautions against infection is a sign of idealism and defiance will keep prolonging the disease, will keep adding to the death count. That, in turn, will prolong the return to normalcy and will keep the economy sinking further and further into an abyss.