Break Free

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries 

but between authoritarians and libertarians

–George Orwell, 1948

The President is losing patience.  Six quarters into the emergency, the FDA has authorized COVID-19 vaccines down to five years of age.  The CDC maintains these vaccines are safe and effective.  Vaccinations are mandated by powerful employers, high ranking generals, and top government officials.  Most of the medical community are on board.  Failure to comply costs income and freedom.   It’s intimidating.  Many have submitted to the pressure.  These policies have concentrated authority and power in a few “experts” who presume to know what’s best for everyone else.  It’s not just arrogance.  It’s slavery.

Slavery doesn’t need a plantation and rows of cotton.  Slavery occurs when one person owns the thoughts and actions of another.  Motives don’t matter.  Good intentions don’t justify coercion.  Masters who treat their slaves well are still slaveowners.  The core moral flaw of slavery is the notion that one person can own another.  Slaves exist to serve masters, not the other way around.  

Masters cannot make decisions in the best interest of their slaves.  The interests of the slaveowner always have precedence.  If you own my decisions, you own me.  You can’t make the best decisions for me because you don’t know what’s important to me.  The individual taking the risk must have decisive control.  Today’s public health policies transfer choice from individuals to powerful experts just like slaves surrender control to their masters.

We don’t need experts to understand the issues of the pandemic.  COVID-19 is bad.  Many people have died, more than should have.  But we’ve learned to identify those at risk.  Sound, compassionate public health policy would focus attention on the vulnerable and protect them with more than vaccines.  Instead, our masters are using only one tool and applying it universally. 

Vaccines have risks.  Many people have died, more than should have.  Vaccines were rushed to market with only a thin veneer of study and testing.  What we know of vaccine risks—myocarditis, blood clots, neuromuscular disorders, death—is scary enough.  What we don’t know is even scarier.  Some of these potential future problems can be deduced from the studies requested by the FDA in its COMIRNATY approval letter.   

Yet our experts cling to a universal vaccination policy that seems to be less in the public interest than in that of vaccine vendors.  Our impatient masters have cornered us into a company store where there’s only one shoddy product for sale.  We must break free.

America is founded on liberty.  Yes, our history is filled with cognitive dissonance on this point.  The institution of slavery is baked into our founding documents, right alongside guarantees of individual rights and freedoms.  But the understanding of liberty is also baked into Americans, so much so that we were willing to shed blood to purge slavery from our land, without the assurance that we could.  

We’ve reached a similar moment.  Echoing notes from the Gettysburg Address, history has given us the opportunity to purge a more occult and subversive form of slavery from our land.  Our public health policies have devolved to the coercion by the few over the lives of the many.  These policies have shifted from information to dogma, from recommendations to requirements.  Like the slaves of old, we must adopt the religion of our masters and submit to their commands.  Otherwise, we are promised discomfort.

To those subjected to these policies, my message is simple.  Resist this coercion like it’s slavery.  It is.