Op-Ed: For the free, risk is key

Once again we face the prospect of elected officials and unelected bureaucrats determining that changing COVID figures warrant restricting our freedoms. Many assert that public safety requires nothing less than new mask mandates and lockdowns. I have not felt so at the mercy of the capricious and arbitrary judgment of others since I graduated high school in 1984.

I am surprised at my age to feel the powerlessness of a teenager faced by the implacable will of concerned parents. It is precisely this tone in official COVID deliberations that says, in so many words, “If only ‘the data’ didn’t indicate such worrisome trends, there would be no need to say to adult citizens, ‘You’re Grounded!’”

We human beings are mortal, and there is nothing that we can do to change it. This is a bedrock truth of our existence. Every pre-Postmodernist culture worldwide has developed theologies, philosophies and moralities that exhort us to live worthwhile lives; not merely long ones.

Risk is the indispensable element in any genuinely well-lived life. From crossing all Earthly horizons, to traveling to the moon, to proposing new ideas that threaten the status quo, people just like us voluntarily put ourselves into harm’s way to hopefully make a better future. More intimately, for any loving relationship to bloom someone must have risked rejection to make the first move.

Today, our lives are increasingly steeped in a risk-averse caution that robs us of spontaneity, creativity and autonomy. How many times has the need to appease insurance actuaries been used to squelch a new idea? We are an increasingly timorous and infantilized people because so many of us crave safety above all else.

Ambitious officials, “experts,” and academics all prey on this insatiable caution; asserting that if only their pet ideas were adopted and enforced by the coercive power of government, then universal security would bring utopia.

We survived and triumphed in our Revolution, Civil War, Westward expansion, Industrialization, 1st World War, Influenza Pandemic of 1919, Great Depression, 2nd World War, Cold War, Civil Rights Struggles and War on Terror. We did so without a Nanny State withholding our civil rights as if our freedom itself was the supreme problem.

The purpose of government is not to provide safety and security for everyone, as if citizens were children, slaves or livestock! No human authority can save us from the existential uncertainties of adulthood. Our Constitution tasks government with protecting our freedoms above all other priorities, including public health. We must absolutely reject any further trifling with our civil rights. While safety cannot be purchased by sacrificing freedom, slavery surely can.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to High School students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in Special Education, Public Schools, and Charter Schools, Grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com