But wut ’bout mah RAHTS??

Got this image from this blog, which says the same things I’m saying, but nicer, and almost a year ago.

All right. I have something to say.

I have several things to say, actually. And I suspect that once I start saying them, even more will bubble up to the surface, like noxious gases from the bottom of the primordial swamp (Or hey, maybe like the scintillant bubbles in effervescing champagne; I probably should shift out of the habit of being maximally dark and depressing. See, there’s another thing I should write about, breaking free of the morass and floating to the surface and freedom, blpblpblpblppPOP!), and soon enough I will have once again exhausted either my readership or my store of ideas. But right now, those things are stacking up, taller and taller, and the ones at the bottom are being squished. Time to Jenga them out of the pile and set them up in their own little spaces.

It’s time to blog.

The first thing I have to say is actually something I’ve said several times already, in various arguments around social media; another reason for me to get back into writing these things. (Yet another reason is that I just said “thing” three times in one sentence: I’ve let my edge get dull, methinks.) You see, I’ve been arguing a lot. It hasn’t gone well. I’ve already destroyed one acquaintanceship (Terrible word. There needs to be another word for the relationship you have with people online who are on your Friends list on Facebook. This guy was not my friend, but I knew him, and we had common interests and values in some areas. So what is that? Normally I’d say acquaintance, or something more specific like coworker or neighbor or my local witch doctor; but what is that when it’s someone on social media? “Mutuals” is a term I appreciate from Twitter and Instagram, meaning someone you follow who follows you; but that doesn’t apply to Facebook. Oop – lost the thread. See? I really do have too much to say. I’m picturing these parentheses as the thin curved walls of the bubbles as they rise up from the depths of my poor swampy head.) and pissed off I don’t know how many people; and so far as I can tell, I have changed zero minds. I know it’s because of the way I’ve been debating these things. Not things, sorry: these issues. The details of it should wait for another post, because I’m too far along the tangent now, but the point is, I realized some time ago that, rather than engage in acrimonious debates with individuals on social media, I should take their topics, and write about them here, where I can make the points I want. The arguments just make people mad. Really, I don’t have them to change minds; I have them because I want to speak my piece, to say what I think – and this is the right place to do that.

I know that the people I have been arguing with, the people who are, in a word, wrong, will not come and read these blogs; but the point is that I haven’t been convincing my opponents anyway, so the arguments have been a waste of time and energy and have produced little more than anger and bitterness, and probably only solidified people in their (wrong) opinions. But maybe if I write a post about the issue, and present my ideas here, people who are interested will read the piece, and maybe spread it in conversation or on social media, and hopefully people will be able to gain some information? Or some inspiration? Or some alleviation of their own turmoil? And maybe that will make a difference.

Enough of my borborygmus. (Hell yes, it’s a word.) Let’s get to the topic.

The question for today is this: do I have a right to not wear a mask?

I know, it probably seems like a dumb question. Because really: who cares if I have a right to not wear a mask? It’s the reasonable and decent thing to do; why would anyone want to not wear a mask during a pandemic? Heck, there are people who love the masks, who have decided to continue wearing them even after the pandemic is over, and bless those people.

But there are millions of people, several of them on my Facebook feed, who hate the masks, hate the restrictions, and REALLY hate the vaccine (I hate to say this, but I’m going to need to write, again, about why vaccines are good and anti-vaxxers are bad. I apologize in advance. But that’s not this post, so let’s let that one sit down in the swamp for a little longer. Down in the toxic murk, where anti-vaxxers come from and where they belong.), and if you talk to them about all of this, at some point they will say “The government shouldn’t get to tell me what to do, where to go, whether or not I should wear a mask or put chemicals in my body. What about my rights?!?!”

That’s what I want to address first. What about my rights? Do I, in fact, have the right to not wear a mask? Do I have the right to keep my business open, which means the government does not have the right to shut me down for purposes of quarantine? Do I have the right to refuse a vaccine?

First, let me say that rights are slippery buggers. I don’t fully understand them, and I won’t pretend to. There is a long and complicated – and fascinating, and important – debate about what a right is and why we have them and which ones we have. So while I have an opinion about this issue of the right to not wear a mask, I freely admit that there may be and probably are factors that I have not considered; I may be wrong. If I am wrong, I invite correction. But here we go with my opinion.

The simple answer is no. I do not have the right to not wear a mask. Not a natural right, nor a moral right. Not an inalienable right, and not a legal right. The Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Magna Carta, the Bible – none of them say anything about your right to a bare bottom half of your face. A law or regulation requiring you to wear a mask is not a violation of your rights.

Because what would be the basis for it? Again, rights are complicated things and nobody has an incontestable definition of what they are and where they come from, but essentially, the three main sources of rights are: our identity as individual rational human beings; the laws of society and the social contract; and God. God, so far as I know, has not decreed that humans don’t need to wear masks (Indeed, the Abrahamic God seems to be more in favor of covered faces than not). The laws of society are exactly the ones that people are arguing about, because they mostly mandate masks, and the social contract is the main focus of the rest of this writing – and it also probably mandates masks. Our identity as individual rational human beings is the source, according to John Locke among others, of our right to life, liberty, and property; most of the Constitutionally-enumerated rights derive from this. We have the right to speech because we have individual thoughts and opinions, and the free expression of those is a recognition of the value of our individual thoughts and opinions. We have the right to bear arms essentially as a means of self-defense and protection of our continued existence – because I can only exist as an individual rational human being if I’m alive, and my ability to defend myself is a protection of and a recognition of that essential right to exist. My ability to choose my own destiny implies the right to do so, and that’s why I can’t be wrongfully imprisoned. And so on.

But there’s no right to not put cloth on my face. It is not a necessary condition of my individuality. It is not a reflection of a defining characteristic of my reasoning mind. It is not even an inherent preference: in cold weather, most people prefer to cover up their faces as much as they can get away with. When I was a kid in Massachusetts, my favorite piece of winter clothing was a ski mask. And not because I liked robbing banks: because it kept me warm.

There are exceptions, of course, which we all know about (mostly because smug twerps have used them as the basis for false claims to avoid following the guidelines and restrictions) – someone with a phobia or a health condition that might prevent them from safely wearing a mask has a right to refuse to wear a mask, because there is a right to life and to the prevention of bodily harm; nobody has the right to hurt me, nor to force me to hurt myself, in a preventable way. But masks are generally harmless, so we’re going to stipulate those (rare!) occasions where people can’t wear masks with the general statement that people who can’t wear masks are obligated to try to find an alternative that does work for them, that achieves the same purpose as a mask but does not cause harm. And regardless of whether or not someone can wear a mask, the essential obligation of mask-wearing remains.

So let’s get to that. Because while I don’t have a specific right to refuse to wear a mask, that doesn’t mean I should be forced to wear a mask for no reason: the presumption for any question of rights and obligations should be that the individual has every right unless there is a reason to restrict it; that is, all things being equal, I have the right to wear a mask, to not wear a mask, to wear 25 masks stacked on top of one another, to wear a Michael Myers mask while I drive around – I should be free to do whatever the heck I want provided it does not harm anyone else or infringe on any other rights. (The Michael Myers thing is probably an infringement on people’s general well-being. But I think it gets the Humor Exception. Different topic.) What I said above generally holds true: my ability to choose my destiny implies a right to actually do that, to make my own choices and live as I wish to. Every action or inaction should be presumed to fall under my general right to liberty and personal sovereignty – unless it is shown to have an impact on others. If it has an impact on others, then it becomes a question.

The question here is does my not wearing a mask affect other people? And the answer is yes. My breathing, my talking, my sneezing and coughing, without a mask on, has direct and tangible impacts on other people: I can spread a virus to them. It’s provable, it’s known – it’s common sense, really; we’ve all been spat on by close talkers, all been sneezed or coughed on by people who didn’t cover their mouths, all been asphyxiated by the bad breath or our fellow human beings. We all know that a bare mouth and nose in a public space has an impact on other people. As soon as we learned the germ theory of disease, and the properties of viruses, this impact became more clear. Honestly, it’s not clear to me that any of us should ever go without masks: even without Covid-19 as the main reason, we still give each other colds and flus and a dozen other infections simply through bare breathing; maybe face coverings should be universal.

The question then becomes one of burden. Is it reasonable to ask me to wear a mask to protect other people from my spit-propelled infectoids? Is it more reasonable to ask other people to avoid those infectoids? Is the means of prevention a greater burden than the risk of said infectoids getting on with their infecting of other people? If they do get infectionalized (Sorry – like I said, it’s been too long since I wrote, and it’s like a peat bog inside this brain of mine.), does the potential harm they might suffer outweigh the burden on me of prevention? Because again, while there is no enumerated, defined right to not wear a mask, the presumption should be that someone who doesn’t want to wear a mask doesn’t have to wear a mask; individual liberty should be first and foremost in our minds, all the time.

I’m actually going to leave those questions alone for now. Because they are determined by specific circumstances. Basically, the answer is that wearing a cloth mask when I am out in public, in enclosed spaces, within six feet or so of other people, is a lesser burden than the risk of infecting someone with Covid-19. So I should wear a mask during this pandemic. I don’t know if it’s a lesser burden than the risk of infecting someone with the flu; it may be. It is interesting to realize that a generation or so from now, mask-wearing may not even feel like a burden; it may just be the norm, and this whole debate will just be silly. But my topic here is a right: do I have a right to not wear a mask? I do not.

The same argument applies to social distancing, to handwashing, to avoiding handshakes and hugs and so on. It applies to weddings and funerals, to in-person classes and live sporting events. It applies to keeping your business open and serving customers during a pandemic. All of it comes down to the same thing: you are presumed to have the right to do whatever the heck you want with your time and your property; you have control over your own destiny – unless and until it impacts others. All of those activities and preferences, for in-person church, for birthday parties, for holiday gatherings with family, for traveling in planes, trains, and automobiles: all of them create a risk of spreading Covid-19 to others. None of them are necessary for an individual’s continued existence. None of them are rights. I do not have a right to have a wedding or a birthday party or a funeral in the manner and at the time and place of my choosing. All things being equal, I should be presumed to have the liberty to choose my wedding and my funeral arrangements; but not all things are equal during a pandemic. I can still be an individual rational human being without seeing other people in large groups in enclosed spaces without masks and closer than six feet.

There is some question of work: the right to work and to derive an income from work is a right we have, as it is both an expression of our rational selves and a necessity for the continuation of life; there has to be some negotiating around that conflict. If, for instance, society can provide me with an income sufficient to keep me alive and essentially free, then that would compensate for the loss of my ability to work as a waiter or a bartender, for instance. Or if my work can move online, as my job teaching high school English did, then that means I can continue the necessary parts of my human existence, without imposing a risk on other humans that might prevent them from continuing their existence. I do not have a right to make my income however I want. I do not have a right to do my job only in the way I want to do it. I do not, unfortunately, have the right to keep open the business I worked my entire life to create. It breaks my heart to say it, but it’s true: my entrepreneurship, my blood sweat and tears, my lifelong dream – I don’t have a right to any of those. I have a right to exist, and to work to continue my existence. I don’t have a right to thrive: and if my thriving puts other people at risk, as it might during a pandemic, then I don’t get to thrive while putting an undue burden of risk on other people.

Put it this way: if I had a right to keep open my beloved mom-and-pop store, what would that mean if my business failed? If another mom-and-pop store opened right next door to mine, which had lower prices and a better product? Would I have the right to take some of their money? Would I have a right to force customers to come to my store? Would I have a right to demand taxpayer money from the government? Or what if my store caught on fire? What if there was a hurricane, or an earthquake? If I had insurance, then I would get the coverage I paid for – but you don’t need insurance to get your rights, you just get those. And there is, sadly, no right to have my dreams come true, or to keep them from being taken away by a pandemic.

All I have is a right not to have my life taken away because somebody doesn’t feel like wearing a mask.

The last thing I’ll say about this is that anyone who claims to have a right to not wear a mask, or to get a vaccine: you do have that right. You can choose to say no to masks and vaccines. It just means you can’t be around people. At all. If you are willing to quarantine yourself in such a way that you have no risk of spreading the virus to anyone, then you have the freedom to do whatever you wish in terms of refusing masks and vaccines: because your choices will not have any impact on other people, and so your individual freedom prevails. But if you want to live in society, then you have to help society live. That free choice, to be a part of society or to leave society, is the final protector of your individual rights. Again, it is a complicated choice, because not everyone can survive separate from society, and a choice that leads inevitably to my death is no choice at all; society has some responsibility to provide for my continued existence if I can’t have that existence outside of society; that’s why society has a responsibility to provide a minimum income, basic needs, to all members of the society who cannot provide it for themselves. And our particular society does not do a very good job of that. But that’s a topic for another day.

For today, wear your mask. And if you can, get the vaccine.

Do what’s right.