From Frank Bruni, one of my fave columnists, in a New York Times newsletter yesterday:
"Our struggle with this pandemic has convinced me that somewhere along the way, we went from celebrating individual liberty to fetishizing it, so that for too many Americans, all sense of civic obligation and communal good went out the window," Bruni wrote. We seem to conflate freedom with selfishness, convenience, and personal comfort, he adds.
Bruni is talking about people who refuse to wear masks. They're among a number of Americans who believe that personal freedom must be protected at all costs, even if the costs are borne by others who suffer for their (possibly cockamamie) ideas and behavior. In short, individual freedom trumps community interests.
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| Conservatives are like Cyrano de Bergerac: They stand proud and alone because they're ugly and nobody loves them. (Just kidding! Sorry, Mom!) |
Thus, she says, any step toward gun regulation "is cast as a dire step toward tyranny."
We've heard that the only statistically measurable difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals have a higher tolerance for things that are disgusting (seriously!).
It's debatable that such a clear distinction has been overlooked in studies seeking the difference between liberals and conservatives. The only measurable statistical difference, we've heard, is that liberals have a higher tolerance for things that are disgusting (seriously!).
It's "I did it my way" versus "Lean on me."
Is this the real difference between liberals and conservatives -- a desire to see the community safe, housed, and free to speak versus a desire to stand high and alone against a teeming mass of strangers?
Did the conservative "regulate me not" drive America's sense of manifest destiny -- or excuse it? What is the weakness in either point of view?
Photo: "Bergerac_Cyrano" by dadotres is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
https://slate.com/news-and-
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