“You know, we’re living in a society!”

George Costanza

I never thought that I would ever start a post on this blog with a Seinfeld quote, but here we are. I was originally going to talk about a different topic this week, but this one is fighting for attention in my brain and I figure I better write it down before my head explodes.

I’ve been following politicians and their political speak for a while now. The pandemic is starting to heat up again as the school begins or is about to begin, and there have been discussions about mandating masks for students. The governors of both Florida and Texas barred schools from mandating masks because…reasons, I guess. However, closer to home for me, we have a Senate candidate in Ohio who is anti-mask and is trying to fight for people’s freedom to not wear a mask in schools. That’s a funny choice of words there.

“Freedom.”

I feel like people think that they should be free to make whatever decisions they want to and to hell with everybody else. If that was the case, we would have chaos and nobody would be truly be free because by this idea, each person would infringe on everybody else’s rights. The thing is, we have certain rights and freedoms, but we are also part of numerous societies. Each group we belong to is a society, whether it’s a country, a state, a county, a city, a school, a workplace, a German brass band, a lodge, or a soccer team, and each of those groups has rules that we have to abide by in order to maintain that society. If everyone did whatever they felt like, then society would inevitably become unsustainable.

An excellent example of what happens when everyone is free to do what they feel like is the Futurama episode, “Freedom Day”. As New New York is preparing for the festivities, a stage collapses and the worker who was supposed to make sure it was structurally sound said, “I didn’t feel like it.” That’s an excellent analogy to what’s going on now with this pandemic.

People don’t want to wear masks, apparently because it’s some form of control technique or something. They want to preserve their freedom by not wearing them. Anyway, there are other people, including kids, who may not be able to get vaccinated who still have to go to school, work, and go about their daily business. The idea of a society is that we all work together for the greater good. If the people who complained about wearing masks since it became a topic of discussion would have done so from the start, I probably wouldn’t be writing this sermon. I probably wouldn’t be doing this Bible study project, either, since I would have lots of other stuff to do instead. Wearing a mask is not a means of control, it’s a piece of cloth that can really reduce the spread of the virus. It’s also a small thing anyone can do that makes you look like a decent person. You won’t be giving up your freedom. And for the record, I hate wearing a mask because it fogs up my glasses, but I still do it because I don’t want to get anyone sick.