It’s still important that we don’t normalize this.
Just to start this off properly, they are correct this time:
You should stay at home.
You should keep about ten feet away from other people.
You should minimize your contact with shared spaces.
You should only buy food and other necessities from vendors with generous paid sick leave policies, so you have some reasonable guarantee that the folks handling it aren’t sick themselves.
And you’re gonna need to maintain this for at least 3 weeks; probably longer, though exactly how long will depend on just how well we all manage to actually do all this.
But, and this is important, you should not be doing this because the State is telling you that you have to.
You should be doing it because that’s what the best science available says is what we all need to do to minimize the impact of a pandemic disease.
(And we all definitely want to minimize this disease’s impact.)
What we should not be doing, though, is getting used to this level of State control over the daily life of our communities.
Because there’s no justification for the State having the power to compel this sort of thing.
And to be fair, here in the United States most governments are being pretty careful to keep the rhetoric in the realm of “recommendations”.
But there’s no doubt that as it gets worse “recommendation” will give way to “instruct”, which in turn will give way to “order” if it goes on long enough and people are doing a poor job of isolating themselves on their own.
And at that point we’ll see exactly how seriously America takes its freedom.
On its past performances, I’m gonna go ahead and guess “not very seriously”.
The United States has a long history of the Courts deciding the State has pretty much any power it claims, Constitution or no.
So even though we do in fact have a Constitutional provision saying that the State may not impede the rights of association and assembly, I have no doubt at all that no Court in the country would find any kind of mandated quarantine unconstitutional.
So, we really need to do something about putting some real teeth into our Constitution, but that’s a task for later.
Right now, prove that you’re worthy of your freedom.
A free State can only function with an educated and informed citizenry who are capable of making these decisions for themselves, and in this situation the educated and informed decision is to follow the best science available.
Stay home; stay safe.
Aaand it took _2 days_ for California to get State orders, with threats of police action.
While I think it’s obvious from the post above that I fully support people staying the hell inside and isolating themselves as much as possible, since that is the _only_ way we can reduce the impact from a pandemic like this, it shows the authoritarianism underlying this allegedly “free” society.
We can do better than this.