May 21, 2020 5 min read

In his recent articles on the 1918 influenza pandemic, Tom Milhollan has shown us how remarkably similar this current crisis is to the one that caused so much pain here a century ago. That we have been compelled to stay at home, shutter our businesses, forego entertainment, socially distance and restrict or postpone our funerals is hardly “unprecedented,” our president’s new favorite word.

No treatment or cure or vaccine for the flu existed in 1918, and by the end of 1919, 675,000 Americans were dead, out of a population of 130 million. Although the number of deaths in the spring of 1918 was shocking, it paled in comparison to the second wave of the illness that struck in late October and November of that year, after all had returned to near normalcy. That’s a history lesson we can’t afford to ignore.

“Business owners, sustaining unbearable losses, began to voice their objections to the closure orders of Dr. Benjamin Franklin Royer, Pennsylvania’s commissioner of health,” wrote Milhollan. “Such objections had already hardened into protest in other places. In fact, city officials in Lancaster and Pittsburgh began to suggest that their cities might break from the state Department of Health’s orders, either by outright defiance of them or by noncooperation in their enforcement.”

Sound familiar?

It ought to after the recent barrage of commentary articles on the O-R’s Opinion page by Dave Ball, Wendy Bell and Tim O’Neal.

Ball complains that Gov. Tom Wolf is “depriving citizens of basic rights such as free speech, the right to practice religion, the right to keep and bear arms, the right of assembly, due process, equal protection and the right of appeal …”

When exactly did the governor ban free speech and order the confiscation of weapons? I missed that.

In her article, Bell mourns the loss of our freedom, including, apparently, the freedom to infect anyone we choose.

“Our health experts now tell us we need contact tracing,” she writes. “It’s necessary, they say, before America can safely reopen. And look at you! So quick to fall for it!”

In contact tracing, people are tested. If they test positive, then all the people with whom they have come in contact are located and tested, and those people who test positive need to stay home. The alternative to this is to simply let the disease run its course. If that’s the course taken, better hope COVID-19 doesn’t come back in the fall the way the flu did in 1918.

What I find most disturbing in these articles is the writers’ confusion about the origin of our guaranteed rights. Ball quotes the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it…” In the final paragraph he states, “It is time for this governor to go,” and “It is the right of the people to abolish it.”

We are no longer ruled by Great Britain, however. A long and costly war ended that. And it is not the Declaration of Independence that grants us our rights, but rather the U.S. Constitution.

We have a way of changing our government, and that is by voting. We elected Wolf governor, and then we reelected him. Ball seems to be implying that we have a right to overthrow him and our government, and advocating that is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison (U.S. Code Title 18: Section 2385). And this is the man chosen to lead Washington County’s Elections Review Committee!

O’Neal writes: “We are criticized by the very government that we, the people have empowered. We are called ‘cowards’ and ‘deserters’ when we fail to outright dismiss our rights for the ‘public good.’ We are threatened when we choose to question the authority of those making the decisions to restrict our freedom.”

An Afghanistan combat veteran, O’Neal writes, “We did not go to war against an ‘enemy.’ No, we went willingly to fight for our ‘certain unalienable rights.’ … I fought in Afghanistan to protect our freedoms, and I am certainly prepared to do the same right here in Pennsylvania.”

We sure hope he doesn’t mean to fight with the same weaponry.

We have every right to criticize the federal and state governments for the ways in which they have handled this crisis. Certainly, some of the restrictions that we face here seem unfair, arbitrary and even irrational. We can voice our objections without firmly planting our feet on one side of the partisan divide or the other, or for advocating abolishing our government. And instead of whining about what we cannot do, we can do what we can to help those who have suffered the most.

We do have in this country freedoms, even under these extraordinary circumstances, that many people around the world can only imagine. But our rights have always had limits. We don’t have the right to drive a car without a driver’s license, for instance, or to drive an unregistered vehicle. We don’t have the freedom to drive drunk, not for fear that we would kill ourselves but that we might kill others.

Our individual rights are vital to us. Just as vital as the public good.

Parker Burroughs is the retired executive editor of the Observer- Reporter and lives in Washington.