Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding↱ suggests, "Mask burning is our new book burning", and while I am not necessarily in the mood to parse the differences, we might take the moment to appreciate the fact that we should even consider such notions.
The accompanying video, from an Idaho protest, is somewhat grim. "Parents teaching their kids to burn masks" might well be "peak 2021", but it seems more useful to consider the symbolic, even emblematic, value of this American exercise in demonstration and free speech.
American society often attends the notion that dangerously infamous causes should be allowed to march down Main Street if they so insist, and usually we use the KKK as an example. But where pretending low danger of ideas translating into action easily favors such banality, we also see what blithe generalization about free speech has allowed, and even cultivated, of American infamy.
To the other, coronavirus, in the pandemic variants our society presently faces, are an actual definable disease, not some metaphorical indictment of antisociality or our American sentimentality thereunto.
Colloquial dispute might suggest these Idaho parents are wilfully endangering their children, but even before anyone can choose to take it so far, the underlying disapprobation presumes impropriety.
Thus, a basic question of ethics:
• Hostility toward prophylaxis during time of pandemic, increasing Covid danger in their community, and, as the example has it, exposing and conditioning children to danger.
• Free speech.
The point is not to refuse the latter, but, rather, to ask a straightforward question:
Is there any ethical obligation, question, or issue—i.e.
, complaint—to be considered, here?
Some might hesitate to address questions of parenthood; after all, teaching kids to be stupid and dangerous to themselves and others is a long and prideful American tradition. Between our freedoms of speech and religion, this isn't the sort of thing that will have authorities seizing children from homes unless we track a body count. Even still, if the question wonders more generally what the hell is wrong with people in Idaho°, or maybe we just shake our heads in quiet disdain, the common link is one of judgment and disapprobation. And it is, indeed, easy enough to construct any number of ethical arguments describing a wrongness including culpability.
But is there
really any ethical question, or is an actual mask-burning protest in the time of covid simply a question of free speech?
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Notes:
° It's complicated; the Idahoan political relationship with self-defeat, or what jurisprudence describes as a suicide pact, shot through as it is with superstition, supremacism, and crackpottery, is about as messy as it can get without being Kansas or Texas.
@DrEricDing. "Mask burning is our new book burning. Parents teaching their kids to burn masks in Idaho is peak 2021 right now... SMH #COVID19 #MaskUp". Twitter. 6 March 2021. Twitter.com. 6 March 2021. https://bit.ly/3qu4MWY
