A Point of View May Not Be a Hill Worth Dying For
Lately, you can hear folks talk about their right to do or to say or to protest or to believe what they want. You hear a lot about that kind of right lately. I don’t think folks are saying exactly what they want to express, though. I think they might want to say that they are free to, but most often screw that up by thinking that freedom is only about escaping something. They’ll say they want to be free from this or that, but I think they really want to say they’re free to do or say or protest this or that.
Here’s a Real Life Example from Our Shared Recent Past
Folks from Yale studied a pertinent set of facts of 538,159 people who died between January 1 2018 and December 31, 202¹¹. One fact set they studied was what political party each of the deceased belonged to. They extracted that information from records from 2017. The long and short of the study of people who had passed away in Ohio and Florida found “the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters after the COVID vaccine was available.”
The folks that made up that 43% were free from the vaccine. It was, indeed, their right to be free from the vaccine. But I have to remember that their rights included the idea that they were free to get the vaccination, too. I wonder if there would have been a different outcome if they had been able to claim “freedom to” as their battle cry? Whenever we claim to be free from anything, we are actually not free at all. Free from requires looking behind to where we’ve been while free to requires looking ahead to where we’re going. That does not mean that folks are not free to embrace any idea or ideal they desire. It does mean that “freedom to” will require The Survivor minded to consider all the possible consequences of any given decision. Just because something is my right to do or to say does not mean that exercising that right is justifiable, much less wise.
You Don’t Have the Right to Tell Me What to Do
So, when I hear people saying they have a “right” to do something, I always have to stop and consider what they’re actually trying to say. Kids sometimes use the word as a defense against siblings, for instance. There are times when I hear that word “right” pronounced a certain way and I just have to wonder if the meaning of that word has been revised since grade school. The visual I see associated with that particular pronunciation of that word is a kid stomping his/her foot with arms crossed and a pouty lip. If we are free to do something, then the right to do that same thing loses some of its edge of self-righteous defiance. It just doesn’t make sense to blame someone for not allowing a behavior if we’re free to behave as we wish.
There are things we are not free to do. But, again, we are free to choose the things we do even if we choose to do things we are not free to do. The interesting part of all of this is that when we choose to do something we deem as emotionally loaded, we often defend that action with denials which can range from embarrassed “no I dont’s” to “how insulting that you would dare say such a thing.” Nearly everyone has had the experience of having to accept the responsibility of our own goofinesses. If we can laugh at ourselves, there is little to no loss. However, when we defend our misused “freedoms to” we are pretty well committed to costing everyone around us with the same consequences over and over again until such time that we can admit to being, in actuality, Goofy. Mostly, we’re then surprised when nothing hurts and nothing falls off.
A Point of View May Not Be a Hill Worth Dying For
Where we get into trouble is when we forget that the other guy also has a right to say and be and do and believe as he wishes and is therefore free to do so in spite of how offensive it might be to another point of view. Let’s take the word marriage as our example here. For the most part the word points at the union of a man and a woman. But the act could be applied to other situations in a legal context, such as two men or two women wanting to have the legal recognition of their long time commitments. From the point of view of the same sex couple, marriage could as easily apply to them as to a man and woman. To the person who has only ever considered the word marriage as it applies to men and women, that would be a difficult point of view to incorporate into their world view. But both world views exist. One would think then they must be able to incorporate one another. Both points of view have a right to exist and the people are free to express humanity as they must.
Freedom to Augment Experiences
We are all free to think of ourselves as the most important being in the universe. In some ways it’s vital that we think that way because it’s necessary for our survival. But that same way of thinking can be detrimental when we forget that other people have experiences we do not and their experiences augment what we are able to consider. But we can never benefit from other points of view unless we’re able to trust that the other person is free to have had the experiences he has accumulated into his point of view. What worries us is if the other person’s point of view is because he is free from his past or if his point of view is because he is free to enter the future. If I paint my point of view with “free from,” then marriage can only be between a man and a woman. That’s the experience I have. If I paint my point of view with “free to,” then I can sit back and watch how a couple of guys go at cohabitating. That’s an experience that’s ready-made for a stand-up routine.
It’s true the authorities were free to tell the folks in Ohio and Florida that the vaccine was not as effective as horse dewormer, but they were not free to play at being important with experiences they did not have. Those authorities were politicians, not medical professionals. The medical people told us to go get vaccinated. But because some people were going to stand on their rights, they died. They forgot they had the right to get a free vaccination. They were just as free to get the shot as they were free to not get it. No one told them they had to get poked in the arm. People did tell them that getting poked in the arm was good for them. So was wearing masks. But if a point of view is painted with “freedom from,” then it is often locked into goofy behavior. That is if you can call mortal self-importance goofy behavior.
It’s a small thing but being “free to” can be a bridge to reducing the stress of past errors. At least it can be if the experience expanded one’s point of view.
References
1. Chappell, B. (2023, July 25). Republicans’ excess death rate spiked after COVID-19 vaccines arrived, a study says. NPR. Retrieved August 21, 2023, from https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189939229/covid-deaths-democrats-republicans-gap-study
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