Don’t Claim ‘Freedom’ to Do Harm to Others
To the Editor:
To coin your phrase, “Oh, Ms. Armstrong” in your letter last week, how dare you profane our sacred Constitution and the sacrifices made by our soldiers to defend it in your veiled rebuttal by using our Constitution to disclaim any personal obligation to respect and protect the lives and livelihoods of your fellow Americans by wearing a mask. And you had the audacity to do so at a time when Texas is reaching ever increasing historic records of COVID-19 cases of more than 126,000 cases per day adding to the more than 20,000 COVID-19 deaths in Texas to date and when the GOP controlled states like North Dakota with the lowest usage of masks are now experiencing the highest rates of U.S. coronavirus cases in the nation while Trump and millions of his Fox Cable News devotees refuse to wear a mask for the protection of their fellow Americans.
To make up for your abject failure to read the facts in my letter, read the book “Hoax” by Brian Stelter, a fact based investigative journalist, who proves that the false arguments made by Sean Hannity and Fox and Friends in daily collusion with Trump for months caused much of this needless death of more than 238,000 Americans of all ages. Why are you so callously indifferent to those Americans who survived days of experiencing repeated drownings and being hooked to a ventilator isolated from their loved ones that makes your minor discomfort of wearing a mask to prevent that suffering and death minuscule in comparison to the lifelong pain and physical and mental impairment they will have to suffer?
Our Founding Fathers and those brave men and women in the military did not take personal risks to protect the life of Americans so that you could someday egregiously exploit our Constitution to have the socalled “freedom” to harm your fellow Americans by not wearing a mask. Those same Founding Fathers would be aghast to learn that your Republican Party Senators like John Cornyn appointed U.S. Supreme Court Judges to rule in Citizens United that corporations are the equivalent of living human beings whose unlimited corporate money is free speech that may be secretly spent in unlimited amounts to deceive voters and make incumbent lawmakers cower to their self-aggrandizing demands not in the interest of our workers or our environment.
Those Founding Fathers feared the very type of corporate tyranny we suffer in America today where almost all state and federal legislation favors big corporations and ignores the urgent needs of working and middle class families and our local governments and schools. Those same GOP Supreme Court Justices refused to reform the Republican contrived election abuses of computerized gerrymandering that destroy our Constitutional based right to “one person, one vote” by enabling a minority of a state’s voters to elect the majority of their state and federal lawmakers just as a former Texas Governor refused needed reforms when he vetoed legislation disclosing the source and money paid to elect lawmakers to help Texans make informed decisions when voting and just as Trump did when he filed suit to stop every vote from being counted in the key states where he wrongfully believed he had won.
However, “my dear Ms. Armstrong,” our brave men and women in the military did fight and die to guarantee all living human beings the Constitutional Rights of Free Speech, Assembly, and Due Process which Trump egregiously violated in Russian Czar like fashion by his ordering our armed military to tear gas Americans peacefully protesting police brutality at a D.C. church just for a photo op and by his ordering children to be separated from their parents and remotely caged with the threat of no return if their parents failed to waive their due process right to a hearing.
Thanks be to God that He has blessed America with a new President in Joe Biden who will abide by the Presidential oath to protect our sacred Constitution that you and Trump profane and who, in stark contrast to President Trump, will earnestly and honestly strive to serve and unite and not divide all Americans.
John W Mikus
Fayetteville