Me versus we

By Margaret Gorski, Stevensville

Last Saturday I attended the Stevensville Farmer’s Market where delightful crafts and vegetables are sold every week in the summer. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people were wearing masks, but many were not. It’s clear the reason why we should wear a mask is not universally accepted and wearing one or not has become a matter of principle with the stated reasons varying widely from person to person. Just like the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake, the issue has turned into a cause for some and in my mind, a misplaced act of defiance for others. 

I had a conversation with one very passionate woman who wanted to discuss her conviction that by not wearing a mask she was exercising her 14th Amendment right. According to her, Constitutional amendments have priorities and the 14th Amendment supersedes the 10th Amendment. (Interestingly, the 10th Amendment is in the Bill of Rights while the 14th came later.) This person, who identified herself as one of the organizers of the “Stand up for Freedom” gatherings, was using the Constitution to justify why she had an individual right to ignore the Governor’s mask mandate. 

I have taken classes in American History and Civics and probably know as much or more about our nation’s history than the average citizen, but I had to reach into the recesses of my learning to make sense of that argument. I am not a Constitutional scholar, but I doubt neither she nor her fellow “Stand Up for Freedom Patriots” are Constitutional experts either. What I understand is the fact that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written as the vision and bylaws of “we the people,” working together, to create a new form of government in a new nation. It wasn’t about exercising one’s individual right at the expense of the rights of everyone else. 

This attitude that an individual’s rights reign supreme over our collective well-being makes we wonder where Ravalli County and our nation are headed? Are we so polarized that we must rely on using such a simple task as wearing a mask to make a point even though that point has significant potential adverse consequences to our fellow citizens? Should this be the issue that breaks us a community or nation? When Patrick Henry, one of our founding fathers, said in 1775, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” he was referring to his personal preference to be free over being enslaved by British rule. He wasn’t making a choice between his individual liberty and the potential death of his neighbor.   

Our Founding Fathers worked hard to understand human nature and create a form of government that protects our individual liberties while uniting the states so we can work together for the benefit of everyone’s prosperity. If we think our liberties are being threatened by a mask mandate and want to break our government instead of working together to fix it, I doubt we would be able to create a more perfect union than the one we have now. We owe it to future generations to stop fighting and figure out how to exercise our individual rights while also protecting our collective well-being before it’s too late.