The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In it, protagonist Hester Prynne is guilty of adultery and forced to wear a scarlet 'A' on her dress as punishment for her sin. It is a symbol of her shame. It identifies her to the rest of society as unclean and blameworthy, which leads to her being shunned and forced to live her life as a second class citizen.
If you read the novel, you'll find that the letter ultimately doesn't have the effect on Hester that the leaders of the town expected it to.
But that's a story for a different time.
Joe Biden continues to pursue one of the greatest federal government overreaches in American History. Thanks to the 6th Circuit Court's randomly selected judges' 2 to 1 ruling, the Supreme Court is now the only thing standing in the way of a world where people who don't allow the government to dictate personal medical decisions for them will lose their jobs due to an executive mandate.
In other words, a world where the President of the United States is going to start firing American citizens from privately held jobs if they reject a unilateral order from his office that was never voted on.
I don't know what is going to happen when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on January 7th and makes its essentially forever-binding decision shortly thereafter, but I do know that the future of our country hangs in the balance in light of it, one way or another.
America is about to decide, on the whole, if it is going to brand a massive number of completely healthy Americans with a metaphorical scarlet letter, simply because they refuse to be injected with a lackluster vaccine that doesn't work at all like a vaccine.
And I have to tell you, I'm in total disbelief about it all.
I cannot get past the way people have responded to Covid-19. At first, I thought their behavior represented a total and complete political demographic shift, but I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that the American people haven't changed at all. I had just totally misassessed who they were and what they believed.
I've said before that I don't believe the Covid-19 era happens as it did if not for the internet, and I stand by that assertion. Without the endless fear mongering and misrepresentation of Covid-19 by the media, there is no way we end up where we are.
But even if the internet had existed 30 years ago as it does today, I never would have guessed an event like this could have happened back then. I would have sworn people in the 90s wouldn't be so easily scared. I would have said they wouldn't buy the media's fear narrative hook, line, and sinker on a daily basis. I would have said they were generally kind enough and open minded enough to allow others to live and let live, even if their personal medical decisions differed from each other. I would have said they were smart enough to see the societal, economic, and precedential impact that allowing one person to force mandate a toothless vaccine on millions would have on the future of the country.
And I would have been wrong. About all of it.
America is on the verge of becoming something it has never been. Not because of Covid-19 or because of one specific vaccine mandate, but because of the willing and conscious decision of average American citizens to accept a reality where personal health choices can be dictated by the Office of the President. Not by congress. Not by local health departments. Not by vote.
By one man.
That precedent is about to be set. It doesn't matter that Covid-19 presents as a cold for 99% of people. It doesn't matter that the very vaccines being mandated have totally failed to stop Covid cases and deaths from soaring. It doesn't matter that the true benefits of these Covid-19 vaccines tend to only tangibly make a noteworthy difference to the unhealthiest 1% of society. It doesn't even matter how safe or unsafe these particular vaccines are.
All that matters is that the precedent is about to be set, and the American people are apparently so scared of the media created caricature that Covid-19 has become that they are going to let it happen.
Nearly half the country is about to be forced against their will to inject themselves with a foreign substance of questionable efficacy, or to be relegated to second class citizenship status.
They will be tested weekly and banished to quarantine based on the results even if they are totally asymptomatic.
They will be force masked -- while the vaccinated are inexplicably free to go without mask, even though the vaccine in no way prevents transmission -- putting their personal and private health decisions and beliefs on display for all the world to see, despite the demonstrable inefficacy of masks which data continues to show again and again.
They will be diminished to a societal position of inequality, all based on the illogical fear of an illness that is innocuous to 99% of society and that vaccines have shown no ability to stop from spreading.
And it's all going to happen based on the whim of one ruler, in one office, making one unilateral decision.
People laugh when you say it, but the slippery slope which leads to some of the horrific societal inequalities we've seen in the past starts, by definition, in a manner that is nearly unnoticeable. That's why it's called a slope and not a cliff. And no, I'm not suggesting the mandating of this Covid-19 vaccine by itself is going to lead us to the atrocities we associate with dictators from the past, but I am saying the precedent always starts somewhere and it's always justified in some small way at first. Then 10 years down the road or 20 years down the road or 50 years down the road some new leader manipulates that precedent in a manner which goes slightly further, then further, then further.
The Supreme Court cannot allow the illogical fear of a disease which is completely innocuous to the vast majority of people who contract it to set a precedent which allows one elected official to unilaterally declare a large swath of society to be scarlet letter bearing, second class citizens.
It's horribly cliché, but I'm going to say it anyways:
This is America. We don't condemn individual freedom. We celebrate it.
Or at least we did.
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