Indecent Exposure

The quest for individual freedom is the quest to live in space. Alone. Untethered to others.

I’d like to light my pipe in a restaurant after a fine meal, or in my office where the rumination of a pipe will help me to think a thing through. But I refrain. It is a reminder that I am bound together with others.

When I choose to wear a seat belt or don a bike helmet it chafes at my independence. My rugged individualism. But very few choices in life only impact the choice-maker.

If we could live free, floating in space, with no responsibility to others, no accountability, then we could live without regulation. Without face masks or seat belts or pipes lit in the office.

But “No man is an island,” as John Dunne said, and “Live Free or Die” is a fine motto until my living free means death for others.

There are no individuals on our planet. No one can live free of the other, free of our desperate connection community. Even those who live alone do not live without dependence. Individualism is a death sentence.

The mask is a covering. It is a lid on our stubborn self-absorption. To eschew the wearing of it is to announce our disdain for all clothing. An act of indecent exposure.

The rallying cry, “my body, my choice,” is taken up by some who would call themselves pro-life, protectors of the vulnerable, which seems a frightful hypocrisy when the chant is breathed out upon the elderly, the immune-suppressed, the child with asthma.

The goodness of a society is measured by its defense of the powerless, where the whims of the powerful do not take precedence over the lives of the vulnerable, where the convenience of the self-serving is not put above the health of the community.

Wearing a mask during a pandemic of individualism is a reminder that we are knit together. That we need each other. That living as a single thread dangling in space is cold and weak and lonely.

To be woven tightly together into a single fabric is the only way to truly be free of our toxic individuality.