There's No Freedom For Us

It's getting hard to stomach the campaign rhetoric.

Thom Hartmann recently wrote a post praising Democrats for campaigning on "freedom." As Hartmann writes, "What Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have done in seizing back the word freedom from Republicans is nothing less than brilliant." He later goes on to say, "If you're unconscious and on a ventilator because the rightwing media machine told you getting vaccinated was for wimps, you're not free." He doesn't have much to say about the 17 million Americans who are dealing with chronic illness and disability now, because the leftwing media told them Covid was mild, while the CDC shared memes instead of vital information.

Here's the thing:

If you're going to take back words like "freedom," you have to offer the real thing, not just something that sounds good.

You can't free people from reality.

That's just gaslighting.

Today, you're exponentially more likely to catch Covid than you were four years ago. We have exponentially more data on the longterm harm it does. We have exponentially more disease floating around in the air, whether it's Covid or something else, and several more diseases threatening pandemics.

We have current and former public health officials encouraging us to wait for vaccines even after they're available, and we have reporters from left-leaning news outlets actively gaslighting the public about their risks in crowded spaces. On brand, a CNN reporter at the DNC asked one of the most loaded questions of all time:

"Four years ago, this would've been a superspreader event... and you're here now, no mask. What has that been like for you as a healthcare professional?

"It's been incredibly freeing."

There's that word "freedom" again.

If that weren't enough, we recently saw DNC members plug their ears while passing through protests where activists read the names of dead Palestinian children, blown apart by American bombs.

You can't free people from consequences.

That's denial.

Like so many other liberals with a platform they could use to educate the public about what's really going on, Hartmann chooses convenient lies over uncomfortable truths. This kind of rhetoric has come to dominate their supporters, who have shut out the vulnerable and disabled from public life and erased them from public discourse altogether.

Is that what freedom looks like?

If so, it's revolting.

When liberal political strategists, politicians, and podcast hosts talk about what the public wants, they're really talking about what they want. They wore masks and talked about climate change just long enough to convince us to vote for them. They minute they could, they threw it all into the dumpster.

In some cases, literally:

Now universities, where students are supposed to learn critical thinking and ethical decision-making, have become plague pits.

Here:

As we cascade toward election day, it's hard to imagine what kind of freedom many of us would enjoy under either presidential administration.

If that makes you uncomfortable, please put aside your need to react.

Sit with your discomfort for a moment.

Think about it.

In 2024, nurses are calling security on vulnerable, immunocompromised patients because they can't remove their masks without risking their lives. This isn't happening in rural Trump country. It's happening in the middle of big cities, supposedly the bastion of liberal values. People are giving up jobs and leaving professions because nobody will do what it takes to keep each other safe. As one person I follow recently put it, "People who live in apartments & condos have had a very different pandemic experience than those who own homes. Everything is a risk, taking out the garbage, getting mail, riding the elevator to get outside."

Where do a majority of liberal voters live?

In big cities, often in apartments.

It's getting hard to watch the Harris campaign, and it's getting hard to listen to their supporters slide their policies, their ideologies, and their rhetoric to the right while calling it strategic, and abandoning the rest of us to disease and the moral injury of watching genocide unfold while knowing our money is paying for it.

This year, like so many other teachers, I had to leave my job because my university offered and then rescinded a remote work position and then told me to resign. I'm homeschooling my daughter because we can't find anywhere that offers clean air or a reasonable mask policy.

Democrats are running a campaign based on the freedom to have sex and watch porn, with vague promises to take on corporate greed. While that's nice and all, I'd like the freedom to go to an ER without risking a hospital-acquired infection that steals IQ points from me or does permanent damage to my immune system or my heart. I'd like the freedom to send my child to a safe school. I'd like to imagine a future where she can have friends over.

We're not being offered real freedom. We're being offered partial freedoms. We can have reproductive freedom, but not freedom from disease. We can have freedom from high prices, but not freedom from war.

That doesn't feel like freedom.

If all this makes you uncomfortable, please reserve your scorn for the elites who put us in this position, not the ones who call it out.

Thank you.

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