Be Safe: Don't Visit Your Dying Parent. Don't Leave Your House. Don't Get Married. Don't ...
Dennis Prager
Posted: Jun 29, 2021 12:01 AM
As many observers have noted, staying safe has become a religion. "Safetyism," as it is sometimes called, like all religions, places what it values -- in this case, being safe -- above other values. Safetyism explains the willingness of Americans to give up their most cherished values -- including liberty -- in the name of safety for the last year and a half.
Millions of Americans not only gave up their right to go to work, earn a living, attend church or synagogue, and visit friends and relatives, but they even gave up their right to visit dying relatives and friends. One can assume that nearly every person recorded as having died of COVID-19 died without having a single loved one at their bedside from the moment they entered a hospital until their death. The acceptance of such cruelty -- irrational and unscientific cruelty, one might add -- can only be explained by the failure of generations of schools and parents to teach liberty, while successfully teaching the worship of safety. If your father had to die alone, it was worth it for the sake of safety; if your mother had to be in what amounted to solitary confinement in a nursing home for more than a year, that, too, was worth it for the sake of safety. And, of course, if political leaders and leaders in science and medicine have to lie for the sake of safety, so be it; truth, too, is less important than safety.
None of this is new. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote and broadcast about the willingness of Americans to watch individual rights crushed in the war against smoking, and especially in accepting the absurdity of the allegedly lethal dangers of secondhand smoke. No one denies that intense exposure to secondhand smoke can exacerbate preexisting illnesses such as asthma. But the anti-smoking zealots' claim that 50,000 Americans die each year from exposure to secondhand smoke is nonsense. For example, in 2013, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute reported that there was no statistically significant relationship between lung cancer and exposure to passive smoke.
