Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Could Liberties be Collateral Damage During Pandemic?

COVID-19 has created significant personal and political carnage as it has spread throughout the population, but the least remarked upon bit of collateral damage we could be left with will be the damage done to our civil liberties.

We’ve been faced with a difficult choice, a balancing act that seems impossible on its face but that must be entered into if we are to emerge from the pandemic both healthy and with some vestiges of our liberties still in tact.

It is imperative that we slow the spread of COVID-19, which likely will have killed more than 100,000 Americans by the time you read this and infected close to 2 million. Internationally, we are likely to hit 350,000 deaths and 5 million cases by summer. There is no vaccine to buttress immunity and stem the spread, the there is no reliable antiviral drug that has consistently aided doctors in treating stricken patients.

There are few protections, in fact, aside from the social-distancing protocols and sheltering requirements put in place at the state level. Basically, the best way to protect oneself from contracting the virus is to stay at home, to limit our interactions with others, to shutter much of the economy. In effect, we are being asked to sacrifice economically and some of the freedoms we have come to assume were inalienable in an effort to protect the survival of the species.

But these efforts come at a cost, which is why I describe this as a difficult balancing act. We remain in the midst of the health crisis, and while many seek to eliminate doubt, we have few real answers about how to move forward. And each action we take, like the drugs being researched, will have side-effects. It’s why we need to ask questions that go beyond the health issues, even beyond the economic aspects, and that allow us to begin understanding how what we do now will alter what we are left with later.

Take the question of COVID-19 testing data. The AP reported in May that about two thirds of US states “are sharing the addresses of people who tested positive with first responders — from police officers to firefighters to EMTs.” Emergency personnel say this allows them to “take extra precautions to avoid contracting and spreading the coronavirus.”

But this widespread sharing of personal data, which is apparently legal, is a breach of privacy. Civil liberty advocates “have expressed concerns of potential profiling in African-American and Hispanic communities that already have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement,” and there is concern “the data being forwarded to immigration officials.”

This could have a disastrous effect, causing people to eschew testing and risk illness and death, and which in turn could accelerate the spread of the virus in already hard-hit minority communities.

Other proposals that have been floated like road checkpoints to manage travel between states and regions, or a requirement that we all carry ID cards certifying we are COVID-free, are even more problematic, and why a tweet from the group Liberal Resistance endorsing the arrest of anti-closure protesters in the United Kingdom seems just plain foolish.

I’m no supporter of these protests, which have taken place across the United States. Most are AstroTurf, or fake grassroots efforts paid for by the usual right-wing donors. I am a defender of the right to protest, which we have to be careful not to erode.

Part of the issue is language. We’ve recast the virus as an enemy and the pandemic as a war, a renaming that creates a dangerous template that we’ve seen abused in the past — in the war on terror, the war on drugs, and so on. The language creeps into our consciousness and makes us more amenable to anything the state might propose as a precaution. Random road checks for drugs? No problem. No-fly lists that have little accountability? Good to go. Profiling? Sure.

In the case of COVID-19, it is clear that many precautions work — social distancing, limits on business capacity, suspension of large gatherings, masks. But the expansion of police power, curbs on speech, and the erosion of privacy pose long-term threats.

We cannot ignore this reality.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @kaletjournalism; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet. Patreon, @newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2020

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