The chance to make a choice

“Painting the American insignia on airplane wings is a job that Mrs. Irma Lee McElroy, a former office worker, does with precision and patriotic zeal.” (Library of Congress)

Thanks to our free pro Zoom account (thanks, Eric Yuan!), we now have some new features to manage the video conferences we run for our middle schoolers. Disabling chat, for instance, is a must-have.

Another useful feature is the ability to mute the mics of all participants with one click. However, we don’t use that unless we have to. Until the meeting officially begins, we let the students socialize; when it’s time for us to start, we politely ask them to mute their own microphones. One by one, we see the “mute” icons appear.

I’ll admit, I sometimes make a big deal out of seemingly trivial things. But it’s important to me that each student have that little moment of autonomy. They’ve shown up for this meeting on their own, and now they have an opportunity to contribute to its success, even in a small, subtle way. They get to demonstrate their own buy-in.

Americans are in a liminal moment in which we have a similar chance to do the right thing before the choice is made for us. We know that “[i]f it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart…the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.” Businesses, school districts, families, and individuals can take the steps to help us get as close to this result as possible.

Of course we don’t want to, but when it comes to long-term public and economic health, it’s our best shot. Like a kid resisting the bedtime routine, we can drag out each step and wait to be coerced, or we can take the necessary steps on our own, by choice.

In this country and many others, individual liberty is among our most prized values. We can take this to the extreme by going to parties, crisscrossing the country on domestic flights, and refusing to allow our call center employees work from home. Or we can exercise our liberty by staying home when we can, offering special business hours for vulnerable populations, closing our businesses voluntarily, and helping others.

We can see emergency measures as restrictions that impinge upon our freedoms, or we can see them as public health initiatives that we are willing participants in. If we take the latter perspective, we can then operate within this new framework, finding a path forward instead of fighting the rules and trying to get around them.

For children, the fantasy of adulthood might include ice cream and candy for dinner, video games all day long, and staying up all night. For teens, it might involve an abundance of illicit substances and flagrant disregard for social norms. The cruel reality is that once you become an adult, you no longer need or want these things; not only do you understand the trade-off involved in seeking them, the fact that you could make such choices at any time means that you don’t feel compelled to.

We can always choose to put profit over people, value self-gratification over the safety of others, and indulge a desire to cough and sneeze anywhere we like. But just like the children and teenagers who reach adulthood and realize that they have good reasons to brush their teeth, wear sunscreen, and eat their vegetables, we might decide that some of the behavioral limitations being proposed by public health experts, epidemiologists, and government officials are actually good ones that we can willingly abide, even if it means personal sacrifice. On our own, for our own reasons, we can act for the greater good.