Ben­jamin Franklin fa­mous­ly said, "They who can give up es­sen­tial lib­er­ty to ob­tain a lit­tle tem­po­rary safe­ty, de­serve nei­ther lib­er­ty nor safe­ty." I have a grave con­cern that the over­rid­ing con­cern for many or­di­nary cit­i­zens, who sup­port the cur­rent state of emer­gency, is not a deep con­cern for moral­i­ty and our fray­ing so­cial fab­ric, but a de­sire to con­tin­ue the com­fort­able and self­ish lifestyles that have be­come so wide­spread in this land of plen­ty.

Ever since our re­cent fos­sil fu­el wind­fall, this lifestyle has be­come more ev­i­dent in the marked rise of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion of every type. Even as high-dol­lar rides and mil­lion-dol­lar homes pro­lif­er­ate, the work­ing class is squeezed out of the hous­ing mar­ket and our health­care sys­tem col­laps­es on it­self. The over­rid­ing con­cern of in­di­vid­u­als seems to be to get ahead at any cost-the same val­ue that they of­ten crit­i­cise the crim­i­nal class for dis­play­ing. What is even more dis­turb­ing to me is the lan­guage that many in so­ci­ety so ca­su­al­ly use to re­fer to peo­ple who live in many of the so-called hot spots. I won't try to fool any­one, I'm as afraid of some of these neigh­bour­hoods as any­one else.

How­ev­er, I be­lieve that we must sim­ply refuse to call oth­er hu­man be­ings "beasts" or "an­i­mals" or to wish dis­as­ter or ill-treat­ment on their heads. Any­one can be nice to their friend­ly neigh­bour, but how we treat even the most dif­fi­cult mem­bers of so­ci­ety is the true mea­sure of our na­tion­al char­ac­ter. See­ing that we have ex­tra time in­doors as of late, I urge my fel­low cit­i­zens to think about the kind of coun­try they would like to live in and how they would like to con­tribute to it. If any­one was plac­ing their hopes on this state of emer­gency to do that for them, then I am afraid there is a load of dis­ap­point­ment com­ing.

Evron Legall

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