Choices always have consequences

The head football coach at Washington State and four of his assistants gave up their lucrative jobs by refusing to be vaccinated... and with no clear explanation as to why or how they could claim to be so supportive of their players, school, and community, yet stand apart.

Lots of large airlines and other firms have mandated vaccines (often with options for frequent testing instead), and a very small percentage of workers have given up their jobs.

I know some will call this being fired, but it's really quite logical that just as people can exercise free will in almost unlimited ways, so too they must accept the well-known consequences of their choices. Some people still refuse to wear a seat belt, after all these years, but if stopped by a cop without one on, they must accept the fines.

Some people may refuse to wear a mask, for all sorts of reasons, but that means they have chosen to NOT fly (or work in an airport).

Some students miss due dates and entire assignments, again for all sorts of reasons, but they don't normally earn all the available points, even if they can make up the work.

Life is made up of a never-ending series of choices, and we are never quite certain where the effects of each choice may take us. I have made all sorts of poor decisions but at least a few of them led to happy accidents. Some "good" decisions turned out be not so good for me in the long run. To choose an action or activity or person or group means we have excluded some other actions, activities, persons, or groups.

A couple Democratic senators have chosen to act as "moderates" (or at least portray themselves as such), perhaps hoping for victory in a future election and perhaps standing up for strongly held beliefs. There is a long tradition of just a few people being firm and standing up against the majority... and later being proven to be on the right side of history.

Choices are rarely binary, of course, and humans have a fine ability to discover compromises and gray areas. 

The U.S. has always been able to encompass a wide rage of views, relying partly on wide majorities of citizens to keep us safe, to shield us from disease, to avoid getting too close to the edge. For some Americans, any request from someone they don't know and trust elicits an automatic rejection. Our default tends to be "no."

I saw today that about 40 percent of Russians say they will never be vaccinated with the Sputnik vaccine simply because they do not trust their government. I used to just shake my head when I heard about people in other countries who so mistrusted authority and "the leaders" that their first thought was always "no."

But now I live in one of those countries.

But there is a silver lining: the vast majority of Americans are willing to follow reasonable rules for everyone's good. There were no "non-maskers" at DIA or Ontario/LA as we were traveling this past weekend. There were very few "cheaters," not covering their noses. 

It's like a dance. Enter a public building and put on your mask. Leave the building and remove your mask.

There. Was that so hard?