COVID is Beyond the Political Now

According to the data tracked by Worldometers and the Johns Hopkins University, the United States is poised to pass the 200K death mark from COVID-19 tomorrow. That is a staggering number by any logic. It is as if a city twice the size of Asheville, NC, died just in the last year. We are now recording more deaths per day from COVID than happened on 9/11 from the terror attack.I usually avoid the political in this blog, but the coronavirus pandemic is not about politics; rather, it is humanitarian in nature. It begs the questions of whether there are limits to freedom, even in a "free" society (of course there are), and whether any of us owe the others in our society anything at all. Does our freedom give us the right, in effect, to kill our neighbor or our mother or our aunt?It is past time to get real about the pandemic. I am staying home over the coming holidays, much as I would love to visit my son. How about you?