The Coffee Shop
By: Roy Smythe
Tags: Friendship, Misinformation, Covid 19, Freedom, Liberty

Amy and Jonathan grew up together in a suburb of Atlanta where they were teammates on the high school debate team. Without coordinating their decisions in any way — they both attended Emory University and graduated the same year — Amy with a degree in political science, and Jonathan in mechanical engineering. Jon entered the workforce, and Amy spent a few years in graduate school before doing the same.

After completing her studies, Amy moved to Nashville, and Jonathan — after stops on the East and West coasts, settled in a rural community outside of Phoenix in Arizona. They both have young families, with kids of similar ages.

While they had not seen one another for many years, they have “kept up” with each other’s family and other activities on Facebook, and are “linked” on LinkedIn as well. They both noticed over the last few years they didn’t necessarily agree on all political topics discussed in those forums, but weren’t willing to “unfriend” or “unfollow” one another as they were childhood friends who knew they in fact they shared a lot of common values.

Amy noted Jonathan, who has been very successful as an entrepreneur, mentioned he was presenting at a national engineering meeting in Nashville on one of his posts, and DM’d him to ask if he wanted to grab a coffee while he was in town.

He enthusiastically agreed.

A couple of days later Jonathan walked into the coffee shop where Amy suggested they meet and maneuvered between the other tightly packed small round tables filled with people to where she was standing. About half of the people in the coffee shop were wearing masks, including Amy as he approached.

She removed her mask, and gave him a hug. She then stepped back while holding his shoulders and exclaimed,“it’s SO good to see you Jon… and you somehow still look the same! What’s the damn secret?”

Jonathan laughed, “yeah, right…. I may look the same way I looked yesterday, but not like when we were in college, that’s for sure,” He pointed at his temple, “and I’ve got a few grays… and a more than a few extra pounds to prove it!”

They sat down, and a waitress who had been patiently standing by gently placed two cups of coffee, and napkins printed with the coffee shop’s colorful logo on the table in front of each of them.

“Anything else?”, she asked, smiling.

“I think this is great for now,” Amy replied.

“I assumed you still drink coffee…. I went ahead and ordered a cup for you.” Amy said, turning back to Jonathan.

“Absolutely.., totally addicted to caffeine, maybe my most exciting vice at this stage of life, unfortunately”, Jon sighed, smiling. They both picked up their cups and sipped.

“Crazy times,” Amy murmured as she nervously moved the paper napkin back and forth in front of her, and set her cup back down on the table. She then looked up and asked, “have you and your family been able to mostly avoid the ‘scourge’?”

Jonathan set his cup back down as well, the smile leaving his face. “If you mean have we avoided getting COVID… no, not entirely. My father got sick with it last June. He spent about six weeks in the hospital and eventually died in the ICU. It was terrible. He was only 66… a little overweight with some diabetes… and he probably didn’t have his high blood pressure under control. My mother was crushed, they were really just starting to enjoy retirement. She said goodbye to him on a freaking Ipad.”

“I’m so sorry, Jon”.

“Yeah, it sucks, but we obviously aren’t alone”.

“Thank God for the vaccine, huh?” Amy said, shaking her head.

“I guess,” Jonathan replied, “but I certainly haven’t agreed to take that crap. No freaking way.”

Surprised by his response, and not thinking about where the question might lead, Amy leaned forward and exclaimed, “you’re kidding… why not!?”

They both sat motionless for long moment, staring tentatively at one another. The sound of muted conversation, silverware clinking on ceramic plates and cups and the “whoosh” of the espresso machine manned by the barista across the room filing the silence.

“It’s complicated”, he replied, “but at its most basic — I prefer to make up my own mind.”

“Is there a medical reason?”, Amy asked, “or something else?”

Jonathan’s face darkened. He pushed his coffee cup forward on the table abruptly — hard enough to slosh some of the hot fluid onto the table. He slumped back in his chair and shoved his hands into the pockets of the worn tweed jacket he was wearing. “No”, he replied sharply, “and like I said, I prefer to make up my own mind. As far as I know, I have the freedom to think whatever I want, and decide whatever I want, about whatever I want.” He went on, “I just think it’s a bad idea. I’ve done my research. A lot of it. In my opinion, it’s not safe — lots of people have been killed by this damn thing. And who knows what Fauci and his cronies are doing here, really? Do you? I am about half-convinced this is some ‘big reset’ effort or something. I’m just not buying it.”

Amy listened intently, without changing her expression, still leaning forward. She sat back, picked up her coffee cup and took another sip. She looked away for a moment, her lips pulled tense and flat. She then looked back and replied, “You know I teach. So, I obviously believe the ability to think on your own and make up your own mind is important. Really important.”

His face still dark and his hands still shoved into his jacket pockets, Jonathan replied, “that’s right.”

Amy went on, completing her thought, “but I also believe what informs the way you think is important. Opinions are great, but facts and training are different.” She hesitated, “I have a question for you. If you were really sick, would you go to a hospital where the people caring for you weren’t doctors armed with facts — as they are admittedly best understood at that moment in time by virtue of the work of scientists and other doctors — and training, or would you go to one where there were people like you and me — using opinions and things they had researched online to treat you?”

Jonathan laughed, “of course I would go to a hospital with doctors… that’s ridiculous.” He went on — no longer laughing, “okay, I sort of get your point, but that doesn’t change the fact this damn thing is dangerous. Its killing people. Lots of them. Why would someone take that risk? The risk of dying from this goddamn Fauci vaccine is higher than if you get infected!”

Amy pursed her lips, and took a deep breath. “I don’t believe that’s true, Jon. My aunt called me a month ago and asked me whether or not she should take the vaccine, and said something similar. I looked up the statistics on the CDC website so I could give her some advice, and as it turns out, your risk of dying from COVID-19 vaccination is really, really low. About 7000 people have died following vaccination out of hundreds of millions vaccinated, and a lot of those deaths were likely not related to the vaccine, as doctors have to report deaths after vaccination even if they don’t know the vaccine caused it. Based on the number of vaccines delivered, that works out to something like 0.0020 percent chance even if you don’t adjust the number at all for coincidental causes. The average risk of dying of COVID-19 at our age — in our thirties — if we get infected, while low, is at least 100 times higher than from vaccination. This doesn’t even consider what they are now calling that “Long COVID” thing, which evidently can effect about one fourth of everyone who gets infected if they aren’t vaccinated as well. I have a friend who has this — she is incapacitated by headaches and she can’t think straight enough to do her job any more. My guess is you know someone who has this as well.”

He replied quietly, “yeah. I do — two of my employees…”. But what about this ‘messenger RNA’ thing, though… what the hell is that?”, Jonathan implored, “you put that stuff into your body without knowing that it’s doing to you? Some say that it can change your DNA. I mean c’mon, really!?”

Amy quickly responded, “the vast majority of scientists around the world and doctors say that it’s safe, and it doesn’t do anything to your body other than allow it to create an immune response. They say it basically dissolves after it does that work. The WHO, the CDC, all the recognized experts say this. When I asked my own doctor some of these things, he actually laughed.”

Jonathan stared at her, brooding. “First of all, it’s not a laughing matter, and furthermore I don’t believe most of those guys, and certainly don’t believe everything the WHO or CDC says — they’re all more or less run by liberals, or people who have other agendas.”

“That’s obviously your prerogative, but I don’t believe the science they quote is affected by politics, or anyting else for that matter. There are just as many conservative scientists and doctors saying this as those you would call liberal” Amy replied, fighting back her desire to utter a number of other, more divisive responses, “there are admittedly some doctors that disagree, but it seems a lot of those are either not really doctors, aren’t trained in the area of infectious disease or epidemiology, or at times… just may be a little crazy.”

“Maybe, but I’ll tell you what I think is crazy… As it turns out, none of this really matters, because even if I did believe you — the shots don’t work anyway,” Jonathan mumbled looking down at his lap, purposefully loud enough for Amy to hear. He then looked up, shaking his head, “vaccinated people are getting infected, so what’s the point? Since that’s true, there’s no point for any of this nonsense.”

Amy took in another deep breath, and replied, “you remember my brother Paul went to medical school, right? He’s a pediatrician in Omaha.”

“Yeah”, Jonathan replied, “but that doesn’t make you a doctor, or him an expert on anything.”

“Right,” she said, “but pediatricians give a lot of vaccines. When the first breakthrough infections were reported, I was panicked. Our mom got chemotherapy two years ago for her breast cancer, and I was super worried about her even though she got in line early to be vaccinated. I called him and he told me she could still get infected, because vaccines are actually not designed to eliminate that risk. They are designed to lower that risk, and lower even more your risk of dying if you do end up being infected. He said we have known this for almost 200 years, and pointed me at some more information from the CDC and other well-known scientific organizations. It looks as if the vaccine lowers your risk of infection alone by something like ten times, and your risk of dying even more than that if you are infected. If you add those two numbers up, then your risk of dying from COVID if you are vaccinated are remote. Haven’t you seen the reports of about 90 percent of patients hospitalized and dying now of the Delta variant are unvaccinated? Do you think all those hospitals are lying?”

Jonathan first glowered, and then surprisingly, chuckled, “whatever… let’s assume ALL of those things are true, even though I certainly don’t believe them. What this all boils down to, actually — and you know it — is freedom. Freedom to do what I and people like me want, freedom to make our own decisions, freedom to decide if our kids have a wear a mask at school, and to decide then whether or not we want to put something into my own bodies. Freedom is what made this country great in the past, and is what underpins not only American democracy — but democracy everywhere. It’s what people yearn for, and it is what a lot of Americans braver than you have died for. You can put up all sorts of questionable scientific information, but this particular point is simply not debatable.” He hesitated for effect, shrugged his shoulders, pointed his finger at Amy’s face and said, “you know it, and you know even if you can argue with the scientific and medical stuff, you just can’t get around this point.”

Amy sat back, seemingly deflated by Jonathan’s comments.

“It’s interesting,” she replied as she looked down at the table, “I am indeed not a doctor, or a scientist, but you know I did get a graduate degree in political science, and my thesis, as it turns out, was based on the concepts of freedom and liberty in early American thought. I actually still teach a course at the local community college on this topic on the weekends — in part to be honest to avoid having go to all of my son’s soccer games,” she laughed. “And for a number of perhaps obvious reasons related to your comments — I’ve been thinking about these things a lot lately.”

Jonathan sat, still leaning back with his arms now crossed, listening — with a slight smirk on his face. “I can’t wait for you to enlighten me then.”

Amy began, now looking up at Jonathan again, “As it turns out, most of us are confused about the concepts of freedom vs. liberty. The founding fathers actually talked a lot about liberty, and how freedom related to it. They are in fact, not the same thing. You can’t actually even have freedom without liberty.”

“Seems to me as if they are the same — they both basically mean freedom to what you believe is right in a free state,” Jonathan said, a twinge of sarcasm in his voice, his arms still crossed.

“Yeah.., I understand,” said Amy, “and a lot of my students say that as well at the beginning of my course, but it is actually a little more nuanced.” She went on, “while the term freedom means ‘the right to act, speak, or think as one wants without restraint’, the term liberty, which the founding fathers talked a lot about, means ‘freedom from arbitrary authority’. They’re not the same, and as it turns out, freedom is obviously then dependent on liberty. There are always restraints on what we can do, but the restraints should make sense.”

“What do you mean?” Jonathan asked.

“It’s actually simple, what we want as Americans, and what the founding fathers really wanted for us was unfettered liberty, not unfettered freedom. They wanted to ensure the ‘authority’ of the government was never arbitrary — meaning the mandates and dictums — those that unavoidably come from governments — needed to be based on reason, and not on personal or political whim. We acquiesce to government authority all the time, especially if we feel it isn’t arbitrary.”

She stopped for a minute and took another sip of coffee, scrunching up her nose at the fact it had now grown cold, “if you drive your car the speed limit, and if you agree to vaccinate your kids for childhood diseases as a condition to enter school each year, or if you agree not to kill your neighbor for no good reason, you are bowing to authority. The thing is, we have agreed the laws and mandates related to these things are reasonable. Absolute freedom? In that situation, you could drive your car any speed you want, refuse to vaccinate your kids and shoot your neighbor in the head if his sprinkler got your grass wet. You can’t avoid mandates and laws — creating them and enforcing them is a part of what governments are supposed to do. What you can and should work very hard to avoid is arbitrary authority, and what we really want rather than absolute freedom — is absolute liberty.”

She hesitated, waiting for Jonathan to respond. When he continued to appear to be listening, she went on, “when Benjamin Franklin said, ‘they who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security”, he used the word liberty on purpose — not freedom. He knew some essential freedoms would always be given up in the name of security. We do it all the time. Society doesn’t work otherwise. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others’. If you drive two hundred miles an hour, send your kids to school with the measles or start shooting up your neighborhood, you are not only blowing past the equal rights of others, you are threatening their lives. And if you are able to walk around infected with a virus because you are exercising your freedom to choose not to try to prevent that with a vaccination or other means — things I have suggested tactfully over the past half hour are actually not arbitrary — that violates my rights and those of my family, and threatens our lives. It also threatens our way of life… the economy.., and if scientists of both parties are right about the fact this virus could mutate into a form that avoids vaccines and also possibly one more deadly and therefore capable of killing off a large percentage of the people in the world — that’s something that threatens our entire civilization.

“Unfettered freedoms always impinge on the freedoms of others, Jon.”

She put the coffee cup back down on the table she had been holding in both of her hands in front of her face, and put her hands palm down on the table, “ I desperately want you and I to live in a country that views liberty as its most cherished ideal, but I do not want to live here with you if you feel you have the right to any freedom you want. It just doesn’t work.”

Jonathan sat silent for several seconds with the sound of utensils banging on ceramic, others conversing in low tones around them in the coffee shop and the sounds of the espresso machine again filling the silence between he and Amy. He then replied, earnestly, “do kids in Arizona actually have to be vaccinated to start school each year? My wife keeps up… with that stuff… not me.”

“Feel free to take the liberty to look it up, Jon” Amy replied.