Family sad, but relieved to have answers to missing cousins
Posted Mar 22, 2020 2:11 AM
RAPID CITY, S.D. (Rapid City Journal) — Family members of two cousins found dead on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation say they’re saddened, yet relieved to how what happened to the men more than two months after they went missing near Manderson.
Robert "RJ" Kills Enemy Jr. and Vincent "Stevie" Little Dog were last seen Dec. 27. Their bodies were found last Friday and on Monday.
Kills Enemy's mother and Little Dog's aunt, Willene Kills Enemy, says it's a sad time for the family, but there is relief in knowing they have been found.
The Rapid City Journal reports the Oglala Lakota County Sheriff’s Office, tribal agencies, and many volunteers searched for the cousins.
Authorities have not said how the men may have died.
Lata Nott is chief content officer of the Freedom Forum.
In times of crisis, safety and freedom may seem like they’re at odds
with each other. A society that respects individual liberty can’t
implement the same kinds of drastic laws and policies that a more
authoritarian one can.
This puts more of an onus on citizens of a democracy to make
responsible choices. As we face a virus that we can easily pass on
without realizing it, that may not cause any symptoms in those who are
young and healthy but is potentially deadly to the elderly and those
with preexisting conditions, we need to keep in mind that our
independent media and civil society can be assets in this fight, as long
as we balance our personal freedoms with care and compassion for each
other.
As I write this column, 7,038 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the United States.
The highly contagious nature of the virus has led Ohio to postpone its
presidential primary, Washington and Maryland to shut down all
restaurants and bars (except for delivery and takeout) and California to
call for all people 65 and older to shelter inside their homes. More
than 30 states have closed their schools. On Sunday, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention recommended that no gatherings of 50
people or more be held in the U.S. for the next eight weeks. On Monday,
it amended that warning to apply to gatherings of more than 10 people.
I’m certain that by the time you read this, there will be more cases of
COVID-19, as well as more shutdowns, both voluntary and mandated by
state and local officials.
All of this was unimaginable last week. Just last month, the
coronavirus seemed like a rather distant problem, even though the
first confirmed case in the U.S. occurred in late January. We had
several weeks to observe China’s handling of COVID-19 and at first, a
lot of our conversations had a tone of reluctant admiration for
how swiftly an authoritarian government could act in the face of an
outbreak. In a matter of days, the Chinese government had quarantined
entire cities, suspended travel, closed schools and businesses and built
two new specialized hospitals. What democracy could match that?
It didn’t take long for the truth to come to light. Not that the
Chinese government had been censoring information and violating civil
liberties — that was sort of a given — but that censoring information
and violating civil liberties actually made the outbreak worse. China’s
suppression of news about the outbreak prevented health care
practitioners and individuals from being able to take appropriate
precautions and hindered officials from being able to coordinate a
response. As this personal essay
from an anonymous resident of Wuhan put it, “Before this coronavirus, I
always thought it was OK to sacrifice some level of democracy and
freedom for better living conditions. But now I have changed my
attitude. Without democracy and freedom, the truth of the outbreak in
Wuhan would never be known.”
Of course, now that it’s our turn to deal with the virus, it’s hard
to argue that we’re doing much better. For weeks, the Trump
administration downplayed the severity of the situation, contradicting
public health experts and news media reports and delaying containment
and mitigation efforts. According to The Washington Post,
early problems with manufacturing coronavirus tests, “along with an
initial decision to test only a narrow set of people and delays in
expanding testing to other labs, gave the virus a head start to spread
undetected — and helped perpetuate a false sense of security that leaves
the United States dangerously behind.” Officials in China are reportedly watching our mishandling of the outbreak
with a “mix of shock and pleasure. They find it hard to believe that
the world’s top superpower might be bungling its response to the virus,
even after having had weeks to prepare for its possible arrival.”
As the national security law blog Lawfare has pointed out,
many observers are using the coronavirus as a proxy war for democracies
versus authoritarian systems. This is, of course, an
oversimplification, but it does highlight an important truth — civil
liberties do have an impact on how governments deal with crises. Our
freedoms of press and speech ensure the free flow of information, but
they also allow misinformation to spread. And while South Korea, a
fellow democracy but one with less regard for civil liberties, was able
to curtail its COVID-19 outbreak by forcibly shutting down a series of
churches where the virus initially spread, it’s hard to imagine an
American government official doing the same. Such an action, “might
register to many Americans as an egregious violation of basic First
Amendment instincts regarding the freedom of religion, right to assemble
and separation of church and state.”
Our state, city and federal officials do have the power to place people in isolation or quarantine, but that power is tempered by the Constitution
(the government cannot confine people arbitrarily and without adequate
explanation) and by the norms of our society (the impact on liberty
means that these are considered measures of last resort). Officials in
the U.S. are more likely to recommend that people voluntarily practice
social distancing. And even when they do make some aspects of this
behavior compulsory, these policies aren’t nearly as draconian as they
would be in an authoritarian system. When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine
ordered bars, restaurants and recreation centers closed, he added, “we
hope that Ohioans will follow this advice. Just as with every other law
or rule, you can’t enforce it every time.” Compare this to language a Chinese party committee used to discourage citizens from hiding infections:
“Whoever deliberately delays or conceals reporting for the sake of
their own interests will be forever nailed to history’s pillar of
shame.”
Our democratic approach means that we run the risk of our citizens not taking the warnings seriously. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie
observed on Monday that, “There are still too many Americans going out
to restaurants, bars and other public areas as if this is business as
usual.” In a way, this is the cost of our freedoms. We’ve been advised,
whether we are healthy or ill, to practice social distancing,
by minimizing contact with other people, limiting nonessential travel,
working from home and avoiding gatherings. But for most of us, this
isn’t a mandate. Instead, it’s a choice we make — every time we cancel
plans, stay in our homes and forego human contact for another day. These
decisions might not make much of a difference to your personal health
and safety, but can have an outsized impact on the health and safety of
others. As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins,
has said, “I think we as a nation have to get into a place of not just
thinking about ourselves, but thinking about everybody else around us,
and particularly the most vulnerable people — those who are older and
those people with chronic diseases. Young people may have a relatively
low risk of serious illness, kids seem to have a very low risk, but if
you want to avoid what could be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
people, then it is incumbent on all of us to severely limit our social
interactions. We need to ask the question about every interaction we
have and whether it is necessary or not.”
It can be quite daunting to realize that flattening the curve
— slowing the rate of new infections in order to buy researchers more
time to develop vaccines and give hospitals some respite — is a
responsibility that falls on all of us as individuals. But the thing
about democracies is that they’re fundamentally optimistic about human
nature. We give people civil liberties, knowing full well that some will
abuse those rights, because we expect that, on the whole, most will use
them wisely. We protect heinous speech, false information and pointless
assembly from government crackdowns because we don’t want to risk
infringing on valuable speech, information and assembly — and with that
there is an inherent assumption that it’s worth it, that the good
outweighs the bad.
There is no requirement that you exercise your freedoms responsibly,
but the fact that you have them reflects the underlying belief that you
will.
Lata Nott is chief content officer of the Freedom Forum. Contact her via email at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @LataNott.
