1/The other day I took a Lyft, and the driver was a Chinese dude. His car was tricked out with electronic signs, and inside was a forest of charger cables. Very cyberpunk. It was awesome...
2/He didn't speak much English. But as he was dropping me off, he gestured around at the sunny weather and said "We need more sunny weather. To get rid of the virus."
3/For a second I thought: "What virus?". And then I realized he meant CORONAVIRUS.
Somehow, to this guy, the virus was ubiquitous and global and omnipresent. It was that scary.
Somehow, to this guy, the virus was ubiquitous and global and omnipresent. It was that scary.
4/And then I thought of all the people in China who must be ten times as scared. Not knowing what information source to trust. Not knowing how much or how little danger they're in.
businessinsider.com/china-informat…
businessinsider.com/china-informat…
5/Not just in Wuhan but throughout the entire country.
6/Too scared to even take the bus.
7/And I thought, who is looking out for all those people? Who is protecting them?
Without a government you can trust, the world is a far more terrifying place.
Without a government you can trust, the world is a far more terrifying place.
8/And of course I can't help thinking of the goddamn tankies, who think that maintaining control over what all those people know is more important than giving them any sort of certainty or control over their lives. And it makes me really mad. 
9/I think many Americans - those of us who don't get harassed by cops, thrown in jail, stopped by the Border Patrol - tend to forget the importance of a government that treats us like human beings instead of objects to be managed and controlled. We take it for granted.
10/For the privileged among us Americans - and that still is the majority of us - our individual freedom and power, our tacit sense of control over our own lives, comes from having a government that, through no fault of its own, has been forced to mostly treat us like people.
11/There is no freedom without good government. Nor will there ever be.
12/But governments don't become good out of benevolence. They only become good because we force them to be. And we've been struggling to make the U.S. government treat its people more like human beings for many decades now.
13/Now, because of the Trump administration, and because of our social divisions and hatreds, our government is becoming less humane. Treating fewer of us like people, and coming down harder on those it excludes from the blessings of full citizenship and inclusion.
14/Looking at the example of China is instructive, because we can't let ourselves become like that. Freedom is incredibly important even in a world of gadgets and memes and video games and distractions.
And in terms of freedom we are headed in the wrong direction.
And in terms of freedom we are headed in the wrong direction.
15/There's really no difference between the concepts of freedom, dignity, and human rights. They're really all just aspects of one thing - a society that treats people like people.
China needs that. And we need more of that.
(end)
China needs that. And we need more of that.
(end)
