Choosing the Hill That You Will Die On

Life is perpetually full of conflict. It can be simple conflict like the guy in the car in front of you cutting you off or complex conflict like coming to a cross road in your moral decision making. The first is fleeting, the second can be torturous.

I was nineteen when the 15 year old brother of a friend of mine came to me with a secret. The “secret” was that his 13 year old brother was being molested by a family friend. I understood what he was doing, he was telling me so that I might tell his mother because he didn’t have the courage to be the one to deliver the message.

This information created massive internal conflict for me. I knew what I had to do, but hated being the one to deliver such awful news. I thought about how to say what needed to be said. I practiced what I would say and what my demeanor should be when I did say it. I finally decided we should be in a public place when I delivered the information. So I called her up and invited her to lunch. I look back on that now and realize it was an incredibly mature way for a nineteen year old to approach a terrible topic in a calm and careful manner.

I did tell her, slowly and quietly. She stared at me for a long time and then said “I felt something wasn’t right.” I believe in that moment my relationship with her forever changed. I felt that I would never again be quite as close to her or the family. And over the years that proved true.

Maybe it’s the Covid that’s instigating a slow but building wave of resistance to other occurrences in our society; creating conflict in nearly every part of our lives. In news story after news story, I’m seeing new found resistance to the notion that we are all just cogs in the wheel. I see people, who not might otherwise behave badly, berate their fellow citizens in public for not masking.

We’ve all seen the parents at the school board meetings calling out a district’s policies, not just on Covid protocols but everything from gender shared locker rooms to social studies and sex education curriculum. These parents and other community members, to include teachers and principals, know when they speak up they face public criticism and even “doxing” or potential loss of their jobs. Social media has made the last two things exceptionally easy to participate in as you can do it on a wide scale and not just mouth to mouth.

I saw a woman’s work place posted after she opposed Black Lives Matter curriculum. That company name and address posting was accompanied by a call to have people contact her boss and demand she be fired.

A woman in my county ran for school board and she was painted as a racist. Further, her children were harassed at school. While she had lived her entire life in this county, it all proved too much so she sold her home and moved her family to Florida. Her opponents achieved their goal of running her out of town on a rail.

A local teacher released a curriculum on Critical Race Theory to a group that she knew would be in opposition, in hopes the parents could shut it down. When I asked if she were willing to speak anonymously to a national reporter, she declined for fear she’d be identified and lose her job.

I just heard an exchange between a talk show host and an activist parent in which the host said the parent should pull his kids out of varsity sports in protest to their having to wear a mask during practice. The parent said “I can’t do that.” The host said “You should have the courage to do that.” The parent said “I’m not going to do that, my son lives for football season.”

I have a friend who works for the federal government and is opposed to the vaccine mandate, on personal and religious grounds. I just spent the past week trying to find him assistance for his resistance, and every stalwart organization for religious liberty that I counted on seems just fine with the blanket mandate, even one I proudly worked for in the past.

Restaurant and bar workers have now been federalized as “Covid Deputies.” Truly given police powers to determine if a patron can eat or drink in an establishment. Flight attendants have been instructed to enforce mask wearing for two year olds.

Landlords have been forced to house people without compensation for nearly two years, but no one thought to exempt these landlords from their mortgage obligation, so at least the banks got paid.

Grocery clerks have been forced to break up arguments between the maskers and the unmasked. Kids have been sent home from school for ten to fourteen days because someone in their class had the sniffles that morning. Churches, Synagogues and Temples in certain states are being restricted once again in their worship services, meanwhile NFL teams are playing to full stadiums.

The Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49’ers game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia had around 69,000 fans packed in shoulder to shoulder on September 19th, meanwhile try to get into a bar in Manhattan without your vaccine passport.

Much of these policies are being decided on a state-by-state or even city by city basis with little rhyme or reason to explain the discrepancies. But the greatest slap in the face of Lady Liberty and her citizens is while all of these restrictive policies are being once again imposed, we will end 2021 with over two million unvaccinated illegal aliens crossing our Southern Border, getting tested at a rate of around 20% positive for Covid and then being bussed or flown all over the country.

With all these inputs of constitutional and civil rights violations, we need to ask ourselves at what point do we choose the hill that we are willing to die on? And while I use that phrase figuratively, there’s a knot in my stomach that asks at what point does it become literal? Do we end up in a situation of such extreme internal conflict so great that we have to act even though it is disdainful or even painful to do so?

Some have come to that crossroads recently. A hospital in Northern New York state announced they will no longer be able to deliver babies due to one third of its maternity ward staff walking off the job because of the vaccine mandate. Teachers are quitting and school districts have a shortage of bus drivers due to drivers quitting and a reluctance of new drivers to take their place. A large “anti-forced vaccine” protest just happened in Time Square with attendants chanting “F-Joe Biden.”

There are so many grievances to be aired, most of which are about personal liberty and sovereignty, the choice of “hills” is growing every day.

Which “hill” will you claim as your own?