I’ve seen a massive uptick in posts recently comparing stay-at-home recommendations to the policies of Nazi Germany and Maoist China.

It should go without saying that these comparisons are absurd.

Most of the policies that have happened here in Utah have been strictly recommendations, and we know the Nazis and Maoists never recommended anything. You either followed the law or disappeared.

But it’s 2020 and so it needs to be said that there’s a huge difference between gulags and good advice.

But in a world where President Obama’s tan suit and President Trump’s taco bowl cause controversy, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me or anyone else that something like medical advice would be seen through a partisan lens.

That doesn’t mean it’s not surprising. It just shouldn’t be.

What’s more interesting is that a lot of the naysayers are content to stay at home and share dank memes about their oppression rather than go out and fight.

Sure there have been some protests demanding that we reopen the economy, but even most of those protesters have stayed in their cars or kept 6 feet away from each other while protesting.

If we’re standing on the precipice of America’s Nazi era, these protesters are falling short on resisting the evil forces that are at our doorstep. The Greatest Generation didn’t settle for sharing memes on Facebook groups. They joined the military and/or created underground networks to smuggle Jewish people out of Nazi territory.

Why are our freedom fighters so much lamer?

My theory is that a lot of the protesters really don’t buy their own message.

It’s simple political performance art. If you’re on one side, you have to be angry and pretend like nothing bad is happening. After all, you got to be the alarmist when President Obama was dealing with Ebola.

In reality, many of us choose to buy into conspiracies over what the experts say, because it brings us comfort to think that what’s happening is within our control.

Rather than dealing with the uncertainty of the pandemic, all we have to do is wave signs in front of the capitol for a few hours, share memes and suddenly the economy will go back to normal and no one will die except those who we couldn’t have saved anyways.

As Bill O’Reilly said, they were on their last leg anyway.

The alternative to blaming the other party for Nazi-level policy decisions requires large spending bills, a lot of temporary discomfort and uncertainty, and future protective measures that we would otherwise be against had we not gone through this experience already.

And that’s a much harder pill to swallow.

And a lot of us don’t want to swallow it.

I’ve seen our response to COVID-19 compared to being part of a group project in middle school.

Some people will put in a lot of effort, some people will put in some effort, and others will put in no effort at all, but we’re all going to get the same grade when the project is due.

Like most things, this analogy is overly simple, but it’s still accurate enough for my purposes today.

Humans are social creatures who live together and depend on one another for what we need to survive. What we can’t provide for ourselves, we pay others to provide for us or we learn how to do without.

If enough of us are harmed for one reason or another, it has a ripple effect on all of us.

So how do we lessen the ripples?

It’s not a question about getting everyone participating in prevention matters equally in the pandemic project. That never worked out for school projects, and it’s not about to work out now.

There always will be people who can’t help with the project because of a family emergency or, in the pandemic’s case, essential workers or those who don’t have the luxury to work from home. And there also will always be freeloaders who trust that your desire to pass is greater than their desire to do nothing.

Managing the health crisis and continuing a successful trajectory means we have to deal with reality on reality’s terms and accept that there’s always going to be people who cannot or will not participate.

Lessening the ripples is more a matter of getting enough people to do what’s necessary so that we can all get a passing grade.

It means patronizing local businesses when possible, willingly giving your excess to friends, family and neighbors who don’t have enough, refusing the temptation to hoard, staying home when possible, listening to medical experts, washing your hands and encouraging those in your social circles to do the same.

We have the opportunity to choose how we collectively make decisions as a country.

Are we going to trust in partisan conspiracies that give our enemy a false face or are we going to embrace uncertainty, take care of the whole, and trust in expert opinions when necessary?

The decision is ours to make, and although we may not individually deserve the consequences of that choice, we will collectively deserve it.