The Good Mandate

The Bible is clear.  We are to love our neighbors as ourselves. Is the political fall-out of the mask mandate across the nation and even here in Big Horn County now morphing into a vaccination mandate? Is there a godly way to national recovery from covid-19? What mandate helped us past the carnage of unregulated car travel on primitive dirt roadways in the 30’s?

 

Our governor has pushed a bill forbidding Montana colleges, business places, county governments, and other facilities to set vaccination mandates for public access. Meantime, President Biden and mostly Democratic supporters are promoting the opposite. They say we can only achieve herd immunity with a national covid vaccination mandate. Should local public enterprises and service agencies be allowed to require vaccination evidence for access to their facilities? Our governor says no. Is that a good mandate?

 

It’s a good time to mull over another nation-wide mandate mounting up over the past four generations. I remember my father’s story from the time car travel was totally unregulated.  

 

It was a sunny noon midsummer, 1937. Sunday dinner came at noon after church, and my father-to-be was with family outside under a shade tree. Suddenly a strong distant explosion intervened. They quickly determined the source. It turned out two Burlington Route trains suffered a horrific collision, nearly four miles away. All three of his brothers and two cousins piled into their model-A Roadster and struck out full bore on the dirt road toward the sound they had heard.  Soon the ambulane sirens in the distance confirmed their vector, and the main road–equivalent to a ranch trail here–was crowded with then-new vintage cars in a traffic jam. The wildest of the reckless cousins, Melbourne, at the wheel, pulled out to pass a line of jammed cars.  Weeds hid a washout. The speed factor colluded. The left front wheel dropped, stopped instantly, and the rest flipped a cartwheel. Everyone was airborne. Miraculously, all flew clear of the car. My father-to-be, previously piled on top 3-deep in the rumble seat, flew farthest away into deep grass.  Others landed on rocks. He was the only one not bleeding, and all survived though badly battered.

 

The next day, Monday, was road grading day. My father-to-be hitched his team to the farm road grader for family-assigned road maintenance. It was a routine. Undiagnosed then was a cracked skull and internal bleeding. His unconscious body returned slumped in the grader seat behind the patient team of horse, dragging their reigns, still hitched to the grader. He was rushed to the hospital.

 

He spent fourteen days mostly unconscious before he began to revive. But his mind was changed. His fiancée soon realized he was not the person she had decided to marry, and soon broke off the engagement. Two years later he met and married my mother.

 

Most important, my father-to-be survived a nation-wide scourge of traffic deaths, leading to useful mandates for car travel now in place for generations.  Unnecessary lives had been lost on our primitive roads then.  But we the people, all of us, through access we have in our constitution, intervened. We did so via the federal government intervention, then community health in local locations all across our nation. It saved many lives. It does so to this day,

 

Let’s demand our governor learn the history of one kind community health mandate now in place for generations. We have these freedoms because our federal government, acting on our behalf, supported states and local governments to mandate transparency, regulations, and our respect for our neighbors’ very lives.  Our Helena officials have no business legislating mandates against local community health mandates, especially the well-researched, evidence-based practices our federal agencies have recommended. That’s how our nation did it, for generations, with our Montana state and county highway and traffic laws. Now, with covid regulations and mandates about as primitive as car travel mandates then, we have work to do. Our governor should join with us the citizens of Montana supporting the good of all of us. This means community health mandates and regulations not unlike our regulated rights to drive cars.

 

A Pew poll last week found 48% of conservative white Christians consider community health effects “a lot” when deciding whether to get covid vaccine. In contrast, 65% of Catholics, 68% of unaffiliated Americans, and 70% of Black Protestants cited community health first. I hope we in Southern Montana are better aligned with Jesus’ mandate to our neighbor in his “Greatest Commandment.”