The technocrats are talking about giving people a chip - once they've been vaccinated for the CCP virus, or otherwise proven their immunity and state of non-contagion - so that anyone with the right scanner can easily see that interacting with them is “safe.”

Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it?

But think about it. Even if you don't care about personal freedom, don't respect concerns for societal liberty. Just think about this a moment.

The CCP virus is just the flavor of the month. It's the terrible risk of 2020, the big thing this year.  In past years, we have been scared of H1N1, Ebola, SARS, all of which have killed tens of thousands of people. This is hardly the first such epidemic to hit humanity.   The list goes on and on.

So… what about next year?

There's a seasonal flu every year, and some years, it's especially bad (sometimes arguably worse than this one)... Over a 20 year period, there might be five such really bad flus. Should we agree to a chip for all of them? Or only for certain ones? This year’s virus hits the overweight and the very old worst of all.  Maybe the next one will hit the young and the skinny worst. Maybe one will hit the asthmatics worst. There's ALWAYS someone to protect from these things, and our concern for these innocent victims is laudable.

Then people will ask:  Should we have a chip every year, and 300 million tests, every year, just to be safe? You know what they say - "if it saves just one life," right?

But we don’t just have to fear seasonal flus.  How about all those other contagious illnesses?  Tuberculosis, leprosy, plague, smallpox, Ebola…  The U.S. hasn't had to worry about many of these for a long time, but with open borders and unlimited intercontinental travel, the once-eradicated diseases of old are back, sometimes with a vengeance.

We could virtually eliminate most such risks by closing the borders to illegal immigrants from the third world, but that's apparently not acceptable anymore, so we need to spend billions enabling our health care system to handle long-beaten diseases that we now import, wholesale, from the same places we import our macramé bracelets and hand-dyed T-shirts.

If we authorize a chip for the illness in today’s news, you can be sure there will be clamoring to add chips for yesterday's illnesses too, not to mention tomorrow's illnesses, whenever they arrive on the scene.

Is this the new normal?  To have shutdowns every single time, until the 300 million tests and chips are distributed?  It will spawn a great boom in the electronics industry, as not just health care workers but everybody else too will want to buy the latest scanners, so they can check their coworkers, their families, their friends, their teammates… their dates...

Oh my.

Their dates.

Forty years ago, the brilliant sketch comedy film, "Amazon Women on the Moon," included a now-classic Peter Horton sketch in which Rosanna Arquette feeds her blind date’s credit card into a computer, and prints out Steve Guttenberg's entire, embarrassing, dating history.

That scene was played for laughs, but think of what it means in the era of chips and scanners. If we do this, can we leave out herpes, syphilis, chlamydia and AIDS?

Before we get too tempted by these possibilities – Doesn’t that sound wonderful? - consider what benefits there are for society in knowing there are risks in the community, and staying on one’s guard specifically because we don’t know who has what, too soon in a relationship.

The risk of infectious disease is just one of many fears that motivate an intelligent nation to keep secure borders. It’s not the only risk. Every time you reduce one risk, you make it easier for the open borders crowd to hide the other risks, and to convince the public that inviting in millions more non-American jobless, millions more than we can possibly assimilate, is somehow "safe" now, “because now we can tell if they have TB, so they don’t pose any danger ” – as if that was the only danger of doubling our population with people who know nothing of the system our Founders designed.

The risk of infectious disease, also, is just one of the many things that has traditionally dissuaded most singles from promiscuity. It's not the only one, but it's a big one. If a $30 scanner now says "he or she doesn't have anything I can catch," that single girl has one less helpful barrier to potentially prevent her from the worst mistake of her life… or that married man has one less barrier to prevent him from ruining his marriage by cheating with a coworker or hiring a prostitute.

Finally, who’s to be in charge of deciding which illnesses are tested, vaccinated, and chipped?  Which ones rise to this level, and which ones don’t?  And once the chips are accepted, how will our nation’s technocrats resist including other information in them as well?

The risk of putting too much information in the hands of government used to be well-understood by Americans, but this risk appears to have been forgotten, with the philosophy of our Founding Fathers going untaught for generations.

In the end, we will need to admit to ourselves that - as wonderful as technology is - we simply can't expect it to solve all our problems for us.

The more we rely on such technology, the more we risk new dangers, like making a clean scan a barrier to entry, so that only those who have consented to be chipped are trusted.  

If you've refused your chip, you must be either diseased or otherwise undesirable, an Enemy of the People, who must be cast out from polite society, from employment, from community.

We want to think this is a leap. We desperately want to tell ourselves that the slippery slope argument is just fear-mongering, that it would never get that bad, not here, not in America.

But in recent weeks, we have seen mayors ban gun sales, in blatant defiance of the Second Amendment. We have seen governors ban church services, in blatant defiance of the First Amendment. We have seen manufacturing brought a standstill in state after state. We have seen police ticketing married couples just for walking together on the sidewalk, and taking down license plates of cars parked at a drive-through church service.

If these past few weeks have proven anything at all, is that we can risk no further erosion of our liberty, because too many of these petty bureaucrats hold too much power... and because too many of them are far too quick to follow the lead of Rahm Emanuel - Chicago's former mayor, and Barack Obama's former chief of staff - who enunciated the modern statist approach so proudly and so succinctly:

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor.  His weekly column is found in Illinois Review.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of Pixabay public domain images