Bob Roegner’s cautious column about lifting mask mandates (Feb. 4) seems intuitively right. I won’t claim to know the hard science behind wearing masks at any given point, but Covid mutates fast and spreads through the population like wildfire, and as of writing almost a million citizens — in two years — have died of it. So, supposing our aim as Americans is to minimize the death-rate of our own people, erring on the side of caution is the best way to go.

But, living a few decades watching hundreds of thousands more Americans kill each other or let die, I’m not sure minimizing the death-rate is much a priority. Besides a million America deaths by Covid in two years, reasons for which are talked about enough, guns aid in the quick and easy homicide and suicide of around 43,000 citizens a year, more than bad driving. There have also been more domestic gun-related deaths than soldiers killed in all our wars since 1775, and the number goes up by tens of thousands every year.

A few thousand more than that die each year because of lack of healthcare: around 26,000. We’ve all debated that enough, we’ve debated every issue enough, and will keep debating them until the rest of us die, too.

Having just turned thirty, I’ve had a midlife crisis about the dead Americans who always seem to pile up in our country. And it seems to me that, in our pursuit of whoever we are as a people, if we are a people in any meaningful way, that American lives are extremely cheap and disposable. For an American to be as free as they can be, by not wearing a mask or not getting the vaccine or owning a hundred guns that on a bad day our kids can get into, or any tragedy we make highly available, in general we don’t really care about American life. So many Americans die every year that only their friends and families could ever remember them — unless they become the face of a movement or something. Then suppose Hitler was right, and there’s too many dead Americans all the time for it to be a tragedy, it’s just a tough stat, so things go on and on as if we can’t criticize how, for the good cause, every friend and family we ever had somehow died a little too early. Freedom’s only American if everyone has to die for you to have it.

I’m moving to Iceland.

Ivo Berg

Enumclaw