Well, we’ve finally reached the exciting day known as Super Tuesday. Today’s results will likely mean a boost for some and the end of the road for other presidential candidates. As I filled out my own ballot last Sunday, I couldn’t help but notice the large number of candidates listed on the Democratic side who were no longer actually running. That list will grow shorter tomorrow. 

Now, if you are reading these words after Tuesday, you know what actually happened, and so just let me say congratulations to ­­­­________ on his/her victory, I knew it all the time.

And with the passage of Super Tuesday, we in Colorado can finally know that our voices have been heard, our choices have been made, and far more importantly, we’ll stop getting Bloomberg mailers in our mailboxes every other day. And perhaps far more importantly, we here in the Centennial state can get back to focusing on more state and locally focused issues. OK, I’m kidding, we’ll continue to concentrate on the national election stuff, but as I wrote way back in 2017, state and local politics almost always impacts us more significantly than do national matters.

Regular readers (hi mom!) will recall that I often drone on about how all government is about balancing the need for order (like cops) and liberty. Where necessary, we voluntarily restrict our freedoms for the common good. For example, your “liberty” to drive as you wish is limited by the stop sign up ahead there. We, as a society, agree to such limits on our liberty as a necessary compromise to make society function. We long for unlimited freedom, but we accept that there are limits.

This ongoing balancing act came to mind this week as I read a Colorado Politics story on the cell phone usage bill before the state legislature. Senate Bill 65 won approval in the state Senate and is now on the way to the House for consideration. This bill, if signed into law, would prohibit drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving, other than to report an emergency. If it passes, Colorado will join 20 other states in banning hand-held phone use. Fully 48 states ban texting while driving. 

This type of legislation is the type of law that is sometimes condemned by those on the farther right as being part of the so-called “nanny state,” where the government overreaches in regulating personal behaviors. But in the liberty vs order balancing act, such laws make sense to many. So, everyone OK with this?

Which, of course, brings me to the mumps.

Another story appearing on the pages of Colorado Politics informs us about the mumps outbreak at the Keystone Resort, where over two dozen cases of the mumps have been diagnosed, including 24 resort employees and two guests. As the mumps is the only one of the usual childhood illnesses I escaped growing up in the ’60s – and given its rather dramatic impact on infected adult males – I find that story worrisome. I don’t want to catch the mumps now, so I’m thinking Gov. Polis should create travel restrictions on those in the infected region and, oh, I dunno, maybe burn down the entire resort, just to be safe?

OK, it’s possible I’m overreacting. 

But there are certainly parallels of the mumps outbreak in today’s news, eh? The coronavirus is scaring the heck out of lots of people and is chiefly charged with cratering the stock markets around the world in the last week or so. President Trump hasn’t helped calm things too much, with the misstatements (only 15 people have it) and in blaming the Democrats for some sort of hoax about the virus being real? 

The virus, just as our use of cell phones, again illustrates the challenge of balancing liberty and order in a free society. The draconian methods used in China, where a dictatorship has few if any limits on power, have succeeded to a significant degree: they built hospitals in days, ordered in huge numbers of medical personal, and banned travel. In societies that pride themselves on freedom, such measures are (for better or worse) much more difficult to put in place, even if we wanted to. We’ve tied up a couple of cruise ships, but as long as there is airplane travel, germs will find a way to spread. 

And such measures, be it on phones of pandemics, always bring up the same question: How much freedom will you give up to feel safe? I’m betting most folks are OK with some limits, but if things get worse, where do you draw the line? If you figure it all out, call me, but not, of course, while you are driving.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.