Usually the first home game of the football season is something to celebrate.

Fans get decked out in home colors and face paint, stadium parking lots transform from oleaginous wastelands into social epicenters, and the air is invigorated with the smell of barbeque and the collective hope that this is the beginning of something good. It’s the kind of mindless fun that’s also an essential human experience.

This was the atmosphere at schools like Virginia Tech and the University of Wisconsin-Madison last weekend. Clips of packed stadiums at both campuses went viral, providing jarring contrasts to the University of Hawaii’s first home game of the season.

While thousands of Hokie fans in Lane Stadium erupted off to never-never land and a sea of Badger fans turned Camp Randall Stadium into a massive House of Pain, the Rainbow Warriors were cheered by artificial crowd noise at Ching Field in front of a few dozen media members.

Different states and institutions have different policies, but that’s not the only reason why there were packed houses on the mainland and empty bleachers on Oahu. A few miles down the road from the UH game, a “medical freedom” rally was unfolding in Waikiki, attended by people fighting for their right to spread an infectious disease. It’s a bizarre and dispiriting hill to die on, often literally.

In fairness, seeing all those fans packed like unmasked sardines in football stadiums made me feel a little uneasy, like I was watching a super-spreader event in real time. On the other hand, 91% of Wisconsin students and 95% of Virginia Tech students are vaccinated. This is a noteworthy example of the relationship between freedom and responsibility: Do the right things and you get to enjoy the nice things.

There is an important discussion to be had about whether huge crowds are safe and responsible regardless of vaccination rate, but these discussions aren’t new. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve constantly tried to negotiate between best medical practices and resuming some sort of normal functioning society.

When we were able to dine in restaurants again, a lot of people ridiculed the idea that you had to wear a mask while you were waiting to be served, since you could take it off once you were seated. For people unwilling to think at a level more sophisticated than a Facebook meme, this was a devastating gotcha. For everyone else it was an obvious and reasonable compromise: if we all do a few small, responsible things to help prevent the spread of a deadly virus, then we can all enjoy some of the pre-pandemic freedoms we took for granted.

The same logic applies here. If we all choose to get a free, easy-to-access vaccine that has been administered more than 5 billion times across the globe without any catastrophic fallout, we can do things like watch the Rainbow Warriors almost blow a four-touchdown lead against an overmatched opposing team.

What’s standing in the way is the “medical freedom” crowd who claim to be skeptics and critical thinkers while eagerly swallowing bogus information from social media; it’s amazing how all the “freethinkers” somehow say the exact same things and arrive at the exact same conclusions as all the YouTube videos they watch.

These are the same people who shriek the loudest about any and every precautionary measure, be it wearing masks or maintaining distance in grocery store checkout lines. It evokes all the nobility and sagacity of a toddler complaining about having to eat vegetables before they get their ice cream.

The irony is frustrating for the majority of Hawaii’s residents: the same people who claim to value freedom more than anything else are the very ones slowing down the process of returning to a normal life.

Though my frustration often clouds my empathy, I do genuinely understand why people are fed up with pandemic life. The last 18 months have felt like 18 years, and I want nothing more than to be able to share in the heartbreaking, hopeful, frivolous foolishness of being a Rainbow Warrior football fan.

But the way we get there is to address our challenges directly, not bury our heads in the sand. Specifically, that means getting vaccinated, requiring tourists to be vaccinated — if you need to be vaccinated to live a normal life in Hawaii, you should also need to be vaccinated to simply visit Hawaii — and continuing to do the small, daily steps that keep ourselves and each other safe.

It’s easy to hold a rally and pretend that you’re the victim. It relieves you from responsibility and gives you a constant target at which to point your finger — “Ige! Blangiardi! Biden!” It’s much harder, messier work to recognize yourself as part of the problem, and take steps to change.