The masks reveal no middle ground
The day we could confirm that the middle ground had vanished from America was the day the masks came out. A reasonable person might have thought this would be something we all could agree upon. About 100,000 Americans will be dead of COVID-19 by the time this column is published, but it’s also true that the lockdown that kept that death toll from soaring higher was not sustainable.
We need more people to get back to work. We’d prefer they not get sick. And there is “clear scientific evidence” that wearing a mask helps prevent the spread of COVID-19, as White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said yet again Sunday on Fox News.
The mask is all about lessening the chances of our droplets from reaching others, an easy enough concept to grasp. We’ve been told our entire lives to cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze, and now there’s a lot more riding on what’s coming out of our mouths. This new and sometimes lethal virus has swept the world in a matter of months, and some of those carrying the disease show no symptoms.
So, naturally, Democrats and Republicans, independents and socialists, even some of the syndicated feudalists on the op-ed pages, all agree it makes sense to take simple precautions to protect the people working behind the counters. Right? I mean, these people are literally risking their health at low wages to provide us everything from Pampers to Big Gulps. Can’t we all agree that wearing a cloth mask within the close quarters of a store, and keeping at least 6 feet away from each other as much as we possibly can, is not much to ask?
No.
“Do some research for yourself and see what you find rather than listening to all these so-called experts,” a mask-spurning man from Sheraden emailed me last week after I’d written a column that mentioned mask-wearing as a sign of respect for fellow workers, at minimum.
I replied to his critique by politely suggesting the man do some research himself, to which he responded, “I will be 82 on Saturday and all our so-called dictators can kiss my you know what. I’m going to continue to do what I want to do.”
He sounded almost presidential with his suggestion of an action that cannot be done from 6 feet away.
I’m starting to feel like I’m in a “Twilight Zone” episode, where ignorance gleefully trumps science. That would be “The Old Man in the Cave” from 1963, which I remembered vaguely and just watched again on Netflix.
The story opens in a beatendown little village, with a sad group of hungry people picking over boxes of canned goods. We learn the year is 1974, 10 years after a nuclear war. A man named Goldsmith is soon telling the villagers he’d just talked with “the old man in the cave” who said the canned goods are contaminated and should be destroyed.
In the midst of their despair, a jeep carrying four bedraggled soldiers rumbles up the street. Maj. French, played by James Coburn, says he’s taking over, knocks Mr. Goldsmith to the ground and threatens to hang him if he gives him any trouble. Then Maj. French tells the villagers the canned goods are fine and they should eat up because they’re less likely to die of radioactivity than “from being conned to death.”
Maj. French persuades everyone but Mr. Goldsmith to feast on the canned goods and old bottles of wine. The soldiers haul him back to the cave and he’s forced to open it up so people can see The Old Man.
Spoiler alert: It’s not Dr. Anthony Fauci. It’s a computer the size of a garage door. Maj. French urges the villagers to kill the tyrant, and they beat it like the guys in “Office Space” did the copy machine. “You’re free!” Maj. French tells them, standing atop the wreckage.
In the last scene, Mr. Goldsmith walks through town with everyone else lying dead in the streets. They all died of “faithlessness,” he said.
Nobody is suggesting that will be our final scene, but we have so lost faith in our institutions that even donning a thin mask is too much for a vocal minority to bear. President Donald Trump himself offers decidedly mixed signals. The irony of such so-called populism is that, if we aren’t careful, too many of our fellow Americans will get sick and we’ll be right back where we started. People talk about the “new normal”; part of that is living in a country so divided we can no longer agree on common decency.