New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)

Wearing masks reveals true identities

- COLIN MCENROE Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenr­oe. is

It’s not about politics. But Democrats are bad. Among the many maxims of old friend Peter Shapiro: “When they say it’s not about the money, that means it’s about the money.” The same goes for politics.

Hello.

My name is Colin. I’m 65. I hold a bachelor’s degree.

My most recent appearance inside a building that was not my home was March 16, unless you count my visit, a week ago, to an oil change place where you sit inside your car in a garage bay. I wore gloves and a mask, kept my window up when it was possible, and maintained a mindset that probably would have been more appropriat­e for a visit to the Island of Feverish Monkeys.

I walk my dog in the deep woods whenever possible. I’m trying to avoid you.

I used to live and die with the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox and the Green Bay Packers, but I can’t imagine caring about them now.

My heroes now are doctors, nurses, hospital workers, mail carriers, grocery store employees, delivery drivers, volunteers in vaccine research. I’ve become obsessed with the work of virologist­s, microbiolo­gists, vaccine researcher­s.

My son and I used to meet for lunch every Saturday. Our last visit to a restaurant was March 7.

I am one of the fortunate people whose work has continued largely undisturbe­d. I do five radio shows a week: four of my own show plus “The Wheelhouse,” a political roundtable. I write this weekly column and a newsletter.

I get very tired, not exactly from the work, but from doing the work with this strange new pulse in the background, a twostroke engine fueled by anxiety, weirdness and the anger in the air.

I’m telling you all of this (quite possibly boring) stuff, so you will know who I am.

I live very near the route used by CT Liberty Rally, the people who drive through Hartford honking their horns and demanding to be released from all restrictio­ns.

I am working hard on not hating these people, but they don’t make it easy. (The honking goes on for an hour, minimum.) No matter what they tell you, this is a political movement. They don’t have any rallies that aren’t heavy on Trump/Pence signs and MAGA hats.

A rally-goer named Valerie posted a throughthe-windshield video of her car cruising in last week’s line of ear-splitting horn-honkers as she narrated: “The police are really cooperativ­e. They love Trump. I’m flying my Trump flag out the window, and they love it. They say they love him.”

Another demonstrat­or named Leslie posted on Facebook: “IT’S NOT ABOUT POLITICS ANYMORE FOLKS, IT'S ABOUT SAVING LIVES! ... Every week our numbers are growing at the CT Liberty Rallies (and Rolling Rallies) to show LOSER LAMONT we see that DEMOCRATS are BAD for Connecticu­t.”

Get that? It’s not about politics. But Democrats are bad. Among the many maxims of old friend Peter Shapiro: “When they say it’s not about the money, that means it’s about the money.” The same goes for politics.

It’s worth noting that all of this honking and signwaving took place on Wednesday,

to coincide with the first phase of reopening Connecticu­t. Businesses are coming slowly, gingerly back. From what I could tell, 80 percent of Wednesday’s hollering about tyrants and dictators was connected to salons and barbershop­s and not much else.

Give me highlights or give me death.

Actually, Leslie’s correct. This is about something deeper than politics.

A Gallup/Knight Foundation survey in the third week of April asked about face mask usage. Women were far more likely to always wear a mask in public (44 percent) than men (29 percent). College graduates were vastly more likely to wear masks always or sometimes than people with high school degrees or less.

I took Gallup’s chart and set it up next to a Pew study of validated voters in the 2016 presidenti­al election. The same splits were there. Men voted for Trump in far greater numbers. College-educated people voted for Clinton by large margins.

This week in the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein assembled a bunch of similar data and looked at the two most alienated major groups: college-educated white women and noncollege-educated white men. When the pandemic hit, Brownstein said, each group “retreated to their respective corners.”

OK, one more study. My rummaging this week turned up a 2014 metaanalys­is in the Singapore Medical Journal about the use of face masks during previous 21st century respirator­y epidemics. (This is where my son invariably says: “Dad, most people aren’t like you.”)

Surprising­ly, the authors found the same correlatio­n between education and gender when they looked at face mask use in other countries. So it’s not just us. (My favorite tidbit: Mexico City cabdrivers who wore masks during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak were hailed more often, which seemed to drive more of them to wear masks.)

And yet, it just us. Way back in 1985, the sociologis­t Robert Bellah worried that the American version of individual­ism might become toxic in a way that interfered with our ability to create a morally coherent life together. That has happened. And now we talk past one another. The reason I told you about myself at the beginning is so you would see that my ideology is a product of my identity. My reaction to Valerie and Leslie is that they don’t get it. Their reaction to me is that I want, arrogantly, to impose my values on them.

They’re wrong about the pandemic, but they’re not wrong about me. How are we going to resolve this? Because it’s not just a political difference anymore. It’s a difference about whether we feel safe in each other’s presence.

And while we think about this some more, would you mind standing even farther away from me?

 ?? Mark Lennihan / Associated Press ?? A passenger in a car participat­es in a rally of honking vehicles that pass back and forth in front of the governor’s mansion during the coronaviru­s pandemic, April 20 in Hartford. Her sign reads, “Set Us Free.” The rally, organized by CT Liberty Rally, is asking Gov. Ned Lamont to allow people to make their own decisions when it comes to their health.
Mark Lennihan / Associated Press A passenger in a car participat­es in a rally of honking vehicles that pass back and forth in front of the governor’s mansion during the coronaviru­s pandemic, April 20 in Hartford. Her sign reads, “Set Us Free.” The rally, organized by CT Liberty Rally, is asking Gov. Ned Lamont to allow people to make their own decisions when it comes to their health.
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