My Kingdom for a Mask...

There was an onslaught of anxiety both online and locally out and about. On the rare occasions I ventured out for supplies and to get some solitary air, it was easily observable. People protesting quarantine restrictions. Refusing to wear masks. Bashing store employees for enforcing mandatory mask wear per safety mandates. There were too many captures on phone video of assorted conflicts at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods and Starbucks. Embarrassing stuff for sure.

A famous taco shop in L.A. closed all its locations, citing too many fights over guests’ refusals to wear masks. Some customers across the country went so far as to cough and spit on employees. In Michigan, a security guard was fatally shot after he refused to allow a customer inside a dollar store because she wouldn’t follow the state guidance terms on wearing masks in public.

Why was it that so many reacted so swiftly and decisively to mask mandates from businesses and state governance as an infringement on personal freedoms? There seems to be only one viable sociological explanation after all is said and done…because we weren’t used to it. It wasn’t part of our perceived norm. It was alien. It was different, and different, especially to an entitled white populace, is almost always bad. 

There is a term psychologists use called hot cognition. It’s when a powerful set of emotions completely override calm, rational thought. I probably engage in bouts of lukewarm, hot, and boiling point cognition a few times a day, depending on the news cycles. My heart’s often on my sleeve, out in the open for horseplay of all kinds.

Some of that mask resistance in 2020 was naturally about control, as in people thought they exercised more of it when they chose to use or not use a mask. They were also confused about the inconsistencies of reported mask effectiveness and fell back on standard American backyard relativity; as in, infection hasn’t happened to me or mine yet so I’m not gonna sweat it. The imminent civil liberty threat pervaded.

For most Americans, ‘no’ is a four-letter word. Mask-wearing reminded people of the ensuing recession, and encouraged certain folks to use natural selection rhetoric, essentially writing off the elderly, the infirm, the at-risk or the less fortunate as part of the cost of saving our economy from ruin, which, according to expert Reddit trolls, would result in more loss of life.  Social media became a focal point for rampant bipartisan knife fighting, surely because of the enormity of a mass reality check on our collective mortality.

This was American hubris at its worst.

Of all western cultures, we became the most complacent with our steadfast resolve in thinking we had the right to do or not do whatever we want.

This was not just exaggerated conceit. It was arrogant and dangerously naive.

Having to wear a mask at all times while outside was not oppression.

Being unable to sit inside a Taco Bell dining room was not tyranny.

Resisting state ordered mandates to stay at home to give hospitals and medical staff room and time to treat those afflicted did not make someone a freedom fighter. If one was a born and bred American, they likely knew nothing of living under a true dictatorship. They were not a third world refugee desperately seeking asylum from authoritarian Illuminati agenda trying to usurp their god given right to assembly. Like me, and everyone else here on the North American continent, they were accustomed to fifty years of a civilian status quo and they didn’t want that weekly routine to change.

But things do change.

Simply because we hadn’t had a global event like that in our lifetime, the circumstances didn’t give us an excuse to look for an easy villain, because it was an unknown virus and it didn’t care about politics or business. All we could do is soldier through it, ideally with calm, careful consideration of evidence to date, rather than YouTube armchair jockeying or marinating our mindsets in endless cable news editorial opinion.

It didn’t matter if one believed it wasn’t as severe as the media played it, but what was never supposed to be in contention – presuming one cared about people they didn’t personally know – is that we didn’t get to risk other people’s lives based solely on our best guess. Erring on the side of caution was the only prudent response. We had to give the science the time to figure it out. That’s just how it was.

Yes, it was a new and unsettling thing, having to quarantine, but what else could we do? Ignore it and pretend it wasn’t as bad as the media says? We couldn’t reasonably do that because even if appropriately sourced statistics eventually showed mortality or infection rates lower than initially reported, we still had to exercise restraint just in case there was even a slight chance of it being as bad as medical experts currently claimed, or worse, if Covid-19 mutated and became something deadlier.

That’s American know-how, not sheep behavior. You were not a wolf for bucking a medical directive that protects those most at risk. You were an ass. It was not an infringement of your rights. The elderly and infirm and immune-compromised were, and still are, as deserving of a chance for extended life as you. There is no such thing as a disposable human being. Not them, not you, not me.

Yes, it sucked, our economies taking a dive and lots of people losing their businesses, jobs, and homes. Pound for pound, death is worse than bankruptcy every time. You can refill your bank account, you can rebuild your life if you’re still alive, and even if you didn’t think you’d die from the bug, you didn’t know enough about it to know whether you were carrying it or not, despite whether you’d been tested, because none of us knew for sure yet how long a half-life the virus had, whether it might come roaring back in a few years much as chicken pox does with shingles. If you were disregarding recommended protocols in the name of your chest - beating patriotism, you may well have been complicit in the deaths of other human beings.

You may have thought that losing everything financially was the same as death, that the loss of everything you worked so hard for was the same as the end of your life.

It was not.

You could’ve rebuilt.

Unless you were dead.

Why did anti-maskers believe such a relatively easy measure that literally saved lives was some form of government control set on depriving them of their precious rights to walk around potentially spreading disease?

What was so difficult to comprehend there?

Their rants about constitutional rights seemed shallow because it was likely the last time the average American bothered to read the constitution was when their high school political science teacher forced them to read it. We didn't want to be reminded our mortality was on the line.

Our fear didn't excuse us from being responsible, mature adults who, for the sake of their children and their community, needed to be proactive and not reactive.  All that effort just to enter and patronize public spaces or private businesses mask-less, uncaring about our possible contributions to spreading a virus that killed people, in the time it took to create anti-mask Facebook groups, dozens of meals could’ve been delivered to the unhoused instead.

Now we know it was a damned sight more than the flu. At that time in the spring of 2020, there were 300,000 dead worldwide, and lots more to come. There were generations who had to live through far worse extended conditions than a few months of indoor confinement with Netflix binging and instant ramen.

I didn’t want to be that person.

I didn’t want YOU to be that person.

I listened to the epidemiologists.

Most of all, I listened to the first responders, the nurses, and the physicians. They were the bottom line in all things reality based with Covid-19 and they were the ones who would try to save your media saturated, pontificating ass if you got sick. It wasn’t just about surviving the virus. It was about who we are as a people, as a species, after the virus.

And if we were the kind of society that disregards our most vulnerable in the times when we most need to look out for them, then why did we even bother leaving the jungle in the first place?

Wearing a mask and staying at home was not authoritarianism.

It was wisdom.

Folks needed to resist the urge to politicize it. They needed to resist taking it for granted, and ought to have followed advisory precautions to the letter whenever possible, as once again, let’s reiterate – even if you were asymptomatic, you might have been carrying the bastard bug and its unknown future to someone whose immunity was less efficient than yours. We had to find the communal empathy to care for others, all others, before ourselves. It was, and remains, the only viable way forward. That’s if we want our species to actually survive and prosper beyond our own lifetime.

Do we care?

If we have children, we must.

On that note, I had a long talk with my oldest boy in the onset of the pandemic, back in late May of 2020. He is an ICU nurse at a Kaiser Telemetry Unit in San Diego. His mother and I worried for him. He was proud of his chosen profession, regardless of its risks, which obviously were ramped up to deadly levels at the time. Much as I’d have liked him to quit and come quarantine with me and his mother, he was dedicated to his calling.

This is what he told me then:

“You dread the moment when you’re alone, where everything sinks in, after shift. You gave your best but it wasn’t enough. You start another shift with a Covid patient presenting perfect vitals, but you get that gut feeling that something is wrong anyway. It’s a nurse intuition thing. Starting to titrate everything to max levo, neo, dopa, epi, bicarb, Vaso(sbp 70s map 50s). You have the best doctor on shift, bedside, just as tired as you are. PT already completed, Remdesivir and plasma, the full court press. On a Rotoprone, 100% fio2, peep24. 2 codes. In three hours of your twelve hour stretch, it all happens, and they’re gone, just like that. Everything you did, everything you tried, was for nothing. The patient died. That quick. This one, there was no family that answered your desperate last minute call to them, for a chance to say goodbye. They just didn’t think it’d go that fast. Nobody does. But it did. Catastrophic failure.  There’s my hands, compressing, doing CPR, there’s my hand on the carotid artery checking for a pulse. It’s gone. I was the last human contact for this person. You ask yourself, after nights and nights more of the same, ‘What did I miss?’ Your coworkers say it’s not your fault, the doctors too. It still feels like it was. The helplessness this virus has instilled, it’s crushing. It’s not just my job. Someone near and dear to me is fighting this thing as I speak, in the hospital on oxygen. I can’t escape it, it’s at my work and it’s in my life and it’s awful. Get it straight, pops. We nurses and doctors are not their frontlines anymore. We are their last line of defense. And for some, too many, we’re the last people they’re ever going to see. That’s how this thing is.”

Yeah. That’s how that thing was.

*Compiled from May 21, 2020.