Saturday morning started on an up note when a guy who prunes trees for a living and took a biology class 20 years ago told us authoritatively that masks do nothing and that global pandemics are an inescapable hundred-year phenomenon. Any glance out the back window confirmed that the vacationing public agrees with him and is ready to let nature take its course. We face a high barrier in attempting to inspire widespread respect for the disease and for each other.
It's not just vacationers. The local mason who rebuilt the top of the older chimney at my house stated his own belief that H1N1 was worse and that Covid-19 is just like the flu. He is one of many who doubt the seriousness of the current disease, or who embrace the death toll as beneficial culling. It's all blown out of proportion by The Media.
The broadcast media have done their best to carry on the traditions of yellow journalism since the beginning of the Age of Infotainment began in the 1980s. I suppose it really goes back to the 1970s and the rise of morning news programs like Good Morning America. I'm old enough to remember black and white television and newscasters who sat there wearing a gray suit and a black tie and just presented the news. My father would get home from his government job and watch the six o'clock news before supper. It fit the mood of a world constantly on the brink of nuclear destruction. Simpler times. Now everything is elaborately produced and set to dramatic music. Half the people are sucked in by the effects and the other half are dangerously skeptical of absolutely everything they see. This does not produce a functional balance of points of view. It just rips us apart along yet another line of perforation.
Our shop will continue to observe precautions and endure being labeled as foolish cowards. Fine with me. We have a long way to go before we find out who was right. Even if there's a huge death toll, the survivors will still argue about whether that's such a bad thing. That debate has already begun.
Decades ago, in the 1970s, I was considering how I wanted to live in an overpopulated and polluted world. If we all did nothing, catastrophic events would probably take care of the problem. If, instead, we slowed our reproductive rate and simplified our lives a little, we could let less drastic attrition ease the numbers down. We could avoid the need for mass casualties. I didn't want to be one of them, therefore I should not ask anyone else to be one of them. It seems pretty simple.
That's not how it went.
The American experiment is more than just a political exercise to determine whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure. It's a complete submission to the forces of evolution. The complete dissolution of the republic is the natural conclusion of an obsession with personal freedom and the pursuit of pleasure. Some people will want a cohesive and supportive social system. Other people with legally equally valid opinions will want chaos. Opinion covers the whole spectrum between authoritarian monoculture and total disintegration. Mix it all together and see what comes out.
The mask debate makes life more difficult than it already was. Any venture out in public not only involves the basic risks of human contact, but the added risks of emotional reactions inspired by the mask itself. I'm really tired of wearing one, but it still seems like a partial defense. A partial defense is better than no defense. The latest hopeful drug, for instance, only reduces mortality by maybe 20 percent in the patients already sick enough to need respiratory support. That's hardly a magic bullet, but it indicates a possible line of weakness in the virus that researchers can follow further. There's even a story going around that COVID19 is weakening and will die out on its own. Is this information helpful when we have no idea yet why that would be happening and whether purposeful interventions have played any part? Someone who skims the headlines will see only that the already over-hyped disease really is just fading out by itself. Take that stupid mask off! Be a man!
The problem with a disease, especially one with a pretty long incubation period, is that you don't feel anything right away. Food poisoning hits you within hours. Someone sneezes on you and you feel yourself getting a cold within a day or two. A gunshot hits you right away. Same with a punch in the face. We can understand direct cause and effect perils much better than the invisible progression of a microbial invasion. We grow up learning about the dangers of fire, and falling off of things, and having things fall onto us, and drowning, and interpersonal violence. We can connect the dots when we see them. Micro-droplets of breath moisture that may or may not be infected don't seem real enough to excuse a change in behavior.
Summer has brought an increase in customers even as the bike industry remains unable to provide product. This means more people through the doors, and more arguments about the need for precautions. We've seen people come up the walk, look at our sign requiring masks, and walk away again without coming in. We've had the people with the mask under their nose, and even under their chin. We started renting bikes again, and have to recite our list of rules and procedures to everyone who inquires. Then we have to follow those procedures after decades of muscle memory based on the earlier, more casual process we used to follow. All the while, we do our best to give each other space during the long work day. We spend most of the time masked, and will continue to do so. It really cuts into my compulsive snacking, as well as the excessive hydration necessary to keep the kidney stones at bay. My nose is getting mashed down. And that's just in the sympathetic environment of the shop. I'm really tired of it, but that's not a good reason to give up.
2 comments:
I feel you. =)
Though I'm in my late 60s, my health is robust and I don't lay awake at night worrying about what my outcome might be should I contract covid-19. However, I continue to wear a mask at all times when I am around others because of the genuine threat that I could pose to them if I were to be unwittingly contagious. I don't consider it my place to second-guess scientists and medical professionals who advise that wearing a mask provides a real reduction of the risk of transmission (even if the exact calculation of that reduction could be debated).
Too bad so many people interpret mask-wearing as an affront to their personal independence, rather than an inconvenient but logical mitigation strategy. Was the level of divisiveness we see in our society related to this pandemic present during historical public health crises? Somehow, I doubt it.
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