Losing the Mask Debate Was Hard, Living With It Will Be Even Harder
The trick is to avoid feeling persecuted about it
The trick is to avoid feeling persecuted about it
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I had my first mask confrontation recently, which was too bad because I had hoped to never have one. Mask-wearing has become such a tribal thing, we have let it become such a tribal thing, that confronting people over it is pointless.
If I learned anything from interviewing conspiracy-theory believers over the last couple of years, it is that the line between belief and identity has merged for so many people. Too many people.
I had the privilege(?) of growing up in a “mixed” household. My mother supported the Republican Party and my father supported the Democrats. We can make fun of the Boomers all we want, but name another generation since where it’s common for the husband and wife to be polar political opposites.
There certainly wasn’t less at stake, but my generation was likely among the last to see a world where how you voted wasn’t reducible to who you were.
My father was for the working class, my mother was for personal responsibility. Imagine growing up thinking that was the fundamental political difference we had as a country. Better, imagine two people you loved and trusted demonstrating that political affiliation was just a badge some people wore during election season, that a person’s political party didn’t reflect on their intellect or moral standing.
It is something that I haven’t completely unlearned so sometimes the current political landscape is difficult for me to navigate. Even when I don’t want to reduce people to their political beliefs, it feels as if a lot of my fellow citizens demand it.
Persecution politics
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spoken with a lot of hardcore religious people and more than a few conspiracy theory enthusiasts. I’m comfortable in conversations with people whose beliefs are utterly incompatible with mine because I’ve learned to accept that they believe what they say that believe.
I get that some people believe in literal demonic possession and that there are vampires and giants who walk among us, but I’m baffled that people chose the mask issue as their hill to (in some cases, literally) die on.
What’s frustrating is that I know it’s not about masks or freedom even if they don’t and I genuinely can’t find a better way to talk about it. The mask/vax issue has moved beyond mere identity politics to something that we might call persecution politics.
The number of white people I’ve seen screaming to be part of an oppressed minority is devastating. There’s a scramble to find boxes to check that somehow are supposed to counterbalance centuries of privilege.
The opportunity to be able to claim that you’re being persecuted or somehow put upon seems to be the pinnacle of cultural credit. We’re all about our rights being violated, but there are so few people interested in responsibilities fulfilled.
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From that perspective, I try not to be baited. I want to avoid adding to any of these insane feelings of persecution. I don’t want to give them air.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m furious. If I thought being mean would convince people that they weren’t somehow a member of a persecuted minority, I’d try it.
Instead, I just avoid going places where people are. When I can’t avoid it, I behave just as I did in March of 2020: I turn the world into a zombie video game. The object is to avoid the infected without resorting to using weapons.
Resisting tribal behavior
I have some very good friends and some dear family members who somehow ended up on the maskless, vaxless side of things. I don’t avoid them the way I do strangers, which suggests that I’m more tribal than I like to let on. I’m marginally more comfortable now that I’m vaccinated, but there’s always an unnecessary tension as if we each thought the other wasn’t “that kind” of person.
I think about that a lot, how easily anti-mask/anti-vax people who are strangers to me slide into the “those kinds of people” category, while people close to me bring confusion rather than anger. I have to reiterate here that I have a deep and abiding anger that will not go away.
I didn’t see my family for a year. I didn’t get to touch my grandson for nearly that long. I feel like “they” will say it was because of my cowardice, or because I’m a slave to herd mentality.
People who know me understand that isn’t true. More important, I know that isn’t true.
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A lot of us lost a year or a loved one when some of our friends, family, and neighbors decided they would rather exercise their right to be ignorant than to participate in the most critical call to national action since WWII.
I seethe and live in terror of giving that seething room to expand or explode. I am prone to rage rants and don’t want or need to have a public one, so avoiding people makes the most sense, especially since I happen to have that luxury.
When someone holds open a door for me, I’ll slow down and wave them ahead. Door-holding is as dead as indoor dining for me. Politely avoiding the Infected usually works, but, as I said, recently I met my match.
An Unfortunate Confrontation
She was a thin woman in her late 60s, dressed in all-black athleisure with bony shoulders and a minor stoop. She was ahead of me at the liquor store and I watched with the line-patience I always hope people will grant me in my dotage.
It doesn’t make sense to say she was caught off guard when the cashier asked her to pay, but she did look down at her purse for a second to study it, as if she forgot it was there or what it was for. Then she hunted for her wallet. Then she counted out the cash (I feel like it was $40 in $20s), handed it over, and replaced her wallet.
Then she got change and reopened her purse and re-removed her wallet. Realizing there was a line behind her, she shuffled to the side to put her change back in what I can only assume was both alphabetical and numerical order. She looked over her shoulder to me and said, “You can go ahead.”
“Time is my ally,” I told her. “No rush.”
She shrugged and went back to doing whatever it was she was doing with her bag. After another probably 45 seconds, she looked back at me again.
“Really, it’s OK if you go.”
“Seriously, ma’am, take your time. It’s just booze.”
I was running out of stock dodges and she seemed nowhere near ready to give up on whatever project she had started in her purse.
She turned around one more time, “Please, go ahead.”
I thought of all the missed birthday parties, the missed funerals, the missed vacations, the missed year of my grandson’s life, and genuinely worried that I was going to blow.
The only thing that saved me was my commitment to being better than her, to being better than all of the yahoos out there screaming at one another because they’re angry and powerless. I think of them as wounded animals, unable to grasp why they’re suffering but howling about their suffering nonetheless.
I tried to remember that there doesn’t seem to be a way back from that headspace. Once you bathe in the comfort of unfair persecution it takes hold of you and dominates your life. It’s a moral infection that chips away at your empathy. You become addicted to the surety and confidence that people hate you for your beliefs.
So I tried this:
“Thanks. Listen, I’m sure you’re a very nice person, but you’re not wearing a mask and I don’t want to stand next to you.”
My voice was even and friendly, matter-of-fact, not loud (which is hard for me). I could have said, “I’m not next” in the same tone and, in retrospect, wish I had.
She shared a look with the maskless clerk behind the plexiglass. The look seemed to say, “he’s one of those,” but maybe I’m putting that on her. Ten seconds later she was finished and on her way to the door.
Even though I hadn’t caused a scene or thrown a tantrum, I feel like I still managed to alienate this person. Maybe my pointed but understated response only worked to confirm her suspicions that people like me will never accept that we’ve been conned. That this plague is part hoax, part common cold. That I am so choked by my fear, so filled with the socialist narrative the mainstream media is forcing down my throat that I’m incapable of independent thought.
That I am a threat to her way of life.
It’s a shame we all let it come to this, that we let profiteers turn us against one another, that we put staying on the good side of the mooks on television ahead of our friends and family, ahead even of our own personal safety, ahead of even our human empathy.
It’s difficult and disheartening because this isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of luck. Now that mask mandates are on their way to being a thing of the past, some people will just have to die and we’ll just have to live with it because winning the culture war is more important than anything. After all, freedom isn’t free.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.