Is This The World You Want?

Yo, Maskerati:

I understand. Truly, I do: you’re too busy to research even basic facts. You’re scrambling lest you lose your job and home after Our Rulers’ lockdown; you’re coping with kids at home all day now that the tax-supported babysitters—sorry, schools are closed; you haven’t seen your parents since February because their assisted-living residence forbids visitors, and you’re worried to distraction about them. 

Wearing a mask seems a minor annoyance after all that. Nor is it an issue on which you’d waste time or energy, even if you had any of either to spare. Besides, people who claim to know insist that these little contraptions will save us. All your friends muzzle themselves as a matter of course. And your elderly neighbor won’t even chat over the backyard fence—with each of you standing 3 feet from that line—unless you don one. 

You can’t buck all those folks, even if you were convinced masks are as harmful as the whackadoos claim.  Besides, who knows where the truth lies?

Fine. Let’s not debate the “science” on masks any further. Instead, we’ll look at this from another angle: is a world in which the government tells us what to wear one you want to live in?

Before you shrug, consider all the ramifications of that world. It’s one where middle-aged male cops can ambush and manhandle young girls caught without masks on the street; would you want this guy straddling your mother or daughter or wife, grinding her face into the pavement, smothering and terrifying her? It’s a world where old men cannot shop in peace. Where people turn against one another and lash out even when both are wearing masks. Where women push one another to the ground and break a leg, ditto. Where we can’t even enjoy a picnic lunch without the smug and self-righteous scolding us (yes, they’re scolding two men without masks—but as our last example showed, these busybodies also attack when you don’t wear yours to suit them). Where meddlers “enforce” the mandate until those they are ordering around punch them (and deservedly so).

If none of these consequences worry you, let me also ask how you would react if the government banned masks instead of requiring them. What if you were liable to a fine or even imprisonment for wearing one? Because rulers could, you know. They suddenly changed their minds earlier this year: masks went from being no help at all to absolutely quelling COVID. The tyrants in office could pull another switcheroo any time they please—regardless of your opinions about it. And you have no recourse then: that’s the system you endorsed. By agreeing that the State can and should tell us what to wear and how to protect ourselves from illness, you have tacitly agreed that it may also rip the cloth off every face tomorrow. 

That may not enrage you, either—but it could devastate folks you love. For example, your parents are convinced that only their matching bandanas stand between them and certain death. Do you want a world where the government could arrest, fine or imprison them because they disagree with its diktats? Over a mask?

Or perhaps this isn’t about masks at all. Perhaps it’s about something much more consequential—something incalculably important. 

Think about that before you pull those loops over your ears next time.

The Best of Becky Akers