I thought it was kinda funny, early on in the pandemic, when Tom Hanks, universal ambassador of civility, spoke about the social obligation of mask-wearing by comparing it to some effortless courtesy like using your turn signal in traffic. I assume Hanks doesn't have the need to spend a lot of time driving in traffic anymore, but for whatever socially relevant reason a majority of Americans stopped using turn signals about 10-15 years ago. It's a persistent pet peeve of mine precisely because it's so petty - how much trouble does a pinky-flick of a small lever involve? The fact that this modest act of cooperative safety suddenly became an unbearable burden for many Americans has long been a perfect example of the overall civic erosion over the past decade for a society that became too sclerotic and lethargic to literally lift a finger for their fellow citizens.
I think the analogy with the more recent movement of denialism is apt. I once asked someone what was so difficult about using a turn signal when driving, and was told that "many drivers find it to be a sign of weakness". I've long suspected that many drivers are secretly playing a video game in their head where only they understand their esoteric scoring systems, so I imagine that this kind of imaginary Mad Max crap is more common than I would like to believe. But this is also at the heart of the resistence to masks and vaccines, they are also a sign of perceived weakness for those inclined to the irrational and immature fear of appearing weak in public. It makes it harder to maintain one's delusion of being a superhero in one's own private video game.
The key to understanding this was Joe Rogan, clearly a man riddled with masculine phobias and compensation complexes. He's taken a Darwinistic attitude about Covid, which is of the "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" variety. Fear of showing weakness. He's maintained that only 5% of Covid deaths did not involve some preexisting comorbidity in order to maintain the illusion of his natural strength. Incidentally, 5% of 640,000 is 32,000. That's 32,000 perfectly healthy people killed by Covid in 18 months. When was the last time in American history that 32,000 perfectly healthy people died from a disease in a 18 month period? How many deaths of perfectly healthy people are enough to satisfy Rogan's lust for a strong ego? His position is clear: the old, fat, sick and weak are no big loss to weed out of his bro-topia. Fear of showing weakness. Rogan still claims that the risk of vaccines are comparable to the risk of Covid infection. He claims myocardia. The incidence of myocardia from the vaccines are 50 in one million, or 1 in 20,000, or 0.005%. The incidence of myocardia in Covid patients is 7% (at the very least). Which of those numbers is larger? Maybe the one that's over 1000x greater than the other?
I know Rogan is a mere knuckleheaded neckhole, and so it shouldn't be surprising that, in his own words, he is "not a respectable source of information", but I think that he is influential, and he does represent the underlying pathology around such mitigation resistence. Once you can understand his simian insecurities, much of the anti-mask/vaxx sentiments become legible. Masks and vaccines are for the weak. They invoke terms like "submission" and "obedience" out of their fragile sense of intellectual autonomy. They "don't like being talked down to", like Otto from Wanda not wanting to be called stupid, and it's pretty obvious how precariously easy such a revelation of their feeble wits would be. Defense mechanisms, threats of violence, petulance, intimidation ("we know who you are!") to ward off the potential lucid threat of introspective clarity. Fear of showing weakness. It's a threat that every two year old understands.
My favorite is how they say that they are not living in fear. No, it's the masks and the vaccines which represent living in fear. "I refuse to live in fear! I choose to live in the belief that the government wants to control my face and my children!" The anti-mask/vaxxers are the most afraid of all, rationally paralyzed by their preexisting inadequacies, living in a frightened state of ignorance, utterly terrified of showing weakness, fighting and flighting their way out of facts.
I'm a chronic grouch so no one has ever listened much to me (and honestly, fair enough), but I've been firing up a warning sign for twenty years about these 'won't lift a pinky' sorts. I don't drive, so I've never noticed the lack of turn signals, but I have been making a big deal out of those who are similarly lazy, or similarly don't 'want to be controlled', for a very long time. And it's never been simply because I'm always in a bad mood and everyone bugs me. It's always been more about the bigger picture. I've always wanted to know, what chance can we possibly have to collectively topple serious problems, when there is a significant portion of people who can't figure out how line ups work. Or be bothered to drop their trash in a bin. Or bring their tray back in a food court. When I've confronted people I've known who do these sorts of things, asking them what's so hard about making these tiny gestures towards civility, their answers are always 'they pay other people to do this for me' or 'who cares' or they think I'm some kind of wuss for following these kinds of rules.
All of these years, friends would have to weather one of my annoying rants when I'd come across these kinds of public irritants, and even those who were sympathetic to my point, still would wonder why I became sooo aggravated by it. And for years I'd say these were symbols to me why we would ultimately fail as a society. It was always something like global warming I'd point to. How could we ever expect people to make such a monumental shift as that to save ourselves, if we can't even ****ing throw our trash away. But, as it turns it, it was much worse than that. It was wearing a ****ing mask on their face. That would be their line. A mask that, for many, they would only need to wear while they dashed into a store. I never would have even suspected we were this collectively hopeless.
And now, being on social media like some lunkhead, I get to see people I once knew, who have never given a turd about a single political issue in their life, become mobilized by the injustice of mask wearing. Of doing the minimal thing to somewhat help the spread of a pandemic. My mother is one of them. My girlfriend's best friend is one of them. And now I have to have all of their mispellings and claims of the research they do jabbed into my eyeballs every day.
So I guess what I'm saying, is I suppose I don't mind being trapped in my home for the last year and a half that much after all. I don't want to see anymore half empty coffee cups sitting on park benches. Or piles of unscooped dog **** on people's lawns. I just get angry thinking of how after the last five years of constant division, this pandemic, as awful as it has been, at least had the possibility of offering us a chance to all come together again. Since we're all in the same boat together, this should have been the outcome. It was our big chance to mend everything that has gone wrong since the whole world should be able to empathize with what we need to do to get through this.
But noooooooooo. Somehow we can't even do that. Masks were just way too much to ask. We have to divide ourselves over the most benign act of courtesy I can think of beyond covering our mouths when we sneeze (which I can only imagine is the next hill some people are going to be willing to die on).
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