The Politics of Masking

 

Something I made just for fun.

 

I went to the auto parts store to get a new battery for my wife's car yesterday.The sub-zero cold of mid-winter is when batteries often fail. It has been in the teens and twenties below zero all week.
I spent much of my youth in and around the hyper-masculine world of auto repair and was unsurprised to see so many unmasked. There is a grunting, testosterone-fueled Neanderthalism among many in the U.S. that at some level deems wearing a mask a sign of weakness. I have often been asked if I am wearing a mask because I am afraid, to which I have replied again and again no. Why does wearing a mask get associated with being afraid? To some, wearing a mask has been equated with a sign of effete weakness. Add to that, the wholesale politicization of masks as objects of scorn and you have a perfect soup for the weird counter factual battles over masks.
 I wore a mask inside the store. Among a half dozen or so employees and customers, I was the only one wearing a mask. When I followed the helpful young man to get my battery, he said to me apologetically, "you don't have to wear a mask in the store". I told him that I work at a school and didn't want to spread anything I might have, and, being a little older, just within the demographic at greatest risk.
As I have said so many times during this pandemic, it is such an easy and simple thing to do that even if the impact is tiny, why not? Science has proven again and again that the impact of this simple, low cost solution is significant.
Reflecting on the self-assurance and indestructibility of youth, he said that he never wore a mask and shook hands with hundreds of people, and never got sick. I thanked him for the battery and wished him a good day. Interestingly, he immediately made it about himself, which almost since the beginning of the pandemic seems to be a point people have been missing. Somehow, as we approach half a million dead and daily body counts in the several thousand, the self-centered still think it is about them.