Walk A Mile in My Mask

So, be thankful for the adults around you wearing masks, staying in, working with the public at risk to themselves in an ER or even just manning a cash register at the grocery store. Citizens are adults, and we have to get through this despite the overgrown children among us. /7x

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 3, 2020

If we limit this analysis to just people at protests refusing to wear masks, I might agree with it.  People refusing to wear masks period:  I agree with it.

I was just at a local restaurant which ran a Taco Tuesday promotion that got way out of hand.  Diners are supposed to order on-line, pull up, text the store, and wait in their cars.  Too many people for that, so a crowd had formed around the patio outside, a fenced off area where, it turned out, staff were coming out with sacks of food orders and shouting names.  The worst part was the people without masks who would crowd me, trying to get their food, to get attention, to get served.  Most of the crowd was not observing "social distancing" at all.

But they weren't rowdy and they weren't crabby and they weren't mean.  They were just trying to get what they had already paid for.  Eventually I did, and left, feeling I'd won the lottery.  But still bugged by people who felt their only concern was getting someone's attention so they could get their food, and distancing and masks and public health be damned.

On the other hand, nobody shot anybody in the head or wiped their nose on someone else's sleeve.  So there's that.

Even in those cases:  what were those people going through?  In the shooting case, three people have been charged with intentional murder (or 1st degree, or whatever Michigan calls it).  The woman went home, enraged her husband, who enraged his adult son (I'm guessing), and they came back armed and ready to shoot.  What the hell?  But what pressure were they under?  Shopping at a Dollar Store, I'm guessing they weren't salaried employees working from home.  Maybe their jobs had gone south and the landlord wanted the rent (statewide orders don't always mean much to individuals.  Same reason some people won't wear masks.).  Who knows?  Does it justify the murder?  Hardly.  But are they to be demeaned as "children"?  Hardly.

Yes, citizens are adults and we have to get through this.  But I remember when Bill deBlasio wanted to shut down NYC and Andrew Cuomo made it clear only Cuomo had that power, and he wasn't ready to do it yet.  And yet now who's the "adult" in New York state?  Those categories slide back and forth so easily, based entirely on our convenience.  "Make me whole" is not necessarily an unreasonable demand if you're late on the rent or the mortgage and the checks are bouncing and the kids are hungry and you need toilet paper.  Sure, those camouflaged armed-up bearded yahoos shouting in each other's faces in Michigan (what IS it about Michigan?) were little boys playing "tough guys," but some people are afraid of losing their livelihoods.  This woman was arrested in Texas because she and her friends thought they were lawyers and could buy booze and carry guns on property that wasn't technically the parking lot or back porch of the bar, though it was the bar owner's property.  You can carry guns into the Texas State Capitol (idiots), but you can't carry 'em into a bar, or onto property adjacent to the bar owned by the bar owner (idiots).  I read that story before she got arrested.  All the bar owners wanted to do was save her bar.  She was about to go under, and some of the patrons wanted to help her out.  They deserved to be arrested for the guns (they were protecting "their 1st Amendment rights."  Idiots.); but not for selling the beer (I'm not sure Abbott's order on that would stand up to the least legal scrutiny). Then again, she couldn't afford the lawyer or the lawsuit to test that theory (a depressing amount of law flies well under the radar of "constitutional").

Tell me again just how "childish" she was, and just how "adult" the rest of us are, who created that situation?  Yes, we created it, especially if we aren't going broke and about to lose everything through no fault of our own; because we benefit from this system, and it's high damned time we gave something back to the people who barely get by in this system.  It's a pretty much zero-sum game:  poor bar owners, even restaurateurs of fine establishments, live on the cusp so we can drink and dine, and people like poor bar owners are especially invisible to us.  They are the easiest to call "children" because, face it, they are NOK.  They are not Us; they are Them.  And them are children who deserve what their whinging gets them.

Nope.  I'm not buying that.  I'm not going that far.  It's Us v. Them that got us into this national mess. Trump is the Team Captain of Us v. Them.  If he was any more evil, he'd be Satan's right hand man, playing us off against each other.  He's not; but we're as much to blame as he is for the current situation.  And looking for someone else to blame it on doesn't make us better than Trump; it makes us sound just like him.

And I sure as hell ain't doin' that!