The Masks We Wear

 

Every time I leave the house, I take a mask with me. It lives in my truck, so I don’t forget it when I go shopping or on my infrequent trips in to campus to meet with contractors and customers. Some stores that I go into have almost no one wearing masks, while in others almost everyone is. In Eugene, the white-collar hippie town where I live, mask use is much higher than in Springfield, our blue-collar sister city across the river where we lived for the previous twelve years. Meanwhile, if you go into a home improvement store on the weekend, when it’s 90% homeowners in there, there’s plenty of masks in evidence. But on the weekdays, when it’s 90% contractors in there, there’s virtually no mask usage. And I think that speaks to a very interesting distinction between who wears them and who doesn’t and why.

But the distinction isn’t necessarily between blue-collar and white-collar, but between conservative and liberal and how each group tends to view society. Most often, I’ve found that liberal people tend to be collectivists, while conservatives tend to be individualists. Obviously, when discussing a nation of hundreds of millions of people, it’s necessary to paint with a broad brush, which means there will be exceptions to be found. The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet. Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, infectious diseases aren’t something that we can opt in and out of at our leisure, or in accordance with our particular political views. It may be your body, but it isn’t your choice as to whether or not you get COVID-19 or whether you give it to others. Like it or not, we’re in this together. We may not be in the same boat, but we’re in the same storm.

I know that wearing a mask sucks. I hate it. But I also spent fifteen years straight wearing a full respirator eight hours a day for work. And I wasn’t standing in line at the grocery store or sitting at a desk, either. I was swinging sledgehammers, running chainsaws, ripping up floors with a crowbar, jackhammering out concrete slabs, and otherwise demolishing entire buildings by hand. Every time we took a break, we had to pour the sweat and condensation out of the bottom of the rubber face cup. And God help you if you forgot to brush your teeth on any given morning, because once you strap that respirator on, you and your morning breath are now locked in a steel-cage deathmatch.

Once, we came across a refrigerator filled with rotten food that we had to empty out before having it recycled. After several weeks of sitting in a burnt-out townhouse, filled with curdled milk, fetid meat, and maggots, the smell was so overpowering—even through a respirator—that all of us started puking the second we opened it. Have you ever vomited into a bowl that’s strapped tight to your face? Good times. Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who can’t bring themselves to wear a paper or cloth mask.

Of course, there is a lot of disinformation and conspiracy theories out there that aren’t helping things. People keep pointing out that the masks don’t stop COVID because the virus can pass right through the pores of the fabric. The warning signs that the lawyers make us put on the package of masks to keep the manufacturers from getting sued say it right out loud. But that’s not what the masks are designed to do. In short, they’re designed to keep us from spitting on each other, because that’s how the virus spreads. It’s not actually airborne in and of itself, it’s spit-borne and our spit is then airborne on the virus’ behalf. So if we could all just stop spitting on each other, which the masks are very effective at preventing when everyone is wearing them, we lessen the spread significantly.

Unfortunately, the people that are supposedly on the side of science, who should be explaining these things to us more effectively than they are, have big credibility problems these days, which we can ill afford. First off, the CDC told us initially that masks wouldn’t help us and weren’t necessary for the public. Later, they admitted that they were manipulating (read: lying to) the public, in order to keep us from sucking up every mask on earth before they could get into the hands of cops, nurses, EMTs and doctors, who actually needed them right away. We, the public, would eventually need them, once the quarantine gave way to re-openings, but at the outset, while most of us were home, we actually didn’t need them at the time. That part is true, but that’s not what they told us, and that's where a lot of our current troubles began.

There’s a great line from Men In Black that I keep in my back pocket while considering the public. “A person can be smart. But PEOPLE are stupid, panicky, and dangerous.” I think if you consider the whole toilet paper incident of March/April, you might agree with that sentiment. So keeping the masks out of the grubby hands of the great unwashed masses was a smart, necessary move, and I totally get it. But now that the public needs them, we all remember the authorities telling us that they weren’t of much use and wouldn’t be necessary for us. So they admitted to “manipulating” us (read: lying) and then lost most, if not all, of their credibility, which they now need in order to get us to wear the masks. As people have been saying all over FB and IG, "If masks work, then why did you release convicted felons instead of just giving them masks?"

Every bit as nonsensical has been the gov’t’s policies on shopping at Wal-Mart vs. going to Church. Or when they arrested lone beach-goers with no one around them for miles. One minute, you’re alone and social-distanced on the beach, the next minute you find yourself in the midst of a half-dozen officers who are all now breathing on you. You know, for your safety? And now that we’re in a position to be re-opened, the governor in my state (Oregon) has decreed that we must wear masks at all times when in public, even indoors. But don’t worry, if you’re eating or drinking at a bar or restaurant, you can take the mask off then. That makes about as much sense to me as having a set time and place in the pool when you’re allowed to pee, because I suspect the virus has as much respect for these rules of transmission as urine does for discreet sections in a body of water. But to me, the real coup de grace to the credibility of the people trying to reign us in came in the form of protests.

When the mask protesters got together in their nonsensical display of outrage, they were rightly condemned. However, just a few weeks later, when much bigger crowds came together for Trans-rights rallies and BLM protests, the same voices of caution and censure not only fell silent in their condemnation, but actually praised the gatherings as necessary to quelling another form of disease in our country: racism and bigotry. Although their diagnosis of our social issues was correct, COVID-19 still obeys all the same rules of transmission in worthy gatherings as they do in supercilious ones, and yet they meet with completely different responses. And not just from political pundits and activists, but from supposedly objective journalists and scientists as well. Right or wrong, that has widely been seen as a double standard and, as such, has completely blown the bottom out of what was already a tenuous effort to unite a nation of disparate views into an ersatz team willing to do what was necessary for the common good. Kicking and screaming fringes not withstanding.

With conflicting reports from WHO and CDC on the spread and transmission of the virus, death-counts being mis-labelled and mismanaged (some say purposefully because of the monies attached to COVID-19 cases), and admitted manipulation of public (mis)information, we’ve never had a bigger crisis of confidence in our public institutions. Remember when the CDC told us, for like five minutes, that the risk of transmission from surfaces was very low, only to reverse themselves the very next day? That's only one in a long list of retractions, policy gaffes, and selective enforcement that are completely undermining critical efforts. Now, if we don’t see any spikes in COVID-19 after the protests, then no one will believe that we’ll see them at 4th of July celebrations or local church services. Meaning that we’ve successfully politicized a virus, and eviscerated public confidence in the leadership of our country at every level.

At the end of this long tunnel, the casualties will be counted in the deaths of our fellow citizens, but they’ll also be measured in the death of public confidence in scientists, educators, journalists, and experts of every stripe. To say nothing of our common bond as Americans first. Before all of this started, we were already fighting an insipid battle to prove that we went to the moon and that the earth is round. After the death of credibility, competence, and objectivity this represents, I can’t imagine where we’ll find ourselves next year at this time.