MASK MANDATES
The Evolution of Government Power and Public Shaming
New CDC Guidance
With great excitement, we all heard the CDC announcement that you could give up your mask if you had been vaccinated. But… That didn’t apply to airlines or airports, businesses that continued to want you to wear a mask and states and counties that had their own mandate. We were also warned that the mandate might return if infections worsened. The devil is in the details and by the time we understood what had actually been said, the excitement (and most likely, the enthusiasm for the reluctant to get the vaccine) was decidedly muted. For the week, we had been in New Orleans and relatively mask-free, but had to return to California where apparently, nothing had changed. The science says vaccinated people should be safe, but even the CDC was told to shut up, back when they tried to offer that guidance.
Mask History
The first time I saw mask-wearing, I had been teaching a class in Tokyo. It looked a bit odd, especially as the city is pretty clean, but only a small percentage of the population had the masks and had donned them voluntarily. I have no issue with a choice.
Even in bad flu years, or when SARS, MERS, bird flu, etc., plagued our country, the most vulnerable populations simply holed up and took precautions. Everyone else also chose how to manage their health, which made sense. We make choices every day, and one of those choices is how much to worry about our health.
Masking and Health
In the early days of Covid, where people didn’t know how lethal the virus could be, nor had confidence that it hadn’t been engineered to be particularly bad, everyone looked for precautions they could take. Dr. Fauci waffled on masks, eventually saying that they should be saved for health care workers. The supply of protective gear amassed by Bush had been stripped bare by Obama during various catastrophes and never replaced. The concern made sense for N-95 masks, which while very uncomfortable, provide some protection. However, the little fabric or cotton ones mainly serve surgeons by assuring that a cough, sneeze or spit won’t invade an open body cavity. Recent research shows that long mask wearing, especially if you don’t change them often, leads bacteria and viruses to stack up in the fibers. In other words, in most cases, these things are pretty useless. Still, the government wanted to look like it was doing something.
What they could have been doing is let the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines go out faster, without the long delays caused by endless studies. Make it voluntary, but we could have been more on top of this thing by March, 2020.
Strange Inconsistencies in Guidance
While most of us were told that singing in church or shouting on a ride could spread the virus (and in neither case would a mask work), rioters were allowed to throng city streets without masks in what the media wags called “mostly peaceful protests.” No one in the government or media expressed concern about “super-spreader events” or any other issue regarding the lack of “social distancing.” For the record, we already had a descriptive term for not getting too close—physical distancing. Either the government felt it would be okay for young terrorists to get the CCP virus and die or they really didn’t believe “the science” themselves.
The Truth About Mandates
You can slowly boil a frog and trick it into not realizing its impending death. But the Democrats wanted speed as well as results. The way to achieve radical change is fear. When afraid, people will obey any ridiculous order in hope of delaying or deterring a bad result. And what better than a deadly disease?
You also use public shaming to herd people into the behaviors you prefer, thus creating a passive population of useful idiots. Then you can do almost anything to them, including radically changing the nature and values of this country.
Governmental officials like power. They behave like the huge aliens in a great Twilight Zone episode, where people were transported to a house that looked like theirs, except it had been located on another planet and they were living there as amusement to an alien civilization. Except for our founders, most politicians hate the fact that this country was founded on essential freedoms. They prefer obedient serfs. Start with fear, remove personal responsibility with welfare and guaranteed basic income and create Big Daddy government and you have all the power you want. It’s time for a revolt. Remind them that we are their employer not their pawn. Dump the masks and start living as free people again.
(And please share my blog link with your like-minded friends.)
