Each year on March 24, we should be celebrating National Ted Cruz Day.
The Republican senator from Texas is my hero for doing what everyone needs to start doing, which is to tell the perpetual pandemic hysterics to take a hike.
At the start of a news conference Wednesday on Capitol Hill, one of those mask fetishists in the press corps asked Cruz, “Would you mind putting a mask on for us?” Cruz said yes. He did mind. He wouldn’t wear one while addressing the TV cameras, and in any case, Cruz and the other senators present had all been vaccinated against COVID-19.
In that patronizing tone that pandemic lovers have mastered, the cameraman told Cruz that wearing a mask “would make us feel better.”
Cruz again declined to play the stupid mask game and told the hysteric that he could simply back away if he felt at any risk of infection.
That a mask would have made this insufferable person “feel better” is precisely the problem. For all of the talk about following “the science,” the hysterics never do. They signal their virtue with six masks strapped to their faces and then nag normal people for not living their daily lives in a constant state of panic.
It’s long past time to move on from the days of letting the most fearful person in the room set the terms of how the rest of us live.
For a full year, we deferred to the exceedingly timorous out of respect for those at high risk of falling severely ill or dying from a highly contagious, airborne virus. The fear and anxiety were, for a period, understandable. We could bear it when they acted out, shaming others over mask-wearing or “nonessential travel,” or anything formerly known as “fun.” Perhaps they had lost a loved one, and this was how they grieved.
But the party for the pitiful needs to end. So does deference to the crowd that claims to “follow the science,” right up until they don’t. These people relished the attention and status granted them by the equally hysterical news media that gladly dialed up the level of public panic.
The market is being flooded with vaccines which, at last estimate, will be available to everyone by the start of the summer.
We have to do what Cruz did and simply start saying no. No, I won’t be wearing a mask. No, I won’t jog across the street to give you space. No, I won’t feel guilty for seeing friends and family or even — oh my God! — for meeting new people.
The hysterics can have their “new normal” to themselves. The rest of us don’t have to participate.
