There are surely worse people on this Earth, but no one inspired more rage in my body in 2020 than the pandemic mask fetishists who worshiped the things strapped to their faces like idols, spreading the good word of their utility and harassing the heretics who dared whisper a scintilla of doubt about their efficacy.
They were the most miserable demons to coexist with this past year, and unfortunately, they’ll be with us for much of the new year as well.
It’s not that I’m anti-mask. Polls show that very few people are. It’s that I’m anti-stupidity and the mask fetishists engaged in their confrontations with innocent pedestrians using the opposite of logic. Those run-ins were often captured on video, such as the one wherein a man in a leaf-patterned shirt is recorded pursuing a woman in a Hobby Lobby demanding in a high volume that she don a mask, all the while he shifts and pulls at his own mask.
The sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s foremost expert on infectious diseases, has said time and time again that masks are to be worn when “social distancing” is impractical. That is to say, if you’re leaving your home to be in shared spaces with strangers who might not be at the advised 6-feet distance, a mask should be worn. Put differently, that means don’t chase random women in arts-and-crafts stores for the purpose of telling them anything at all, let alone to harangue them about masks.
Walking along a sidewalk in Washington, a man going the opposite direction waited until he was shoulder to shoulder with me to bark, “Mask!” There had been no one else in sight, meaning the right thing to do for those nervous about catching infections outdoors, where transmission of the coronavirus is near zero, would be to maintain as much space from others as possible. This person instead determined that making a point with passive aggression was more important than his own health.
Smart health choice: keeping away from others because, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it helps protect yourself and others. Dumb health choice: running up on people to get in their space and say, “Mask!”
Masks fetishists are the most likely to say something lame such as, “Listen to the science,” while then pulling down their mask to cough at someone who isn’t wearing. That literally happens. It happened to me. It happened to a man this summer in Detroit.
Michael Hale was walking up to a local restaurant to retrieve a pizza he had ordered for takeout when a woman exiting the building asked him why he wasn’t wearing a mask. Then she leaned into him and coughed at his face. It’s on video. (Hale is black, and the woman who coughed on him is white, which would normally make for one of those racism stories that the national media love, but it was covered nowhere outside of local media. Weird!)
Mask fetishists were the most miserable people of 2020. If only they were left behind come 2021.
