We’ve gone from “15 days to slow the spread” to, “How dare you monsters step outside without masks?!”
The liberal media like to frame the overarching coronavirus debate as a culture clash between mindful citizens who do as “the health experts” advise and reckless paranoids who are preoccupied with triggering liberals.
In reality, the “culture clash” is between those who hold a stake in keeping everyone miserable (that is to say, Democrats and the media, both unenthusiastic about economic recovery) and the people who are no longer able to keep down the suspicious “stay home” mystery meat we’re constantly being asked to swallow.
MSNBC captured that moment exquisitely Monday, though not on purpose.
While surveying the sunny outdoor location of Geneva Lake, Wisconsin, puzzled anchor Katy Tur said to on-site reporter Cal Perry, “It seems like you might be one of the only people wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.”
“You talk to people, they allude — they say they’re brave, this is their way of getting out, this is their freedom,” said Perry. “[They’re] telling us to go home. That’s the situation here. There doesn’t seem to be any social distancing and not a lot of care when it comes to the coronavirus.”
“So, are the people there just not worried about it?” asked Tur. “Are they not worried about their own personal safety?”
“I haven’t met anybody who is,” said Perry.
The reporter then asked the camera to pan to his left and train on an unmasked bystander who was filming the crew with his own phone.
“You can see here — nobody’s wearing them.”
The man filming replied back, “Including your cameraman. There you go. Exactly half your crew is not wearing them.”
The footage that the man shot on his phone made its way around social media, and it does show that of the four MSNBC personnel in view, two weren’t wearing masks.
Exponentially more irritating than the blatant hypocrisy is the moral lecturing and nagging.
In the short term, donning masks in certain settings (grocery stores, public transit) isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of people. But taking a camera crew to a lakeshore on Memorial Day for the purpose of patrolling regular people isn’t how you encourage safe protocol. It’s how you stoke resentment and piss people off.
Declining to wear a mask in the warm outdoors is not an indication that people don’t care about their “own personal safety.” If anything, it’s an indication that people are paying close attention to the data, which right now indicate that the coronavirus is least likely to be transmitted among people in sunlight and open air.
The lecturing from our moral betters about the need to wear masks in wide-open outdoor spaces is especially ironic given that back in March, public health experts were warning people not to wear masks.
And nothing could possibly make a mask more repulsive than the government trying to turn them into Air Jordans.
It was more fun to wear a mask when officials were telling people not to. But then, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said at his daily press briefing Tuesday that they’re “cool.”
“Wearing the mask is officially cool,” he said.
Shoot me.
Even White House official Dr. Anthony Fauci, the expert on infectious diseases and previously a source of comfort, appears to be doing what he can to turn people off of the mask. He said Wednesday on CNN that he wears a mask anytime he’s outside and as “a symbol” representing proper hygiene.
All of this is nothing compared to the constant barrage of ads and tweets from liberal celebrities and corporations trying to make “stay inside” a cozy little game.
In one of those noxious ads, Travel Channel host Zak Bagans urges viewers to “be creative: Do some writing.”
How about instead, these people get out of everyone else’s faces and mind their own business?
The resistance to the saccharine “we’re all in this together” stuff isn’t out of pleasure. It’s out of spite. And there are plenty of reasons for people to be spiteful when they’re asked to live months on end in total misery.
