A line of cars inching along a once-quiet rural road in Maine recently prompted the realization that traffic is not back at pre-pandemic levels but now exceeds them. We have not simply returned to normal but have shot forward as from a catapult. After being held back almost to the breaking point, Americans are surging away from restraint as far as they can.
Timothy Carney notes in this week’s Washington Examiner magazine that airports, too, are overflowing, and the seven busiest in the world last year were all in America. We’ve been itching to get out, and now, we’re scratching the itch.
U.S. culture has been described as “loose,” meaning its social norms are flexible and informal. The spirit of individual freedom — free speech, free association, free enterprise, religious freedom, etc. — has animated Americans since before they had a country. It was what created the nation.
Lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates, and other restrictions (whether voluntary or imposed) are, or were, probably more alien to the people of this country than to most people elsewhere.
Not just alien, but psychologically and economically damaging, and enraging, especially as official rules and guidance were so frequently self-contradictory. As Haisten Willis reports, “When it comes to masks on transit and Title 42 … the pandemic will end in May, [but when] it comes to ending the student loan repayment pause, the pandemic will end on Aug. 31, or maybe after Election Day.” In other words, it’s about politics.
The variation reveals that the tattered remnants of COVID caution and compliance have nothing any longer to do with healthcare. The huge sigh of relief you heard when a federal judge invalidated the federal mask mandate for public transportation came from a people that objects to jumping pointlessly through bureaucratic hoops and enduring unnecessary physical inconvenience.
They’ve been wearing their masks below their noses or around their chins for months. They’re fed up to the back teeth with onerous requirements no longer required to play one’s part in a necessary national effort, and that have become central to playing a game of cultural charades.
All of which makes it odd that the Justice Department plans to appeal the judge’s ruling that ended the mandate. Democrats face not just defeat but a debacle in the November midterm congressional elections, and dropping the mask mandate was a chance to do something voters would like. Accepting the judge’s ruling would have aligned the party with reality as perceived by most people while being able to deflect complaints from die-hard triple maskers of the Democratic base.
But, as usual, Team Joe Biden is probably calculating that it can have things both ways. The mask mandate cannot be enforced unless the administration gets a judicial stay of the ruling, so the public will be freer and happier, and yet seeming to try to overturn the decision might mollify those aforementioned triple maskers.
One suspects that it will, rather, be recognized as drift and clumsy calculation rather than leadership, like so many other Biden efforts to have it both ways — such as arming Ukraine sufficiently to prevent Russian victory while not sufficiently to secure Russian defeat.
