Social distance warriors

Kentucky has a similar hotline, as do an increasing number of other states. Rather unsurprisingly, these reporting methods are being immediately abused. “Some businesses report that their competitors are doing wildly inappropriate things,” county health department official Nicholas Rupp told the Salt Lake Tribune. The same piece also notes that “complainants often report personal behavior that can’t be verified by the time the health department visits.”

Officials are encouraging us to become a nation of tattletales. And a lot of the country needed no such encouragement.

Officials should work to stop some egregious violations of social distancing. And following best practices for not spreading the virus is important. Don’t bunch up when you have to wait in line, don’t mob stores, etc. But also, a few unspoken social guidelines need to be added if we are not to become some plague-stricken and petty Stasi: If you see somebody else appearing to ignore the rules, especially online, maybe don’t assume you need to make that person’s business your business, much less the business of agents of the state who are possibly infected and definitely armed.

By now, everyone knows the drill of life under the coronavirus. And if someone’s not listening, assume it’s not because he or she hasn’t been told. Yet the social distance warriors of the world seem to think that any lapse in compliance is just a matter of not enough PSAs and nosiness. At a time when we’re all more crammed together than ever, being left alone and given the benefit of the doubt that we know how to run our own lives is a precious resource in short supply.

The messages are everywhere. #FlattenTheCurve scrolls across the backs of patrolling police cars. The demand to stay home blares out from signs posted by police outside of the few businesses allowed to remain operating. Your trips outside are counted by watchful neighbors who wonder if that last one was strictly necessary — er, essential. Keep apart. Wear a mask. No, not an N95. Actually, yes, an N95. No, not one with a valve.

Does anyone think that whatever lack of compliance with the orders exists is because people aren’t getting the message?

Apparently, yes. In Savannah, Georgia (among a growing number of American cities), police have deployed drones to get the word out in the creepiest possible way. In a video released by CBS on April 14, a police quadcopter hovers a few feet over the street, barking in a mustachioed baritone, “This is the Savannah Police Department. Due to the current health emergency, members of the public are reminded to keep a safe distance of 6 feet from others while in public places to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.” Would a land-based robot, a speaker, or, I don’t know, a piece of computer paper scotch-taped to the wall somehow deliver this message less capably? No. But it would do a worse job giving the impression that we live in some kind of futuristic nightmare in which our public servants and compatriots have gone a bit batty in an all-consuming campaign to repeat the injunction to #StopTheSpread.

In this culture of informants, media reports shame specific citizens for things that don’t seem obviously more risky than a trip to the supermarket. Early in the crisis, TV news cameras loved a 22-year-old on spring break who said, “If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not gonna let it stop me from partying.” This isn’t the most responsible thing I’ve ever witnessed, admittedly. But does anyone doubt his ensuing viral infamy probably had more to do with the narrative requiring an entertaining villain than with the idea that he’s really the most concerning infection vector we might have paid attention to? Anyway, the New York Times later featured a story about his shamefaced apology, noting in the passive voice that he had been “seen as exemplifying a kind of reckless attitude that many across the country had displayed.” It would be more precise to say he was touted or held up as an exemplar and object of public admonishment, though. He was arbitrarily selected for the national shame stockade.

At least he was being legitimately irresponsible, though. In England, where the culture of snitchery is even more pronounced and the lockdown rules have for whatever reason orbited more specifically around only going outside very precisely for the purposes of exercise, the state-run news service ran a piece denouncing a family for driving in a private van to the remote Lake District. “The family were criticized as ‘absolute idiots’ and called ‘clowns’ after the [local police] force posted about it on Twitter,” the story read, under an image of a camper van alone in a field with absolutely no other people or signs of human civilization in sight. Presumably, nobody at the BBC knows about trailer parks, but it is still sinister for a major media concern funded by a compulsory tax to spend its time echoing police social media call-outs of citizens who have removed themselves to empty fields. Meanwhile, since the United Kingdom’s hypervigilante corps of coronavirus snitches had started calling in fellow citizens for doing yoga in the park (since that inherently physically distant activity doesn’t involve enough moving), the guidelines on exercise have had to be updated to clarify that “you are allowed to stop and have a midrun breather,” per a story in Runners World summarizing a police document. Phew.

I wish I could report that Americans were, in contrast, holding to our revolutionary spirit while doing what we must to exercise good individual judgment. But we are fast catching up with our former colonial master in showing that we need little official encouragement to become obsessed with ratting on anyone who might even appear to be failing to hew to the latest public health measures. When the USNS Comfort arrived on Manhattan’s west side at the end of March, photos of runners and gawkers who’d gathered to see it became the subject of a social media outrage — though it didn’t look to me like anyone was all that near anyone in what was ultimately not a very big crowd. On April 5, journalist Michael Moynihan posted a video of some Brooklynites who were dealing with their quarantines by sunning in Domino Park by the East River. Moynihan meant the post lightheartedly, and it wasn’t immediately obvious from the photo that anyone was breaking the rules. But social media doesn’t do lighthearted, especially not now. Soon after, a still from the video was behind Andrew Cuomo as the governor announced a tightening of enforcement.

By now, this sort of thing is a routine feature of how we experience the world through our windows and computer screens. Some impromptu group of virtue-signaling, self-sainted sequesterers will take to the internet to shame fellow citizens for spitting all over the greater good by daring to go outside.

On April 17, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis allowed beaches to reopen. There’s no reason in particular to think these warm, sunny, and enormous spaces sprayed with salt air are somehow more conducive to COVID-spreading crowding than are parks anywhere else in the country. Still, #FloridaMorons started trending on Twitter, and a post showing a picture of lots of people on a just-reopened beach in Jacksonville blew up online. As it happens, my mother is in much-more-populous Miami Beach, and she sent me a picture of a completely empty beach at nearly the same moment. If you scrutinize the picture of the Jacksonville shoreline, it is once again not clear who exactly is pictured in it standing within 6 feet of anyone they don’t live with. Still, it’s apparently too much fun to cluck at the Floridians to think about whether it makes sense or is accurate. If disapprovingly checking in on your neighbor’s social distancing is one way people are getting through this, then looking down on a whole neighboring region seems to work even better.

But tetchy superiority apparently comes before scrutiny in the middle of a pandemic. As Anne Helen Peterson writes in BuzzFeed, people are in outrage high gear online lately: “Seemingly innocuous tweets incited disproportionate reactions, asking how someone could think about (insert anything, really, here) when people were dying.”

One important thing that will help compliance with quarantine measures as well as help us suffer less through this ordeal is recognizing that morale matters. And if we wish to maintain morale, we would do well to try our hardest not to deputize ourselves as virus-fighting police with jurisdiction in our neighbors’ personal space. Minding our own business is a matter of looking out for public mental as well as pulmonary health. As the great epidemiologist and rapper Cam’ron would no doubt say: Stop the spread of snitching.

The internet being what it is, some combination of funny and sinister trolls already seem to be pushing back. On April 21, New York City had to shut down its hotline because it was being flooded with lewd pictures and abusive comments, plus pictures of New Yorkers hanging out in parks, the gigantic mayor going to the gym after his own government recommended against it, and de Blasio dropping (and killing) a groundhog on Staten Island in 2014. Obedience and civil disobedience are both important, even in a pandemic, and with all of society trending toward obedience right now, it’s a little bit inspiring to see these prankster heroes standing athwart history, coughing “stop.”

Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.