Forgot my mask

I started a new job this week too. It was very strange meeting everyone with masks. It's all very impersonal. The office is at 50% capacity as well with a rotation of who works from home and who comes into the office so it feels very empty. Strange times indeed.

Soapbox time.

I get it. It's a pain to wear a mask. I was on the way to pick up a pizza yesterday and realized I had no mask. So I turned around, went home, and got it. Lost a few minutes. * But you know what? The pandemic's a bigger pain, and facts are the masks help deal with it. So maybe you should deal with it. Don't know if your area mandates masks -- the pharmacy story suggests they are not mandatory -- but why punish the pizza people for trying to do the right thing?**

Nice to see people's full faces, too. Not necessary, but nice. But, I find myself appreciating people's eyes more now. They can smile, too.

A nice full smile may make your day,*** but it could also help end someone's life unnecessarily.

I notice that here, in my city that has always had a love/hate relationship with protests, a couple hundred people have "expressed interest" in an anti-mask rally a week from Sunday, on the theory that the pandemic "is exaggerated" and that God will tell us when to wear masks. I guess He did do that with seatbelts, but that's another issue.****

IMHO.

*Pizza was fine, hot, and waiting.
** Masks are mandatory here.
*** Sounds like a cliche to me.
****Sarcasm.

No emoticons were harmed in the production of this message.

The mods will probably bump this to some debate room, but here goes (though I don't understand what's up for debating).

I'm not sure I know of any serious medical professional -- at least without a political axe to grind -- who doubts the severity of the pandemic. I'm married to a doc, and I know other medical professionals. Trust me, they have nothing to gain by making this sound worse than it is. How many dead already from it? I know it would be nice to believe it's exaggerated, I want to believe that, but the data, the science, the numbers, all say otherwise. I suspect you have been fortunate to not know anyone who has it, had it, or died from it. That doesn't make it less real.

And if you're in doubt anyway, why not err on the side of caution and make a special effort to wear the mask?

Speaking of the masks, they help stop the wearer -- who may be asymptomatic but still infected -- from spreading the virus. They don't do much to keep people from getting sick themselves. The mask is for other people. The decent thing to do is wear it, put up with any minor inconvenience. People often don't enforce the rule because they don't know if the person without the mask has an agenda, and of course your pizza guy didn't want to get into an argument with you about it.

Yes it can be alienating to be isolated. Good point. I miss my friends at the Y, I miss going for coffee;. I'd like to visit my out-of-town family, and to see my in-town but asthmatic daughter in a mode other than videochatting or masked up, but that's where we are and I still feel connected to them. In some ways more connected than before because we make special efforts to check in.

Communication between people involves so much more than the bottom half of one's face. As for the smile thing, it's not the lips and teeth that make it really important, it's the totality of the person behind it. Unless, I suppose, you're a dentist.

As for the cliche issue -- gad it gets tiring up here on this soapbox, I'll get down in a moment -- we agree on the definition. I merely meant to suggest it weakens your writing in a technical and literary sense (this is a writing forum after all) -- you are too good a writer to rely on one to make your point.

Not wanting to throw in my 2 cents is about as painful as walking on hot coals and then proceeding to sleep for a night on the Iron Throne.

I must say I am *thoroughly*, *totally* disappointed that you didn't pull "a Karen", or do what some guy did and stab an old man 7 times.

In seriousness: it's not the black plague, so I don't really care to be honest. The piss-poor way that the media has covered this was the last straw that helped me decide to stay far, far away from the propaganda machine that the media has become.

On one hand you've got people who genuinely believe that this is a complete and total conspiracy and that the virus doesn't even exist. You've got people who think that it was a deliberately released viral-weapon from China. You've got people who think it was hinted at by the Bible and that the Reckoning is soon to be upon us. Some say it only impacts old people. Others say it's completely, totally random and that we basically know nothing about it and that we should all cower in perpetual fear. People on Reddit claim that they have after-effects from the virus 2, 3, sometimes 5 or 6 months after having had it. Other people say that they had it and it was just a cold.

You've got hospitals writing off people as "corona deaths" when they were already on their death bed for several months, inhaled a pack a day for 50 years, and were 300 pounds overweight, and were soon to be dead anyway. You've got other people who apparently treated their bodies like temples, never had a drop of alcohol, never smoked a singular cigarette, ran a marathon every year, climbed Mount Everest, and were somehow killed by this virus in a matter of days.

Not even going to apologize for being jaded. There are two, and only two, ways to walk away from the Cacophony Circus. You can either go about your business in a laissez faire way, or you can become a victim to the hysteria and buy into the cringe-inducingly Orwellian "new normal".

From the very beginning, within the first 30 seconds of the media deciding that this would be 2020's narrative cash-cow, they were already force-feeding "new normal" down people's throats. As if we will never, can never, ever ever go back to a society that isn't absolutely atomized.

No. This isn't a "new normal". This isn't like some step in evolution that cannot be undone. It's not like turning paper into ash, but not being able to turn the ash back into paper.

No. This is literally just a couple year blip in history; afterwards, the only "new normal" should be that governments are more prepared to respond to pandemics. That's it. People shouldn't have to still be working from home 50 years from now in case of a new outbreak of Insert Virus Name, people won't need to wear a mask for the rest of their lives, concerts and public sporting events won't become a thing of the past, once you hit the age of 50 you'll never get to see your family in-person again, etc. So what new normal are they even talking about lol?

I've sadly grown to despise the media, only because it's reprehensible how irresponsible they are; they seemingly don't care about the way that a 24/7 broadcast of "fear" impacts a society of people that are constantly exposed to it. The effect is no different than having a parent who constantly fills your head with paranoid delusions. It's no different than constantly being surrounded by negative, cynical, nihilistic people. Unless you completely go dark from social media and refuse to watch TV, the constant barrage of doomsday material is impossible to avoid.

Riots! Plagues! Locust swarms! Global warming! Sorry, I meant climate change! Generic outrage! Police brutality! Trump said something! Kim Jong Un threatens again! Hurricanes! Wildfires! Give it a damned rest man. Jesus. I don't need your negativity anymore. I've got plenty of it coming from the voice in my own head, without your help. Thanks.

My rant aside, I hope the same.

I do want to add that one thing I like about some eastern cultures (at least, that's where I've happened to notice it most, but it very well may be commonplace in other parts of the world) is to wear a mask when sick.

Even if it's just a cold. Like, that's really cool man. That's a cultural norm though, not a law.

But people out here living like they're in The Happening or Contagion, the musical. Sleep easy knowing the worst your blankets might have are bed bugs, and the only thing on the wind is tree sperm.