The Covid-era directional aisle markers vanished from the local grocery store weeks ago. The “masks required” signs are slowly disappearing many places – with the obvious exception of medical facilities. I still wear a mask when entering businesses, if for no other reason than I haven’t had so much as a common cold in well over 18 months. STAT reported this month that owing to mask wearing, school closures, and travel restrictions, perhaps two strains of flu virus may have gone extinct. I can live with that.
But the old normal may have gone extinct as well. And the new normal, well … it leaves something to be desired.
CNN:
Just when you thought you were ready for a soft return to public life, this happens: An unruly plane passenger commandeers an intercom. A grocery store clerk was killed after asking a customer to pull up his mask. Countless shootings result in lives lost, others permanently changed.
And that’s just in the last week.
For those who were already tiptoeing back into public spaces with some trepidation, seeing these incidents splashed across their news feeds may make them even more hesitant to live the way they did before the pandemic.
Whether these public outbursts and violence have increased recently — the experts CNN spoke to said it’s too soon to tell — seeing so many of them is likely driving some Americans to delay their reentry into society a bit longer. But it’s unlikely that anyone will write off reentry completely — it may just take some of us a bit more time to feel comfortable again, experts told CNN.
Especially when wingnuts are still waging a culture war against mask wearing. Two “adults” in Pennsylvania felt compelled to film themselves harrassing three kids for wearing masks. They then uploaded the video to social media. Why?
The people in the video are following the instruction of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who told viewers on April 26 that they should accost Americans they see wearing masks and call 911.
“So the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate,” Carlson told his audience. “Ask politely but firmly, ‘Would you please take off your mask? Science shows there is no reason for you to be wearing it. Your mask is making me uncomfortable.'”
“Call the police immediately, contact child protective services,” he told the Fox News audience.
CNN again:
Reentering public spaces can put many of us on edge. Filling public spaces with people again — people who have weathered the last year in different ways — may increase the likelihood of incidents of chaos, said Dr. Crystal Clark of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.”
Now that the world is reopened, we may see less patience, more irritability, less stress tolerance because people have been trying to hold it together for so long,” said Clark, who is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of obstetrics and gynecology. “Even though they are finally able to ‘relax,’ they remain on edge because the effects of the mental stress over the past year do not go away overnight.”
For the same reasons that social isolation and undue stress may motivate people to act in bizarre ways when they’re out in public, that isolation might cause those of us who aren’t acting out to react with “excessive fear or avoidance,” Taylor said.
I’m not letting the Pennsylvania couple off that easy. They were under a different kind of stress before the pandemic. Fear of losing status and political power. Fear of no longer being able to dominate Others existed among conservatives long before Donald Trump’s presidency. Decades ago, Rupert Murdoch constructed his media empire’s business model around stoking that fear day in and day out.
Next, they’ll be coming to your door and demanding you come outside, you snowflakes. Lord Trump is displeased that you have not returned to serving the wants and desires of The Market. He said it. They believe it. That settles it.