Literally a yarmulke
Seen on Twitter:
For people in urban, liberal cities, the mask and associated rituals are articles of faith. It is literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl. Not hard to understand if we see it as motivated by signaling “I’m part of the good tribe.”
No it isn’t. If the mask were literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl then it would be literally a yarmulke or a prayer shawl. It isn’t, it’s a mask. You can tell it’s a mask because of the loops for the ears, and the size and shape. It doesn’t look like a yarmulke or a prayer shawl.
But more to the point, there’s no need to attach some weird political idenniny to it. I don’t know, maybe some people get a little “right-on!!” thrill from it, but it has to be very little, because…what’s political about it? There’s no political thrill to putting ice on a bruise, or washing a cut carefully, or taking aspirin for a headache. There’s little if any political thrill to trying to cover your cough when you’re around people (I read somewhere a few years ago that the best way is to cough into your elbow – and definitely is not coughing into your hand, which will just spread it). It’s just ordinary medical advice and basic (seriously, so basic) consideration for other people. I guess you can decide that’s “political” if you want to say that all Republicans are malicious boors who want to make other people sick, but otherwise it makes pretty much no sense.
I get what the idea is supposed to be, I think. Politics is groupthink, lefties are very susceptible to groupthink, this is just more of that. Wearing masks during a pandemic is groupthink, and it gives lefties a little righteous glow of being better than those rebellious independent thinkers over there in their MAGA caps.
But it’s just dumb. It wouldn’t be a right-left controversy in the first place if Trump hadn’t decided to make it one, and why would we take our ideas of what’s political and what isn’t from him?
We wear the damn masks (or did) because that was the medical advice, and it’s stupid to go all do-it-yourself on medical issues of all things, especially during a pandemic. There’s no thrill in it, it’s just the inconvenient thing we have to do (or did) to try to avoid spreading the Covid. That’s all, no psychoanalysis necessary.
Updating to add (h/t Mike @ 2)
I don’t think I’m disagreeing with you, but I can report that, after a year of being on Team Mask, where I thought poorly of anyone I saw who wasn’t wearing one, it’s been a bit of an adjustment. For a long time now, people who don’t wear masks (or wear them improperly) have been Bad People in my eyes, and I was one of the Good People for wearing one. With good reasons, that you list in the post.
Today I was walking back from the market, saw somebody wearing a mask only over his mouth and not his nose, and thought “oh, one of these assholes.” Then I remembered that we don’t have to wear masks outside at all now, and I only still had mine on because I hadn’t bothered to take it off after leaving the market. That guy wasn’t an asshole, it was my asshole detector that needs recalibrating.
So I do think there’s a bit of an adjustment process going on, and that people who continue to wear masks in every situation regardless of the CDC’s recommendations may have some psychological/tribal reasons for doing so.
Right, I’m not the kind to signal, at least not deliberately. I’m not one to be performative. I washed my hands when there was no one to see me, for gosh sakes. The mask was me not wanting to spread a deadly virus that is still killing people, wounding people. Because I never knew if I had it in me. It’s not visible.
Jason Isbell retweeted a store that was selling yellow stars reading “not vaccinated as if they are the aggrieved parties. (Isbell retweeted wth disgust in case you’re curious. He’s a good guy in my book.) I can’t even “even” anymore with this sense of persecution.
Screechy, oh yes, I relate to all of that. I’ve spent a year inwardly snarling at people to stop walking straight AT me ffs. But I think I can honestly say I’ve felt no glow of virtue or self-righteousness for wearing the mask. (I have in fact been wearing it outside less than most people around here, because the Washington state instructions were to wear it if you couldn’t keep social distance, so I simply kept social distance instead of wearing it outside. It involved a hell of a lot of zigzagging, but it mostly worked; when it didn’t I wore the mask.) It’s been just…I don’t know, like walking on the sidewalk instead of the street, or not putting my hand on the kettle that just boiled. Ordinary self-preservation, and heeding the social mandate because that’s self-preservation for all. It’s not virtue-signaling. I can’t see it as virtue.
Oh god the yellow stars. Now I have to find that.
Masking with the nose exposed is *still* being an arsehole… Not wearing it at all in appropriate circumstances isn’t. Why they thought doing something that made them look stupid and unfashionable I’ll never know.
BKiSA,
I don’t know, it could be that, like me, he was coming from a situation where masks were required/appropriate, and decided to just pull his mask down a bit for comfort. I’m really not prepared to say that it’s a jerk move to have a mask half-on in a situation where it’s ok to have no mask.
I saw one guy a couple months ago in a grocery store, at first he was shopping with the mask hanging down off his nose, when I later ran across him it was down on his chin, then when I saw him at the checkout he had removed it completely. I think he only had it on initially to satisfy the mask policy when he entered, but by the time he left I thought he was purposely being obnoxious. I would rather give people the benefit of the doubt, but how people accept or reject the mask guidance adds a visible layer and gives them away.
Now that the mask policy has mostly been lifted, instead of noticing the ones who are not wearing them with the associated negative bias, I am noticing the ones who are still wearing them with a more positive bias. It will be nice to get back to occasionally thinking some people are stupid or rude based on their behavior instead, there were a lot less of them. Rude mask behavior makes it too damned obvious. :P
@twiliter – When I went back to the gym, before the vaccine was widely available. There were several people there with the mask down low below their nose. And I can relate, being on a treadmill with a mask restricts breathing. The treadmills and other cardio equip are farther apart than the six feet due to alternate equipment blocking. What bothered me was that as people were walking around recovering, or in the strength training areas, they didn’t move the masks back in place. I complained to the desk personnel and they didn’t seem too bothered and told me that as long as I had the mask on and used the cleaners, I was safe. I tried to explain the purpose of masks but it seemed to fall on deaf ears, so I cancelled my membership.
After my safe period and immunity kicked in from the vaccines I rejoined, and they actually had a sign that said “masks must be worn OVER the nose.” At least someone got the message.
@8 I found myself mumbling “Why wear one at all?” several times (behind the safety of my own mask of course) then look around confusedly. The thing I might miss the most about eventually being mask free are my rude ventriloquist impersonations. ;)
It’s going to be so difficult, in the coming months and years, finding a new way to get our thrills when masks just don’t do it any more. Sad.
I’m fully vaccinated, and as immune to SARS-CoV-2 as I am ever likely to be. But I am still wearing the mask because, hard as it might be to breathe through it (especially when cycling) it is a hell of a lot easier than trying to breathe during an asthma attack. Wearing the mask has reduced my exposure to allergens. It’s wonderful.
OB@10, I’m thinking of going with headbands and wristbands, like a 1970s tennis player. Or perhaps an ascot.
tigger @11, I hear flu cases are at an all time low due to masking and hygeine, not a bad argument eh?
Don’t worry Ophelia @10, I always seem to find new and unexpected ways to hurt people’s feelings. My failure to properly identify males and females (to my own surprise too!) being one recentish example. ;)
Yes! And I haven’t had bronchitis since the pandemic started, which I usually have to deal with at least once, usually twice, a year, with intense steroid therapy because of my asthma and my inability to get over bronchitis without it. Part of that could also be working at home; being around college students exposes me to all sorts of pathogens they may not even know they have until it’s too late.
I am going to be slightly contrarian. I do wear a mask almost universally when indoors and I would never be an asshole about it. The asshole in the supermarket just makes me shake my head. Just like the excessive hand washing. COVID is spread through aerosols.
However: I guess I just am a skeptic that wearing a mask when by yourself outdoors is anything more than virtue signaling. I have seen people wearing a mask when by themselves on a street with no human beings around for blocks. That just seems silly to me. The risk of exposure, or exposing, is so minimal.
As for cycling….why? Again, especially in a non-urban setting, (a crowded urban recreational path might be aa different story) who are you are protecting or being protected from? My favorite, too frequent examples are people RIDING THE WRONG WAY DOWN A BUSY STREET with dark clothes, during rush hour with no helmets and no lights But by GOD they have a mask on. I know it makes me a bad person, but these people really…annoy…me.
ikn: One advantage of aging is seasonally triggered asthma and…yes…bronchitis…seems to be a problem of the past. I used to get terrible attacks every Spring. I live in a very windy place (Solano County, CA) with a predominance of grassy hillsides. I feel for you!
Ok about the “anything more than virtue signaling” thing. As I mentioned above (# 3) I mostly didn’t wear one outside when social distancing was possible but when it wasn’t, I did. Those were the instructions from the people who knew more about the subject than I did. I really disagree that virtue signaling is the only possible reason to obey such instructions. The part about knowing more than I do is key, because they know more than I do. When experts get it wrong despite being experts this leads us into quicksand, of course, but I still think that when you have experts on the one hand and your own uninformed guesses on the other, it’s not mere virtue signaling to go with the experts. It’s one of the two options, and overall it’s usually the better one.
Also, in a situation like this one, full of novelties and unknowns, it’s really not such a terrible thing to do it so that other people won’t feel uneasy or freaked out. That too is not virtue signaling, it’s more like basic consideration. I admit I found it irritating to get the stinkeye when I was 10 feet from someone on a windy day and we were the only people in sight, but I also found it irritating – a good deal more irritating – when unmasked people would make a beeline for me instead of veering away. (I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that people have a kind of instinct to use others as direction beacons when crossing the street.)
I think the people wearing masks with no people visible for blocks were heeding the instructions to put the mask on and then avoid touching it again until you took it off for good. That one I did reject in favor of my own untutored judgement. I took it off via the loops, and…I did it often. My bad.
Oh, there are definitely other reasons than virtue signalling for people to wear masks when they don’t need to. Irrational fear is one. Rational fear coupled with misunderstanding of the current advice is another. I often just plain forget to take my mask off when I leave the supermarket (this is partly because my glasses don’t steam up so much when I’m outside).
Another reason is that I can just sometimes adjust my mask in exactly the right way so that my glasses don’t steam up at all, even when I move between different environments. When I hit that sweet spot, I’m not taking the thing off until I get into bed.