It’s Time to Make Mask-Wearers Feel Uncomfortable
It’s Time to Make Mask-Wearers Feel Uncomfortable
If shame was considered a legitimate tool to get people to wear a mask, then why can’t we use it as a means of getting them to stop?
For almost 9pm on a Christmas Eve, the snow coming in at right angels, there was a surprising amount of traffic clogging up the streets of my small, fairy lighted downtown.
What last minute, festivity-saving errand, I wondered, had these men been sent on?
My own mission, lest Aunt Gwendolyn’s lactose intolerance once more jeopardize the Yuletide cheer, was the retrieval of dairy-free eggnog, but as the lights returned to red and my dashboard clock showed seven minutes until closing time, it seemed bleakly possible that this crisis would prove the last my wife’s sanity, and conceivably our marriage, was capable of enduring.
A family of five were waiting at the crosswalk. Despite their whimsical outfits (a trio of snow-children flanked by two parental reindeer), their appearance only further darkened my mood. Over the course of the last few weeks, as winter tightened its grip, there has been, among the people of my town, an appreciable uptick in masks. True, this trend has coincided with more of Fauci’s fearmongering as well as Biden’s teleprompted, occasionally coherent threats, but without the attendant mood of generalized hysteria, I am confident that this regression has been prompted more by the cold rather than any renewed faith in MSM bullshit.
I have my own way of discouraging the practice. Under the guise of glad tidings to all, I have developed the habit, whenever I’m within earshot of some self-muzzled normie, of complimenting the masklessness of perfect strangers – praising, for instance, the barmaid’s nose-ring or telling the gas station worker, with complete sincerity, that their smile was just what I needed today. I am under no illusions that this strategy will change the world. What we have lived through, it is becoming increasingly apparent, has been the most extensive psychological operation of all time, the grand unveiling of a terrible new form of warfare, and though the initial blast may have subsided, the depth and diameter of the resulting emotional crater is such that, for many, logic alone provides an inadequate foothold to haul themselves out.
Not that my approach has done much good, either. The sad truth is that positive affirmation counts for little when weighted against the crushing, transformative powers of shame, and glancing between the dashboard clock and sight of a father straightening his son’s symbol of political orthodoxy, I couldn’t help but think some well-directed derision might be long overdue.
The most obvious argument is simply that it works. I’m sure, after all, that every dissident in America can remember the feeling, around this time last year, of venturing into public – picking up something from the supermarket, for example – and knowing with utter certainty that your presence would provoke hot, hate-filled stares and often an undisguised insult.
And let me tell you, for your humble narrator at least, weathering this scorn was no mean feat. Perhaps, as a recent immigrant to the United States, I was particularly sensitive to the ire of what felt like my entire adoptive hometown, yet now, as I look back upon everything which has unfolded since March 2020, the realization that Big Pharma are criminals, politicians are their puppets, and that the elites already possess the blueprint for enslaving us, was almost laughably easy when considered against the societal pushback of living in accordance with this knowledge.
Hardly surprising therefore, that many simply didn’t. During the early stages of the *ahem* pandemic, fear was quite obviously the primary driver behind widespread lockdown compliance. What had been unleashed, we were told, was an unprecedented wave of death and destruction, a plague of near biblical proportions, but when the promised apocalypse did not prove forthcoming, the general public were, quite understandably, keen to know just why the government had fucked literally everything up.
Now, as a foreigner, I have to say, watching the American media ratchet up of the race narrative over the course of the last decade has been grimly captivating. It was a little like watching the class scumbag successfully neg the naïve new exchange student. I mean, selling race-paranoia to a race-paranoid nation seemed like a grift way too obvious to sell, but while shame had proved sufficient to convince the most neurotic segments of society that they were complicit in a system of white supremacy (a system, bizarrely, that could only be dismantled by politicians who’d spent their lucrative careers inside it), surely it was a step too far, I innocently assumed, to use the same playbook to rebrand the government-corporate power grab of the last twenty-something months, not as a demonstrable, observable reality, but rather as the latest in newspeak slurs – a conspiracy theory.
Well, I was wrong. Such was the contempt mustered by genocidal maniacs, paid liars, and establishment mouthpieces toward those skeptical of the official narrative, even entertaining the notion that the virus leaked from a lab or that Fauci was in some way responsible soon became tantamount to a moral failing. For many, the threat of ostracism was far more terrifying than any dystopian future the elite might have planned, vast swathes of the population choosing to bury their heads in a mask and hope against hope that their new overlords were as wise and benevolent as they’d been lead to believe.
I have no doubt that this cowardice, far more than any professed concern, is what had compelled Mama and Papa reindeer to gag their own wintry brood. Please – don’t mistake this for callousness. As a new father myself, I fully understand the whirlwind of irrational fears and smoldering anxieties that come part and parcel of parenthood. Christ, my wife threatened to have me removed from the hospital if I didn’t drop it about seeing the midwife’s criminal record. This maniacal overprotectiveness is a powerful, evolutionarily-enshrined obligation, a kind of hardwired psychosis, but watching this family enter the crosswalk, looking two parts Miracle on 34th Street, one part Twelve Monkeys, it seemed heartbreakingly obvious that this most beautiful of human instincts has been hijacked by an entirely inhuman enemy.
And herein lies the second benefit of shame. Now that the effectiveness of face masks has been roundly obliterated, torn apart by study after study after study, all that remains by way of defense is the wearer’s impotent and inevitable, “Well, I don’t see why you care.”
Let’s, for a minute, accept the premise implicit in such a statement. Let’s ignore the demonstrable damage masks have done to health and social cohesion, to the environment and our mental well-being. Let’s ignore what they’ve done to our children. Let’s also ignore, as if it possible to ignore, the innumerable everyday connections which have been stymied, reduced, and fundamentally curtailed by these idiotic signifiers of submission, and even then my answer remains “because they’re taking over the planet, you spineless, braindead amoeba.”
Shame, put simply, is a means of disabusing people of the fiction that wearing a mask is a neutral act. You see, at this point, I do not care whether it is stupidity, cowardice, servility, or a combination of all three that prevents someone from pushing back against the evil that is taking shape around us; these are all equally contemptible excuses. Whether or not someone chooses to look, our civilization finds itself on the precipice of very dark oblivion – a future planned by and for the benefit of, a depraved and unaccountable class of elites – and by complying with any aspect of their absurd, spirit-crushing Covid theatre, mask-wearers keep society tethered to the lie which helps to facilitate it.
Admittedly, the contention that these people are deserving of our ridicule is not motivated by solely noble desires. Now, I do not like to consider myself a bitter person. I do not wish to see those who called me selfish or glared as we passed in the dry goods aisle endure the same ignominies that only last year, they were happy to inflict on me. I’m just not sure society can survive any more of that particular poison. I want no one fired or forced from their homes, and I certainly want none of the re-education camps the left would reserve for us.
What I do believe, however, is that the truth should sting. Over the course of the last decade, western civilization in general although America more specifically, has been fed the easily digestible lie that the greatest menace of our time, the threat we must all #resist, was the elusive but all pervasive specter of racism. Media conglomerates railed against it. The titans of Wall Street pumped billions into its defeat. Presidential candidates condemned anyone accused of acting in its name and yet, save for the occasional campus eruption or tearful testimony of a professional actor, there really wasn’t much evidence that this beast, much like their depiction of Covid, was what they said it was.
Its function was almost entirely emotional. Thirsting for meaning in their safe, digitalized lives, much of a spiritually lobotomized America bought what was, in essence, an expertly branded, relentlessly marketed political and moral product. They could switch on Netflix and live vicariously through a sassy young upstart. They could update their vaccination status, go to the movies, and pretend like they took the red pill. The delusion they have wrapped themselves in is so comforting, so psychologically satisfying, I can think of nothing other than shame that might wake these people to the reality that, when tested, they proved themselves not the heroes Hollywood promised they would be, but rather a herd of eager, willing slaves.
Of course, I am not the kind of man who goes around hurling insults out car windows, much less at young families. Even if I was, this one was far too long-winded. In truth, ruining Christmas with the CDC’s own statistics is really more my speed, and so giving another forlorn glance at the dashboard clock, I decided fuck it – if Aunt Gwendolyn started her vaccine spiel again then that lactose intolerant libtard could have both goddamned barrels, the eggnog a lost cause long before the lights finally turned green.
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