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.
