Okay, strap in for a post that is the crossover I never expected. In April, I posted about Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desire to put National Guard troops into the New York City subway system to combat a crime wave that didn’t seem to really exist. The next month, I posted about plans in North Carolina to try to ban mask-wearing statewide without any kind of exceptions for masks to reduce transmission of airborne pathogens.
And now, in June, those two concepts are converging with Hochul suggesting she may ban the wearing of masks in the NYC subway system—again, claiming things like crime and particularly violence against Jewish people, even though the evidence is sketchy that there is an actual problem (much less that banning masks will do anything about it even if it is).
Think about this—assuming you’re not one of those people still insisting that masks either don’t work or aren’t needed anymore because COVID is no longer a threat (it still is, and there are other worrying diseases making the rounds lately too, from bird flu to measles). Because if you’re in that group, you’re probably happy to hear about mask bans and why are you even reading my stuff anyway? But think about it: A Democratic governor wants to bans masks in one of the busiest and most congested parts of New York City, a clear vector for infection. She wants to take away people’s right to protect themselves against disease and protect others as well, all for an unproved and probably imagined problem that won’t be fixed by making a law that would likely not just include balaclavas and the like but also probably N95s and the like.
When I posted about the total mask ban proposal in North Carolina, the one that would only exempt Halloween costumes and workers who need masks for their jobs, many of you probably said to yourselves, “Well, that’s the South for you!”
But it isn’t. It’s the North too, and lots of other parts of the country, where there is a growing hostility to masks that isn’t just about protestors (and there are reasons they justifiably need them too) but about a hatred of seeing people still wearing masks when so many people want to forget COVID was ever a thing and want to pretend it isn’t still a threat.
It isn’t just the Republicans, either, because plenty of Democrats want to return to life as usual (which we cannot return to anytime soon, and that’s about more than just COVID) and are behind things like trying to limit vaccine availability to immunocompromised people and others. Plenty of Democrats are worried about losing moderate swing voters and want to score brownie points by doing things we normally associate with Republicans. Things like giving the police more money when they are already misusing their bloated budgets and not preventing or solving any greater number of crimes...or, you know, cracking down on mask-wearing and not caring if it puts more people at risk by doing so than it protects—if such a ban would even protect anyone at all. Because honestly, if someone was going to commit a crime and wear a mask to hide their identity, they will likely still commit the crime anyway, and may still wear a mask when they do so because—what’s an extra little charge like that if they get caught?
No, folks, when it comes to a lot of issues, racism and misogyny among them, the North isn’t better than the South. Nor, really, is the West, the Midwest or anywhere else. A lot of it is just better hidden, or in smaller pockets, and it doesn’t take much for the ignorance to rise up and common sense and public safety be tossed to the wind. Time to stop pointing to “other places” as the problem and realize we have serious problems all over the place.
I can’t help but wonder if this is also rooted in good old fashioned racism… pre-COVID, it was common practice in many Asian cultures to wear a mask if you felt under the weather.
Not so hidden.