Uncovered

A few days ago, Dalia Lithwick wrote an article for Slate, which the publication titled: "Refusing to Wear a Mask Is a Uniquely American Pathology." It was subtitled: "The obsession with individualism and the misinterpretation of constitutional freedom collide into a germy mess." It was, of course, designed to be eye-catching. Slate is, for the most part, a free commentary site, which means that most of its operating revenue comes from advertisers. And that means driving clicks.

When I went for a walk late this morning, something stood out for me. While people were somewhat touchy about perceived violations of social distancing or other items related to the current COVID-19 outbreak, things like right-of-way and other trail-use guidelines were, for the most part, completely ignored.

Given this, I expect that when people don't wear masks (or other face coverings, given how difficult formal masks can be to obtain) that it's less about some "obsession with individualism" or a misinterpretation of the constitution, and more about a simple lack of fear. Riding a bicycle on a narrow sidewalk when it's been clearly posted that cyclists should dismount simply doesn't carry the same perceived level of consequences as walking, or breathing, too close to someone, even though it's entirely possible to kill someone by striking them at speed. Knocking someone down on concrete is nothing to be taken lightly. But dismounting a bicycle, walking it fifty yards, and then mounting up again is an inconvenience that many people would rather not deal with, and they don't see the harm.

And perhaps this is part of the reason why there seems to be so much fear-mongering in the modern United States. Not specifically related to the current coronavirus, but in general. Fear of consequences drives compliance, and people tend to be poor at understanding the general level of risk of any given action. So it becomes about scaring people.

And we can relate this back to people not wanting to wear masks. Given that the CDC says that even a t-shirt can supply the materials to make a serviceable covering, it can be understood that people may detect a whiff of the theatrical in all of this. After all, many t-shirts are made of very thin materials, and not very densely woven. Sure, it's not meant to be up to the standards of a surgical mask, but that may be why people find it odd. After all, surgical masks aren't respirators and "They are not designed to protect the wearer from inhaling airborne bacteria or virus particles," according to CVS. So why should a makeshift face covering made from a shirt do any better? So, if someone's not particularly afraid of becoming sick, and most face coverings aren't designed to prevent illness in the first place, why bother with it?

There is a degree to which one might legitimately see wearing a face covering as being more of a concession to public piety than public health. And I'm not sure there any real pathology in not following the crowd.

Boys' Club

There is a cliché that's been making the rounds for a while; it goes a little something like this: Problems that impact women's health don't inspire legislation to remedy them because the United States Congress is made up of mostly men. If these problems impacted men as much as they do women, Congress would have addressed them some time ago.

Okay, I'll bite. Why?

I get that this is conventional/received wisdom; male members of Congress are a bunch of unreconstructed sexists who are card-carrying members of the Inner Circle of the Evil Patriarchy. But doesn't this presume that members of Congress are somehow more sexist than Americans at large? After all, Congresspeople (one presumes) are human, too; they have mothers, wives, sisters, daughters et cetera that they care about. (After all members of Congress don't seem to be any less likely to be married or have children than Americans as a whole.) Are we really presuming that election to the national legislature somehow makes the men of Congress more likely to sacrifice their female family members than the rest of us? Or that these same female family members are somehow more likely to be on-board with this than other women?

In other words, is the problem really Congress? Either Congressmen are a reflection of the public at large, or said public has a penchant for electing people more sexist than themselves into office. Either way, the problem seems to be with the public, rather than the few hundred men in Congress. But I understand the impulse to blame Congress for this. It's the nature of populism to divide the world into the virtuous "people" and the corrupt "élites," and Congress is always a convenient bastion of the élite that can be cast as a pit of vipers.

The cliché has the ring of "truthiness" about it, in that it seems plausible and offers a conveniently simple explanation for something that is likely quite complicated. As long as one doesn't examine it particularly closely, anyway, and that's kind of thing about truthiness; once a statement has acquired that quality, people tend not to look into it that deeply, in much the same way that people don't bother to closely examine a lot of mundane information. But maybe a closer look would serve well here, as a means of mobilizing the voters who act as the power behind the throne.

Being Very Afraid

Screencapped from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/ahmaud-arbery/611539/

A question can be appropriate, even pressing, yet still, perhaps, be the wrong question. When Ibram Kendi asks "Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?" I think that it is the wrong question. In no small part because the answer is "everyone." After all, much of the point behind "Pandemic Shaming" is the attempt to get people who aren't behaving with sufficient fear of the current respiratory disease outbreak to fall into line with the people who are. So, if the SARS 2 COV virus is any indication, not only is everyone allowed to be afraid, but the people who aren't afraid are a deadly threat that everyone else should be afraid of.

So there's no real question of "Who gets to be afraid in America?" The question is, what are people allowed to be afraid of? I'm not a member of Black Lives Matter, and so I don't presume to speak for them, but, as I see it, the whole reason why the movement came into existence is the habit of meeting fear with deadly force, and the idea that the consequences of this lethal response are often overlooked, because it contributes to a reduction of the (immediate) fear. And, also as I see it, a lot of the pushback against Black Lives Matter is driven by the idea that Black Americans have no legitimate reason to be afraid of encounters with law enforcement, "if they don't have anything to hide." It may be because every Black person who appears to have been killed in some encounter or another was genuinely a violent threat, and so the tales of innocents being killed are fictions, or it may be that there are only a few "bad apples" to be looked out for. (A viewpoint that misunderstands the message of the saying concerning "bad apples" in the first place, it should be noted.) But in any event, it's a narrative that says that Middle America is allowed to be afraid of Black America, while Black America's fears of Middle America are considered somewhere between naïvely overwrought and deliberately fraudulent.

Back when Ta-Nehisi Coates was still writing regularly for The Atlantic, and back when the site still allowed comments, I encountered the phrase "The exculpatory power of fear." I wrote about it at the time, because it stood out for me. I find it interesting that the author of the comment, "bear report" effectively makes the same point as the headline: "Of course, the privilege of fear is not uniformly extended because of the political and legal power it grants." But the "privilege" of killing others in self-defense is not reserved for anyone in particular. Had Father and Son McMichael themselves been Black, it's unlikely that the police in Brunswick would have been any less likely to take their story at face value. And for many, the counterfactual that they compare the scene against is one of Ahmaud Arbery and his father gunning down Travis McMichael as a suspected burglar. The message isn't that Black people aren't allowed to be afraid. It's that they shouldn't be afraid of White people, history and the present day be damned.

This is not to say that American society never grants special rights to be afraid. One can imagine, say, a twenty-something White woman (let's call her Alexis, for the sake of this example) being in Ahmaud Arbery's place. She certainly would have been granted leave to be terrified that the McMichaels meant to abduct and/or sexually assault her. And it's possible that the same would be true had she been Black. The story that the McMichaels were defending themselves against a dangerous felon would likely have been viewed with much more skepticism. regardless of the color of Alexis' skin. (It is, of course, highly debatable how that well such skepticism would hold up if we assume a Black or Hispanic Alexis, as opposed to a White or Asian one.)

But the differences in people's fears make for a difficult situation, and always will. Because how does one set up a scenario in which trusting those that one is afraid of consistently leads to the best outcomes? I believe that it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who first put it this way, and I think that he was on to something: White America's history of injustice towards racial minorities has created a situation in which present injustice is seen as a shield against the justified anger of those same minorities. Vulnerability is seen as too high a price to pay for a just society, and so the injustices will continue until unconditional forgiveness can be guaranteed. Thomas Jefferson predicted that there would be "new provocations" as time went on. I wonder if he had come to the same conclusion.

A lot of the fears of modern Americans can be chalked up to what one might call a form of Affluenza; people have enough that they are afraid to lose it. I doubt that this is going to go away anytime soon; there is little sign that even the wealthiest people in the nation are sanguine about the idea of losing even relatively small portions of what they have. And when that fear suits people's purposes, it is stoked. It doesn't take much to conclude that many people fear elements of the world around them much more than they actually understand them. Even if the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself, that still means that there is plenty for many people to be afraid of.

Gone Fishing

More found object photography. Perhaps predictably, I cam across this on a bridge.

I Don't Do This Often Enough

Sometimes, one should recognize that it was a beautiful day, note that fact, and then say nothing else about it.

Today was a beautiful day.