On his show Dave Rubin states: “I firmly believe now that COVID was just a test run to normalize masks so we could have jihadists out in the streets.” This seems like dangerous commentary considering the person who killed their own father for getting vaccinated based on conspiracy theories about threats. And of course this is just one conservative pundit, but even mainstream politicians are painting people in masks as “hiding their identity” and there have been videos — including shockingly of white male police officers ripping a respirator mask hardshell N95 off an Asian protester.
There need to be checks on power, resources devoted to protecting the vulnerable, and elected representatives and community leaders need to call for taking down the temperature on the rhetoric against groups that have already been targeted, or for doing things already politicized, like wearing respirator N95 masks and getting vaccinated. If the war drum continues to be beaten by weirdo pundits and fringe politicians, there will no doubt be some destabilized people who may target for harassment (or worse) the disabled, elderly, immunocompromised, transplant recipients, or cancer patients, because they have been hyped up into a state of fear and justification believing that people wearing N95s in public are terrorists. Attacks on healthcare workers are already a serious problem.
To be honest, I do avoid crowded locations for a number of reasons. Though I personally haven’t experienced harassment for wearing a mask, not even when I wear a N95 at boat launches in state forests, state parks, and game lands, sometimes deep in the “red” countrysides where some houses have huge permanent wooden trump signs and that sort of thing. I’ve not heard from anyone locally having much problem with this, even while masking at work habitually. In fact, I happen to know several conservatives who put on a mask at work during the winter now, without any requirement.
I actually more often hear of people being harassed for wearing a mask on the streets of liberal enclave cities. My suspicion is that this may have something to do with the fact that people can be ramped up to behave with hostility by the idea that they are in fact fighting back against a threat, whereas at the gamelands out in the rural area, they would rightly realize they are in fact the bully, not the underdog. There is historic evidence that people are prompted to act violently when they believe they are in fact defending themselves, no matter how absurd it might seem objectively.
McDoom, Omar Shahabudin. “The Psychology of Threat in Intergroup Conflict: Emotions, Rationality, and Opportunity in the Rwandan Genocide.” International Security 37, no. 2 (2012): 119–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23280416. The threat is framed or rationalized increasingly within society as part of a conflict between two readily identifiable social groups, such as those defined along ethnic, sectarian, or racial lines. In Rwanda, the civil war would be narrated as an “ethnic” conflict, one between the Hutu majority ingroup and Tutsi minority outgroup. It was not framed as simply a conflict between the government and rebels. The second mechanism is “outgroup negativity”: the greater the threat, the greater the references that denigrate the outgroup. Often the threat is framed to resonate against negative historical and cultural beliefs—myths or narratives—that exist within the in-group about the outgroup. In Rwanda, historical references to Hutu oppression at the hands of the Tutsi increased as the threat itself increased. The third mechanism is “outgroup homogenization”: the greater the threat, the greater the de-individualization of outgroup members. The threat is perceived as one posed not only by those bearing arms, but by all members of the outgroup. As the threat peaked in Rwanda, more and more Hutu would see all Tutsi civilians as the enemy. It was not just rebel combatants who represented the threat.
I’ve been ridiculed — told to not “catastrophize” about the dangers of going masked to a university campus which has banned all masks. I’ve been called alarmist before. And I hope I’m wrong and the upcoming months leading to the election somehow gets less and less hyped up and less tense, but I’m not counting on that. And I’m not counting on all police to recognize my ADA rights even if given special dispensation for wearing a mask as accommodation in a mask ban zone. I didn’t like the idea of pandemic comfort level buttons, and I don’t like the idea of having to get special dispensation sash that says “disabled” across it just to protect myself in order to go out and about in society.
Masks need to be freely available, and freely worn.