05-16-2021, 07:55 AM
(05-16-2021, 03:14 AM)nguyenivy Wrote: Has anyone noticed the mask mandates going away for the fully vaccinated in the US everywhere except public transport?
I was at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art yesterday (excellent museum! If you are ever within a reasonable distance of it it is a great place to visit!), and my mask slipped below my nose a couple times. Staff told me to put my mask over my nose. I complied. I would guess that art museums, if this one is indicative, might be another such place.
My guess is that it is likely not a favorite place for people who fit the Trump profile (undereducated, white Republicans) which is also the group least willing to get vaccinated. The only complaint that I might have of the museum is that it has relatively little to catch the artistic achievement and experience of African-Americans... there is much artistic creativity among them, and they actually visit that museum (Toledo and relatively nearby Greater Detroit have large numbers of African-Americans). Such art would be largely modern (Harlem Renaissance and later)... I might be white, but I appreciate powerful and competent expression when I experience it.
Well, back from the sidetrack. I expect another wave of COVID-19 among Trump-like Republicans who think that having to wear a mask or something so simple as getting a pair of inoculations is as much an impingement upon human rights as is censorship, harassment of journalists or labor organizers, politicization of the educational syllabus to fit an ideology, or forced disappearance of political offenders. That many such people are in a totalitarian-style personality cult centered on you-know-who causes me to tremble. If Donald Trump were to die of natural causes, there would be all sorts of conspiracy theories of Democrats assassinating him... and the persons starting such theories might themselves contribute to a personality cult with someone else as a focus if not be the focus himself or herself.
It is difficult to operate public transit efficiently without packing people like sardines, and even if cost of operation and fare revenue were not a concern, having inadequate infrastructure (such as buses) for public transit that causes people to wait in longer queues than to which people are accustomed is another. People waiting for such transportation face long waits even in normal times. Mask mandates are appropriate because one never knows who might have never been inoculated. COVID-19 is still lethal, about on the scale of danger of death as a rattlesnake bite. At least a rattler is likely to move away from me. Before I got inoculated I had more fear of COVID-19 than of rattlesnakes. OK, most of the people who get envenomated are bitten on their hands or faces*, and they are not outdoor workers such as ranchers or utility linemen (cowboy boots exist to fend off rattler bites to the legs) or people sensibly hiking, camping, or fishing. Our tread even more lethal to a rattler than its bite is to us.
About 26% of the white population and about 46% of Republicans (I'm guessing that those largely coincide) say that they plan to not get inoculated against COVID-19. They will have "mask-free" get-togethers of various kinds, and the Plague of the Donald Trump Presidency will sweep them again and cause further deaths. But people inoculated against COVID-19 will at most experience a resurgence of fear... unless COVID-19 evolves into something against which the current vaccines pose no defense. Maybe "COVID-22" (God help us should that happen!)
* The typical victim of a rattlesnake bite has provoked the snake into a defensive bite by teasing the snake. The one exception to this rule is rock climbers who might place a hand blindly into a position in which an unseen rattler lurks. I would not do rock climbing even if I were fit for it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.