Courage

I sympathise with people feeling stir-crazy and wanting to get out and do something. Plus, getting out and moving around feels healthy and refreshing. Unfortunately, those are both feelings, and are entirely irrelevant to what is actually safe. There is also irritation at being told what to do, especially by governments or local buttinskis, even when they are correct.  The irritation increases (uh, maybe exponentially), when they are just plain wrong, forbidding people from going fishing in their own boat or playing tee-ball with their own family in a park. We begin assigning terrible motives to them, beyond mere nervousness and foolishness. These are also just feelings and entirely irrelevant to what is actually safe.

The irritation was predictable from the start, and I did predict it, but I overlooked an important aspect.  I projected that people would increasingly find excuses and rationalisations to make unnecessary trips or break social distancing, because that is my style.  I did not foresee that people would actually try to make a virtue of unsafe behaviors by calling them courage. They aren’t courage. They feel like courage in the same way that teenagers feel they are being courageous when they drive too fast and stay out late.  There is something like courage involved, in that you prove that you aren’t one of those timid people who doesn’t dare anything.  But mostly, you’re just doing it because it feels good, and shouldn’t kid yourself. I’m detecting a bit of attitude about this with people, both male and female though in different styles.

As a good counterexample, let us look at the recent behavior of our friend Grim.  He was antsy at being cooped up, so he went out for an extended ride on his motorcycle. The risk was entirely on himself, he didn’t bring added risk to anyone else. (Okay, maybe he did if he drove too fast, but I’m not inquiring into that and am sticking to the simplest form of the example.) Acts of civil disobedience, when you go fishing in your own boat (though you should not conveniently overlook contact and distancing at boat ramps) are also fine in my book.  If something is objectively safe – not just mostly safe if you squint really hard – and you want to run the social or legal risk of torquing people off, then go with my blessing.  I feel the same about political protest against government officials who are overreaching because…well, it doesn’t matter what their reason is. Insofar as they are declaring things a public hazard that aren’t a public hazard, I don’t much care if that’s because of stupidity, hand-wringing, or power grab. We think at first that the last of those is the most dangerous, but I’m not so sure.

But something else is increasingly creeping into this, and I don’t think it is justified. I also hear laxity increasingly excused by people who don’t engage in it themselves but don’t want to be seen as interfering with others.  Many of us have a horror of interfering with others which sometimes outweighs our willingness to assess situations dispassionately. I have a friend making noises about how he doesn’t put up with all this nonsense about masks, and I know it isn’t because he has done a thorough study of the relative safety of masking. I don’t want to say anything, but I may have to.  Being safe ourselves but shrugging at others because, well, a lot of people are high-spirited, and they aren’t going to put up with this forever, and governments have to understand…it’s fine if they want to take increased risks when it is only their increased risk. But that’s the same excuse we used with teenaged boys getting drunk, driving fast, and playing rough with girls until quite recently – still a common excuse in some circles.  They’re just high-spirited, you see, and what are you going to do?  It doesn’t get any prettier when we make dark warnings about what adults are going to do because they don’t like being in quarantine. That’s just a way of quietly excusing it. (You will notice that liberals use these dark warnings a lot about what black people and the poor are going to do if conservatives keep doing this or that.  It’s a way of quietly threatening and excusing it. [It’s also racist and condescending.] Gandhi did that with the British as well.)

There is considerable justification for the secondary point of pushing back against interference via protest or civil disobedience, as I suggested above, simply for its own sake. It’s good to fire a warning shot across the bow of the officious. I have no objection there, either, and that is not what I am talking about.  Yet I see the irritation as deeply affecting how people evaluate the information they are receiving.  They become predisposed to seeing this as no big deal, holding aloft every bit of information that supports that POV and discarding every bit that goes against it. Sometimes it’s just guys not wanting to look unmanly (to themselves or others) by being overcautious, nervous Nellies.  I have railed for decades against liberals, especially NPR and the Washington Post, arguing from anecdote, and now I am seeing lots of conservatives doing exactly that.  I will caution again that the people at the most risk who have the least ill motivation are the medical professionals who are directly involved. And they aren’t relenting in discussions of safety from their recommendation that distancing, self-quarantine, and masking are important.

A side point.  The new nickname for interfering, speak-to-the-manager women is “Karens.”  My brief research says it means women 30-60, usually suburban women, who have a particular attitude toward everyone else.  It’s an interesting choice of name because it comes much more from my generation than the one after.  The frequency was greatest for those born 1940-1980, and so women who would be 40-80 now, especially 45-75, so a full fifteen years off from the new stereotype. I knew lots of Karens growing up. The additional piece is that it was very popular among the Lutheran, meaning German and Scandinavian, women I have known across the years.  Thus I find it quietly humorous that the Swedish Lutherans I stem from may be the primary offenders here, leading to that choice of name. I mean, it wasn't the Greeks or Italians for this one.