Drop the Damn Masks

"Sick sick sound

All fall down
It is a necessary evil -yeaaah!
Just like highway gas stations and people - yeeaaaah!

I remember golden days when all this was a mystery
And you could write a letter then or god forbid come visit me"

 

Dresden Dolls - Necessary Evil

 

 

I've been getting more and more annoyed over the past six months, as COVID-19 mask mandates were loosened and finally dropped, at seeing some still wearing them as some act of defiance, to the point that I find myself on the opposite political side from last year's railing against antivax paranoia. Situations change. Just as the whole point was for ALL of us to wear facemasks two years ago, it's conversely pointless now just to posture as saving the world.

 

Don't get me wrong, plenty of people might wear one with cause. Maybe you just have some unidentified sniffle and you're using the mask for common courtesy in not infecting others with the common cold or flu either - let's remember those masks aren't antibody-loaded; they're all-purpose filters. Then there's young children, not all of whom have been fully vaccinated yet, and their parents who have to set a good example... BY VACCINATING THEIR DAMN KIDS INSTEAD OF JUST WEARING MASKS... or the elderly. I saw a rather antique female, masked, barely trudging behind a grocery store cart who looked positively terrified of the rest of us - maybe with good cause, I don't know what her last WBC count looked like, keep yourself safe gram.

But overall, life goes on, you can't completely up-end society for the sake of perfect bovine safety, most of us have been triple-dosed for half a year, and overwhelmingly the ones I see still sporting their badge of compliance are none of the above categories. They're perfectly healthy, twenty-something yuppies with nary a trace of respiratory discomfort, sipping their lattes through a straw, wearing masks as a fashion statement. Oh, fuck me. If it's not one set of idiots it's the other.

 

The last thing we needed was for a critical health measure to be degraded to just one more perennial, thoughtless SJW virtue signal. Drastic measures were needed in 2020 because of a new infection toward which we had no immunological defense, whether induced naturally or artificially. We needed to prevent 2% of the world's population, 160 million people, from dropping dead in one summer for lack of readiness. We've done that... badly... but it's mostly done, unless China cooks up some new menace, at which point have no fear, dead slaves are of no use to our corporate masters and they'll have their government patsies reinstate public health measures. The message was "flatten the curve" to prevent flooding hospitals not "be 3M's gimp for the rest of your life" and your pro-mask paranoia isn't helping matters any more than anti-vax paranoia. By this point the virus is obviously here to stay, and the measures against it really do approach those of the yearly flu.

 

I don't see world-saving heroes when I see masked yuppies. All I see is a bunch of fanatical braindead hicks expecting us to read their declaration that 'the south shall rise again' as some sort of heroism. Stop living in the past, hipsters, the masks are, like, soooooo last year. Quit posturing and just take your Listerine.