Maskless Mobs and Their Collateral Damage

At 80 with a problematic heart, I’m hyper careful about trying not to catch the COVID virus. I stay home, mask up when I have to leave and social distance with some precision. And there’s very good reason. COVID-19 is a terrible, painful, exhausting disease that infects the lungs, leaves some people debilitated for years, even when they’ve survived it, and suffocates others.

Last week, more than 3,000 Americans were dying of COVID every day. The country has almost 16 million cases of the disease and nearly 291,000 deaths.

With the terrible surge of the disease in New Mexico — sometimes with as many as 1,800 to 3,600 new cases a day — and virtually no hospital beds left, there’s a good chance critical care will be rationed here and that I won’t make the cut, having been deemed to have less of a chance to survive and prevail than younger sturdier folk. And, in such a case, I’d bow to youth and vigor.

But it wouldn’t be as if I’d caught the dread disease purely by accident. There’s a malicious strain involved as well, a deadly selfishness on the part of those who scoff at masks, tests, social distancing and vaccines, who see government of any kind as a bully to be shunned and who refuse to comply with even the soundest public health directives. They’re apparently not bothered that their intransigence dangerously increases the chances of the old and infirm catching this disease that’s spreading like wildfire. And it’s doing so in part because of their very defiance, their carelessness, their virtually sociopathic, conscience-dimmed political motivations.

The simple, well researched truth is that COVID-19 is a disease that could be minimized by everyone simply by wearing a mask and not crowding with other people. It is also a disease that spreads fast and far among maskless people in densely packed unventilated spaces who, in turn, infect other people. And the numbers are horrifying. Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of COVID-19, “is about three times as infectious as the flu.” Professor Hugh Montgomery, a person described as an “intensive care expert,” told the Business Insider that “if one person with coronavirus passes it onto three people, and those three people pass onto three more people for ten cycles, there will be 59,000 infections.” Montgomery said, “if you are irresponsible enough to think that you don’t mind” if you get COVID, “remember it’s not about you, it’s about everyone else.”

There’s a good case to be made that I, and many of my older friends, not to mention anyone with health issues young or old, would be the collateral damage of what I’ve come to think of as a mob of maskless domestic terrorists, who, in the name of “liberty” and “don’t tread on me” refuse to take the simple precautions to avoid infecting other people.

I know that’s strong language. But if I was denied care, or if a loved one of mine was sickened unto death because of surging COVID and left to die, that’s who I’d blame — the willful, ideologically driven, human vectors of this disease.

As domestic terrorists, they remind me in some ways of Timothy McVeigh and his off-hand remark about killing innocent people when he and his accomplices blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, murdering 168 people and injuring 680 more. McVeigh said he considered these victims “collateral damage” in his war against who he considered the gun-hating, control-freak bullies of the government of the United States and their “Socialist Wannabe Slaves.”

If an estimated 67% of Americans wear a mask, that means that 108.6 million people, or 33% of Americans, won’t wear masks.

Granted, some have respiratory and other diseases, including skin ailments, that prohibit mask wearing. But they aren’t in the majority. Some don’t think it’s cool to wear a mask, that it looks stupid and itches, and can’t be effective. I don’t think they are in majority either. Some are just drunken lout frat boys who use universities as an excuse to booze and carouse. There’s probably more of them, but still not the major source of surging infections around the country.

According to McGill University, people who don’t wear masks tend to be younger, male, and “lean conservative politically.” The public health danger comes from the ones who think that “freedom doesn’t look like this,” or who believe that masks offend “personal freedom,” claiming they are not against masks per se, but against government mandating they wear them. And there are many more who believe, apparently, that COVID itself, and masking, along with restricting the size of crowds, are part of a government conspiracy “to tame the population.” Some go so far as to say it’s all a Zionist plot, or part of a scheme to wipe out white people by the “mongrels” of the United Nations, spewing forth a whole sewer of other kinds of hate speech as well. They are joined by racist and separatist militants, armed to the teeth, who terrorize public health officials with their screaming mobs gushing invective and raging threats. They are the heirs of Tim McVeigh. They are the ones who I consider domestic terrorists.

McVeigh’s “last words” were the 19th century poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. “Invictus” is Latin for “unconquered.” It reads in part “…under the bludgeonings of chance/My head is bloody, but unbowed…./It matters not how strait the gate,/How charged with/Punishments the scroll./I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul.”

McVeigh’s heirs, at Trumpian hate rallies, believe violence, contempt of law, creating conspiracy fictions to deflect public health measures and righteously risking the infection of vulnerable people around them, are justifiable attitudes in response to the so-called crimes of the government and its “socialist wannabe slaves.”

They haven’t resorted to blowing up buildings yet. But they outright deny willfully harming people like me and younger folks with compromised health, but that’s what collateral damage means — damage you didn’t intend but knew would happen if you acted on your judgment that government is bad and that you are besieged by institutions that are out to get you. After his conviction, McVeigh was quoted in the Guardian, saying “I am sorry these people had to lose their lives, but that’s the nature of the beast. It’s understood going in what the human toll will be.”

When full blown medical rationing hits New Mexico, sometime sooner than later I fear, and folks are turned away from hospitals and start dying without intensive care because there are too many infected people to be cared for, then we’ll all understand what the infection of hate, and the indifference to the suffering of others that it breeds, is really all about. The heirs of McVeigh don’t care about you and me. The culture war is real for them and they are maskless soldiers in it. The COVID surges terrorizing the country, stimulated by these militant zealots, is one of the terrible side effects the culture war is taking.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image by Paul Becker)