Who Cares If Other People Wear Their Masks Forever?

“Who cares if other people wear their masks forever? They’re not bothering you.”

I care. And yes, they are bothering me.

As a mom to small children, my daily life is often go-go-go, without much time to stop and think and observe along the way. Today though, I found myself with a few unoccupied moments as I sat in the car with our smallest toddler while my husband and the other 2 kids ran into the grocery store for a couple of things. Every person I saw wore their mask all the way from their car into the store, and vice versa. That’s never become normal to me; it’s always felt strange and uncomfortable to see people like that, looking afraid (whether they are or not), agitated and unapproachable. Looking vaguely threatening, unidentifiable, and alien.

I know I’m not the only one who is bothered by this. And yet, I kept noticing, from one person to the next, the exact same sequence of events— car door opens, masked person emerges, masked person disappears into the store, and another one appears in his place. Like some sort of automated script, or a piece of dystopian choreography they all seem to have memorized. Little differentiates one person from another, all of them conforming flawlessly to the current social convention. It made me feel sad. It made me feel angry. I was, in a word, bothered. Actually, I am always bothered when I see another person in a mask, and more bothered the more of them I see.

And then, my family emerges. My daughters holding hands, chatting, and smiling when they see me looking their way. NORMAL. And the contrast between us and “them” is so stark to me in that moment that my heart swells with pride and my desire to protect my children from the darkness of the world has never been stronger.

I hate the masks, because of the fear and the weakness and the compliance they symbolize. But it’s the mask-wearers I have come to resent. Because it’s not just their choice, it’s the normalization of an objectively bad behavior that has surrounded my beautiful family for a YEAR now.

It’s wrong to comply with mandates that don’t make sense. It’s dishonorable to cling to false senses of security. It’s cowardly. I don’t want my children observing people in that state, and unless I shutter them away completely, that choice has been taken away from me. I don’t want their sense of what is normal to include others looking like that. I want them to know smiles, greetings, friendliness. I want them to develop the crucial ability to distinguish safe people from risky ones, and trustworthy behavior from suspect. Instead they are becoming familiar with averted eyes, heads down, the occasional person who physically steps back from them for no logical reason, or worse.

No matter how much it is mocked, derided and loathed, how my family is living is normal. It is not Neanderthal. It is not extreme fringe. It is not reckless. It’s as normal as it was a year ago, and for us, it will never cease being normal. I refuse to ever become unwilling to label widespread abnormal behavior as bothersome to me.