The Fear or Fear, Itself

...unmasking the brave defenders of contagion

I was thrown out of a grocery store yesterday, for making issue of the fact that a vendor working to stock the shelves with tortilla chips was wearing his facemask around his neck, as opposed to the way it’s intended to be worn. Of course, this is at a time when anybody entering a store, even as a customer, is required to wear a mask inside. It’s posted on the door of every establishment that’s been lucky enough to remain open throughout the pandemic.

For most of the job, the guy was twelve inches away, at most, from the shelves he was stocking. Breathing on each bag, as he put it in its place. Maybe it was bordering on fixative paranoia, to some small extent; maybe the pandemic has pushed all of us a little past the brink, when it comes to such matters. It just bothered me.

I didn’t see why he, a subcontracted worker, should be exempt from the requirement published on walls and doors all over the store that employees and customers must both wear masks. When I asked him about it, he responded in what’s become a predictable fashion.

He turned to me. “I’m sorry, do you have a problem?” He said, in an unmistakably confrontational tone. There was no doubt he heard my question clearly.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, “But I asked you a very simple question. Are you having trouble understanding my English?” This was a budweiser-white dude, I wasn’t trying to imply anything about his actual lingual skills or national origins.

It escalated, as he doubled down on his condescending and dismissive gestures. I told him to go fuck himself, and that I was going to go and find a manager to speak to. Yes, I drew first fuck. But I found his adversarial dismissal of my rightful concerns insulting, both as a consumer and as a man.

I found an employee and expressed my frustration at the stocker’s disregard of the rule, and his insulting behavior towards me. He went to find a manager. When they returned to speak with me it became clear that she had no interest in talking to the gentleman, and turned to leave. I asked her if she was refusing to speak to the man I’d brought to her attention. She said she was going to get the owner to come and deal with it.

I had to walk by the stocker again, and now he had the mask around his mouth, but hanging so loose I could still see his lips and teeth when he talked.

When he showed up, I was on my way to check out of the store. I realized he’d come to see me, and when I explained why I’d been frustrated with the stocker’s lack of a mask and his behavior towards me, the store owner looked at me like he was waiting for me to shut up.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him.

“Okay that’s it, you’re out of here,” he ordered. Suddenly, I was the offender.

“Seriously, you’re going to throw me out because I complained that a worker wasn’t wearing their mask? I have to wear a mask. It’s a posted requirement!”

“You’re not wearing a mask,” he told me. When I clearly had a mask on my face.

He told me I was to leave and never return to the store. Which sucked because I was a regular customer, there. In fact, I remembered having helped a disabled woman who’d fallen outside the front door, on my last visit there before this one —my actual last visit, it would come to pass.

Look, I’m not gonna lie. Confrontations like this have happened to me a couple times, recently. It’s getting hard to keep my mouth shut, when I see people being blatantly disrespectful about Pandemic safety measures.

Just a day before this, I’d gone into the little mini-mart at the Chevron on Snoqualmie Pass, in Washington. I’d wanted to get some licorice to help keep me awake, after what had become a week of long-haul driving. It helps to keep your eyes open, having some sugar on a long drive. It’s tricky, though, to make it last. The smart strategy is to eat one stick of licorice and stop, until you get sleepy again. Once I get that taste, though, I normally just keep eating it till its gone. That’s just the story, between me and black licorice.

I’d been excited to find it in the candy aisle, which I’ve discovered can be something of a rarity. There’s a lot of places that stock three or four different kinds of red licorice, and no black licorice. It makes a guy feel discriminated against, honestly.

It’s a really emblematic fact of American life, that the majority prefers red licorice over black. Red licorice has always been an artificially-flavored treat, whereas black licorice actually tastes like licorice root. It’s an amazing flavor, one of the best. But, we like what we like. Seriously, though, in some stores they’ll have, like, seven different kinds of red licorice. And NO BLACK. That seems like a willful neglect, born of a personal distaste for the flavor, a gesture from which I take personal offense.

Black licorice is not only as good as red licorice, it’s actually better. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just say we live in a world where the two forms of candy were equal. If the two flavors are equal, why are we citizens forced to endure an interstate highway system, populated mostly by culinary infidels who inflict their lack of good taste on an entire population of travelers, many of whom would even be satisfied with one of the shitty boxes of the ‘Red Vines’ black licorice (see how insidious it is?). A twizzlers black licorice. And instead we see varieties of red, in every licorice-shaped product.

Anyway, this is all to say that I was in a good mood. I’d found some goddamned black licorice. Everybody in the store was wearing masks. One guy was coughing profusely underneath his, when I’d walked in. I waited for him to pay for his stuff and leave, before I even got in line. When I did, I stood behind a pleasant woman in a dress, and her two children. Then a different woman with a teenaged daughter got in line behind me. She stood uncomfortably close to me, Pandemic or no.

“Would you give me six feet of space, please?” I asked the lady.

She did her best impersonation of a bulldog, as she stuck her chin up at me, clearly resolved not to afford me the space I’d requested.

I looked at her, realizing what was happening. She was making a stand. The line moved up.

“Lady just move back a couple paces,” I said, incredulous.

“You better just move forward,” She glared and hissed at me, almost sounding like it accompanied a snub-nosed pistol aimed at my kidneys —like the tone of an enforcer, dominating their prey.

I’m sorry but this fat old redneck bitch wanted me to knock her fucking teeth out, behaving like that. In a pandemic like the one we’re working our way through, a refusal to grant that simple six feet of space amounts to a threat to my person, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the whole reason we’re supposed to observe it, yes? In all honestly I eventually ended up leaving the situation slightly frustrated with myself, that I didn’t push her onto her fat ass, there in front of everybody in the store.

“Lady get the fuck away from me,” I snarled.

“How dare you talk that way around these children!” she cried, indicating the family in front of me. Yes, she played that card.

“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” I told the mother ahead of me, “for swearing in front of your children,” I looked back at this tough old bulldog woman, “but I’m about to go and see my parents, who are nearing seventy years old, and I’m not interested in catching somebody’s germs and bringing them back and getting them fucking killed!”

The woman glared up at me, still refused to move back. At this point, I would have had to get physical with her, in order to get her off of me. It would be inappropriate of her to behave like this with another person, even if it wasn’t a pandemic. Her teenaged daughter pretended to be looking at some candy on a shelf.

“Hey, what’s going on here?!” I finally hollered up at the lady behind the till, “This woman is refusing to social distance with me, even after I’ve asked her to move!” The checker wasn’t wearing a mask, herself, although she did have a plexiglass shield between her and her customers.

“Um, ma’am, we actually are requiring everybody to give six feet of space in here,” she told the woman behind me. And she moved back, finally. I could see her daughter was somewhat familiar with the awkward situation, having probably had to go through too many experiences like this with her shitty mom as she’d grown up. I felt embarrassed for her.

When she rang me up, the woman at the till told me, “I understand what you mean, about not wanting to get your parents sick,” which sort of missed the point in my opinion, but oh well. At least she sympathized.

“I’ve just driven to California and Texas and back,” I said, “and I’m fucking sick and tired of people not taking this shit seriously. It’s fucking ridiculous, and stupid!” I looked at the bulldog lady, when I’d said it. “They’re fucking idiots,” I said, emphatic.

It was a fact. I’d driven my car from Monitor, Washington out to Los Angeles, with the first load of a two-part move, to my new apartment. The following morning I’d rented a car and drove to Lubbock, Texas, where I packed up the apartment of my friend’s daughter. She was a Grad Student with UW, who’d been doing work at Texas Tech. She’d gone out to Vermont to visit her mom for a short visit in early March, and then just stayed after the shutdown occurred. Then two moving companies had cancelled on her, after booking the move for August. So she offered me the money they were going to charge her, to go out and get it all together and drive back to Seattle with it.

This worked out for me, because I’d been trying to figure out what way would be most economical and germ-free to get back to Washington, once I’d taken my first load to Los Angeles. I’d thought about hopping a train, even, but I’m never very good at anticipating their destinations, and that could have made the journey stretch out to a dramatic and frustrating extent. As it happened, even though the total series of moves came out to somewhere around 5300 miles, it was kind of nice to get out and tour the country —a little achey without cruise control, in the Uhaul truck. And it proved to be a little dicey, as far as germs went.

There were a lot of questionable gas stations in Arizona and New Mexico, little underfunded mom & pop joints I ended up at when the tank ran down too far to ignore. They were probably shirking on surface wipe-downs and other pandemic amenity services. And all sorts of other travelers were coming in and out, often without masks.

I kept a bottle of sanitizer on me at all times, in a cargo pocket of my shorts. Any time I touched anything, I squeezed a dollop of sanitizer out on my hand.

I ended up staying for almost a week in Texas, packing up this young woman’s apartment and sorting out logistics on moving it back to Seattle —it turned out when I arrived that the Jeep she had was only a four-cylinder engine, and would be towing more than its rating, if I installed a trailer hitch and pulled even the smallest U-Haul trailer with it. So I had to rent a truck, and a towing dolly for the Jeep. It would have been upcharged furiously, if I hadn’t given a couple days on the booking, so that left me with a couple days of downtime, during which I mostly wrote, and sampled the different Tom Yum offerings at Lubbock’s Thai restaurants.

I went to Home Depot one day, to buy some boxes and packing supplies. There were signs out front, requiring masks. Then, when you went inside, numerous people were simply walking around with them around their necks, just like this jackass stocking Tortilla Chips, who got me thrown out of Grocery Outlet. Then I went to a Food King store, and it was just frightening. Nobody wearing masks, practically shoulder to shoulder congestion, at some points —and this, at a time when Texas was apparently experiencing a crazy upsurge in COVID-19 cases.

I started noticing, even in just the general style of driving, that the people of Lubbock demonstrated a sort of obstinate, aggressive stupidity in the way they behaved. It just seemed to be a theme, over and over again, in all these micromoments I experienced. Just a proud, naked entitlement, to do things the stupid way. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that, you know?

This woman at the gas station on Snoqualmie Pass made me think of Lubbock. It was like she’d been waiting all day for this standoff moment to happen, to give her a platform to announce to myself and the world that she wasn’t afraid.

Great. Don’t be afraid. That’s fine.

But if, in the middle of a pandemic, when scientists and doctors are prescribing six feet of distance as a means of preventing the virus’s spread —if, in that scenario, a person refuses to grant me that six feet of space— they are willfully obstructing my ability to practice behavior that will more surely guarantee my safety. They’re literally trying to bully other people, because they think these people following Quarantine protocols are ‘fearful’.

It’s the same obstinate insistence that the Yellow Ribbon crowd demonstrated in the beginning of the Iraq War. “Support the Troops!” was the only thing you’d ever hear come out of their mouths, in response to whatever intellectual or emotional appeal you made about the martial recitivism and moral regression our invasion of that country represented. They thought of the anti-war movement as ‘fearful’ and ‘weak’; too ‘cowardly’ to stand up to our enemies. Of course, all of us protesting the war spent a whole lot of (inevitably) wasted time, trying to explain to these people that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11, or WMDs. But it didn’t matter, and it still wouldn’t, were one to try to resuscitate that conversation with any of those people today.

They resented what they thought was our fear. They thought we were weak, for succumbing to it. They thought we were immoral, for questioning our own morality, as a nation. And it made them afraid, to observe as we allowed ourselves to experience and respond to the fear.

All these anti-maskers are creating situations —again and again, across the country— that can only add to the labor and risk required of our healthcare essential workers, who are stuck responding to COVID-19 cases, whether they like it or not. They didn’t enter the healthcare field during a pandemic. These people refusing to wear masks don’t even seem to regard these healthcare professionals as people. Or, at the very least, they certainly feel no shame about making the decision for them, of how many more COVID cases they’re going to be forced to deal with in a given week.

Sounds like a fun life, doesn’t it? Going in to work every morning, not with the stress of preparing to avoid any contact with the virus, but with the knowledge that you’ll be working directly, exclusively, with people who are actively suffering from it!

And each new headline that comes out about anti-maskers dying of the Coronavirus just streams in one ear and out the other. They aren’t even listening. They’re not even engaging with reality.

I think this is because they are actually performing a fear response, living in a fight-or-flight reaction, to the pandemic itself. These are the same people who deny climate change, who refuse to admit that the Republican Party and Democratic Party alike treat the working class like a Cash Cow, a piggy bank, a virtual living slush fund.

These are the same people who talk about smaller government and yet think governmental officials should have some sort of determinative power over citizens’ private sex lives. Who support institutional surveillance of private citizens, as a matter of normal intelligence protocol.

These people grew up in fear —fear of authority, fear of change, fear of compromise, fear of weakness, fear of vulnerability, fear of being wrong, fear of being human! And yet the only thing they know how to do, when the specter of those fears rises up again in their lives, is to shout obstinately at the other people waylaid by it.

They haven’t the courage to face fear, head on. They haven’t the courage to admit that authority is morally bankrupt, in the Oligarch state. They haven’t the courage to admit that, far worse than sending their sons and daughters to unnecessarily die in foreign wars, they’ve sent them to unnecessarily kill. These people are trying so hard to pretend like they’re brave, in not wearing their masks —they’re tough!— precisely because they are so afraid to admit the fact of their fundamental impotence, as citizens of the United States.

It’s just so much easier to find something nearby to shout at! It’s so much easier to manufacture some petulant stand-off, with one of these bleeding-heart O’Biden worshippers. How is it that these proud Americans can care so little for the way their lives impact the lives of their neighbors? How is it that ‘Liberty & Justice, for All’ is an invitation, to force upon me a greater risk of viral contraction than I’m comfortable taking? Who invited them to determine for me what feels safe and comfortable, and what doesn’t?

It’s like they think the force behind this mask and distance mumbo jumbo is some nefarious Boogeyman, which they can dispel by ritualistically taunting him. So every time they make their stand —with some innocent, plague-fearing passerby— every time, they’re staring that boogeyman in the face.

But what can you really do about a Boogeyman?

Can you hunt him down and kill him? No. The Boogeyman is a made-up character, an amalgamated construct of fear. You close the closet door, or you put on a nightlight. Or you think about something happier. That’s how you deal with the boogeyman.

And that’s what all these anti-maskers are doing —they’re running from the Boogeyman, in being assholes to their neighbors. They’re projecting their fear out at those whom they see as capitulating to it. They’re saying, “Not today, devil!”

But it’s not a devil, or a Boogeyman. It’s their neighbor. Maybe from a few cities away, yeah, but we’re all Americans. Right? I mean, it would be pretty un-American to suggest that some of us are more entitled to the identity than others.

It’s just funny to me, that there are all these horrible things happening right now, in America and the world —there’s a lot to be afraid of, in the world of 2020!— but these truck-stop Geronimos want to make their grand stand in the candy aisle of a gas station mini-mart.

I mean, really, we the working class are caught between the hammer of profit and the anvil of austerity; we are harvested like crops, across boom-and-bust cycles; we’re demoralized for our audacity to hope, as a matter of general policy; then, as thanks, we’re run through a morass of paperwork and red tape every time we need to do anything of significance in our own day-to-day lives. It’s so obvious, so transparent now, what the Neoconservatives and the Neoliberals (and whatever Trump is) all have in common —the way they use us to achieve their career aspirations, by gaming the American economy to suit the gluttonous ambitions of Corporate Lobbyists, and at the same time refuse to empower us in the pursuit of our own economic well-being.

And their answer, these anti-maskers? The moment where they feel irresistably called to action? A well-meaning neighbor simply asks that they observe the social distancing and mask-wearing requirements, which are real enough that servants of the law are currently enforcing them with citizens. That’s going to be the foe. They’re going to pick a fight with their neighbor. Because that’s how you America, goddammit.

I know most of you reading this aren’t, but I finish this essay in a direct appeal to the antimaskers, all the same:

Oh, you petulant idiots; You proud Kraft-macaroni martyrs —what kind of a pissant stand is that to make, in a world of such monotonous barbarity? There are legitimate reasons to revolt, all around us, and yet this is the moment you’ve decided is worthy of making a move? Let’s look at a couple key moments from recent history.

We were lied to by our government and national news media, so that our sons and daughters could go to a land across the planet, and kill and die in the name of global economic domination.

You found out about the lies, and said nothing.

They broke the domestic economy, and that of the world, on a massive bullshit amateur-hour sales scheme in the housing market. It broke our economy, and the world’s, and what did our bipartisan leadership do in that moment? They paid them off, for having done it to us. They put the burden of restoration, ultimately, on the backs of the people who were victims of the mortgage crisis, the American people. Nobody went to prison for it. Nothing was done to change the way the Market is being run.

And you said nothing.

You go around screaming about black people and brown people, because they’re the only people you feel comfortable blaming, because in your small, racist minds they’re the only ones who definitely aren’t in charge.

Because the thing you really fear is authority.

You fear it so fucking much, you worship it. You’re addicted to it. You can’t even think, in its presence.

It’s all tied in, you know? To your childhood, and your relationship to your parents, and the way you were in school as a kid, and the way you are in the workplace. Authority is god, the father, the president, the priest, the judge, the policeman —the System.

Because it is one of your life’s sole central concerns, to live in perpetual denial of this fear, you never accurately recognize what it is that burdens you in this life. You never look into the face of your oppressor, because you remain unwilling to admit that you’re being oppressed.

If you could stop taking every authority figure who speaks your rhetoric on their word, and admit that most men in the world —at the very least, in their professional expression— demonstrate a rich capacity for self-service, and a general disregard for their fellow human being, if you could admit this you would not feel so comfortable just trusting in the slogans and platitudes that make up the most of what these elected actors say, to gain our votes (“It was a deBATE!”).

Nobody’s better than anybody else. That’s a truth that will never die, at least as long as we all continue to. Death will find us all, when it does. It’s what we do with our life that ends up defining us. And if you make your grand stand in this life against your great nemesis, and you make it over wearing protective masks in a virus pandemic?

I’m sorry, but what?!

What about the evictions? What about the hunger? What about all the people who are suffering in other ways —my mother wasn’t able to have a necessary surgery done on her arm for months, because so many people were in the hospital with COVID. Her need was only so serious, thank God, but there must have been thousands of people who missed out on critical treatment and care, because of the fear of cross-contamination, and the general overflow of patients, when the Shutdown originally began.

You people with your proud dignity, refusing to wear your masks or social distance, you’re making this shit worse for everybody. Your stance of defiance —‘against tyranny’, some of you have said— it’s just a slap in your neighbors’ faces.

The idea that people are killing people over this shit, in some incidences that have circulated in the national news, is just perverse. It’s one of the signs that the fabric of our society is disintegrating. And by and large it seems to have consisted of these ‘unafraid-of-fear’ types, who feel it incumbent on them to shove their feeling of invulnerability so far down the throats of their neighbors that they leave behind a body count.

You people think you’re standing up for something; you think you’re rebelling against tyranny. And all while the state has consistently forsaken your earning power, your saving power, and your voting power —all at the behest and service of private interests in the financial sector, the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, Big Pharma and the Healthcare and Insurance industry Mafia Families.

At what point do the truly brave and free of our country point the finger at the actual Boogeymen who are ruining it? You’re upset about the masks, and the distancing, because it’s a symbol of the shutdown. You feel like something is suspicious, about it all. The reason is because you, as a representative of the American Working Class, have a great reason to be suspicious of the governmental powers-that-be. They’ve been giving you great reasons to suspect them of conspiracy against you, for a long time. They have been conspiring against us —otherwise, how the fuck do you explain Citizens United (Among other things, to be sure)?

But you’re too afraid of it to look it in the face, so you’re lashing out at anything else you can identify as an ‘interloper’. It’s just the same sort of cowardly projection of anger that guides a person to kick the dog, when they’re angry at their spouse or their children. Or whomever. It’s uncivilized, and inhumane, and it’s an embarrassing ritual to be a part of.

I resent you, for it. For pretending that everything that’s wrong with the country is the fault of your fellow countrymen. That’s a lie, and it’s been fed to you by the people who are actually responsible —the Neo-people the American Majorities keep voting for.

So I say to you, the unpatriotic anti-maskers out there. If you love your country, you’ll quit blaming your mask-wearing neighbors for how bad everything is, and you’ll put your fucking masks on. We aren’t representatives of your fear, or servants of the forces you fear. We’re trying to keep from getting ourselves and our loved ones sick. Is that okay, with you?

Also, if you don’t start giving me six feet of space, I’m gonna start taking it from you. Don’t make me push that bitchy old lady over in the gas station —I swear to god, I’ll fucking do it.