The End of the Era of Mask Shaming

That part of the pandemic is finally over, or should be.

For the first, oh, nine months of the pandemic, I — and everybody else — was way too worried about masks. Not that they weren’t important: They were, vitally so, which is why I wore mine any time I wasn’t in my house. What obsessed me, along with too many of us, for too long, was whether other people were wearing them. When we look back at the Great Pandemic Year of 2020 in the United States, one of the things we will regret wasting so much of our time and energy on will be mask shaming.

Boy, did we all do it. I certainly did. There was something about going to a grocery store, with all the stress and worry that came with that anyway, and seeing some jackass without a mask on and acting like it somehow made him tough, or independent, or anything other than a jackass. Every time I went anywhere, the first thing I’d report back on to my wife when I returned was what percentage of people weren’t wearing a mask, and if it were higher than “zero,” we’d click our tongues and shake our heads and just tsk tsk tsk. What was wrong with people?

And boy, the anti-mask crusaders, the ones who acted like there was somehow something wrong with other people wearing a mask, they were even worse. Remember those idiots who charged through a Target, chanting…