politics in your face
What happens when a topic so taboo some families have banned it at the dinner table is suddenly front & center?
The year is 2020. We’ve gone from avoiding politics in “civilized discussions” to discussing it on the reg, with strangers, on neighborhood streets, over social media, at work. Basically everywhere you’re brought up not to.
What’s struck me how the pandemic has made politics even more unavoidable.
Our personal political beliefs are now on display — whether we like it or not — in the form of face masks.
(Granted California is also dealing with wildfires. So it’s presently unclear if you’re wearing a mask because you:
A. Want to protect yourself & others from Covid
B. Want to protect your lungs from wildfire smoke
C. Are annoyed at having to wear one but people can’t tell from under the mask
D. Mix of above)
To be clear, I support individual political beliefs. To not have your own beliefs is, well, un-American. This reflects more on how 1. dramatically polarized and 2. suddenly public these beliefs have become.
I suppose of all personal protective equipment, a face mask is the most symbolic we could’ve ended up with. It covers the wearer’s mouth and nose, renders facial expressions non-existent, makes breathing more difficult and quite literally muffles our speech.
Would the situation be at all different if we’d been told to wear gloves or something? Probably — everything has double meaning these days.
While standing outside during a recent Central California road trip, I noticed a group of people not wearing masks. However, it was a quote on one of the shirts that stared back at me.
“Support the country you live in or live in the country you support.”
Those words etched into my mind for the rest of the trip. I couldn’t shake it.
It was broad enough, but served anti-immigration undertones. On a different day I could’ve blamed my overactive mind for projecting. But on this day the combo of the shirt plus no mask in a crowd of other masked individuals said: I’m making a statement.
Rarely are we so confrontational that we’ll walk up to a stranger and straight up start arguing.
That’s the other issue though: since Covid it’s been in our best interest to stay away from others.
How many of us live with people of opposing political beliefs? If we do, how many of us engage them in productive exchanges of political viewpoints?
Quarantine is more than a shelter in place; it’s a shelter away from opposing ideas, perspectives, sides. We have so little interaction with others — much less different views — that we’re falling deeper into polarized groupthink because of it.
It makes for the perfect storm.
So.
While we’re in this mess….should we mix it up by linking masks with religion or sex? No better time to piss each other off. We can always blame it on 2020.
The politicization is getting a bit old.