(Dobbs) We're Living In Flat-Earth Time
Opposition to masks and vaccines is about politics, not protection.
There is no more stunning hypocrisy than this: many Americans who parrot the NRA’s (and Donald Trump’s) call for guns in schools to protect their children are the same ones now fighting tooth and nail against masks in schools… to protect their children.
One way to explain it: this is about politics, not protection.
We’re living in a world where science, and statistics, and safety, take a back seat to blind faith. A world where, if one side says the sun comes up in the east, the other says no, it comes up in the west. The enigma for me isn’t about how we rebut the duplicity. It’s about how we reconcile the divide.
That’s why it scares me to say, the gap has grown so wide across the spectrum of issues today, and trust has shrunk so low, I don’t think we can.
Masks, and mandates, are just the most conspicuous example, and here’s how bad it has gotten. Two weeks ago, a former 60 Minutes correspondent named Lara Logan, doing a guest gig on Fox, had the audacity to suggest that because Dr. Anthony Fauci has supported mandates for masks and vaccines, he “represents Josef Mengele— the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the second World War and in the concentration camps.” That’s inane, not to mention insulting to the memory of twelve million souls who suffered far worse under the Nazis than public health mandates to wear a mask and get a shot.
But the notion has taken hold. Fauci told the Senate a few weeks ago that he and his family have been on the receiving end of hate mail, of suspicious powders sent to his home, of phone calls threatening their lives. He was on the “kill list” of a California man caught on his way to Washington DC in December with an AR-15. A woman showed up at an anti-mandate rally a week ago with a poster saying “Hang ‘em high” with a picture of Fauci’s decapitated head in a noose.
Anthony Fauci, whose whole career has been about curbing infectious diseases, now has security police sleeping in his guest room.
Of course he’s not the only one. Teachers, school board members, doctors and nurses and public health officials all have been assaulted for advocating what Fauci advocates: protection against the pandemic.
But remember, it’s about politics, not protection. We are living in what one commentator calls “flat-Earth time.”
A conservative Denver Post columnist wrote toward the end of last year, “I will no longer comply with government mask mandates.” Her reasoning? “The paucity of benefits to mask-wearing weighed against the costs to interpersonal communication and to breathing easily makes the case for noncompliance.”
How about looking at it the other way around? Weigh those discomforts and disruptions against the disaster of the coronavirus and against protecting the most vulnerable, and give that half-baked argument its other half: the paucity of real costs to mask-wearing makes the case for compliance. Or maybe it could be even simpler: the cost of dying makes the case for compliance.
This isn’t rocket science. Put a scientifically engineered mask over your nose and mouth— the kind medical teams wear during surgery, the kind designed to repel viral particles 200 times thinner than a human hair— and it’s no contest. An obstacle to transmission beats an opening. Breathing through a mask beats not breathing at all.
Maybe this is the place where I throw in the latest statistic: right now in the U.S., approximately 2,300 people are still dying every day from Covid.
But for many Americans, for whom science now takes a back seat to scuttlebutt, it comes down to Chico Marx’s celebrated question, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” The Washington Post summarized it well: “People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, internet trolls and even elected leaders.”
No, I don’t see how we reconcile the divide. It’s flat-Earth time.
And it only gets flatter. Just as Fauci is compared to the Nazis’ “Angel of Death,” mandates are compared to fascism. Critics— who include some of our highest elected politicians— complain that a government that forces people to wear masks or to get vaccinated for the greater good— whether local, state, or federal— is no better than China.
For two reasons, that’s blatantly bogus.
First, today in China, authorities are literally surveilling citizens to determine where they are, where they’ve been, and what contacts they’ve had that might have exposed them to Covid. Some who have broken the rules have been jailed. Maybe it’s a matter of degrees but measures in the United States don’t hold a candle to that. We imprison people for going to an insurrection, not for going maskless.
And second, if you don’t like what’s happening here, you can scream, you can protest, you can sue, you can ignore. Try that in China.
One more example of the insurmountable divide: the same way that many Americans who once accepted science now abandon it, many who once promoted law and order now turn a blind eye to it. Believe what you like about the mendacious movement to “Stop the Steal” (which polls suggest most Republicans still inexplicably embrace), but how could people with any conscience cheer at a Texas rally this past weekend when Donald Trump said “it’s a disgrace” that the insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol last year are being treated “so unfairly.” These unfairly treated citizens are the ones who beat police officers and hunted politicians with shouts like “shoot (Pelosi) in the friggin’ brain” and “Hang Mike Pence." And, lest we forget, who tried to violently overturn the election.
This was the same rally where Trump denounced the district attorney in Atlanta who is investigating his effort to intimidate Georgia’s Secretary of State and overturn its 2020 vote (which of course he lost). “Radical, vicious, racist, and sick” Trump called the D.A. Now threats have come in. Yesterday she asked the FBI for help with security.
Dr. Fauci, you’ve got company.
Wasn’t there a time when the Republicans were the law-and-order party and liberal young Democrats were the ones who called the police “pigs?”
The beatnik generation poet from the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, once closed a poem with a thought I feel today: “My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”
If we can’t actually reconcile the divide, maybe at least we can keep our sweet land of liberty from dividing even further, and to do that, just remember one thing: no matter what anyone says, the sun only comes up in the east. Even if the Earth is flat.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.