Commentary

We all carry with us resentments from events over the last five years. I certainly do, and some are worth keeping. For example, I will never look at the medical profession, pharmaceutical companies, teachers’ unions, or government in general the same way. What they did to human liberty and free speech in the pandemic years was unspeakable.

That said, there are surely some we carry around that can be resolved.

There is a small, family-owned grocery in town that I’ve avoided using for four years. This is because four years ago, an employee there threw me out. This was after the people at the meat counter refused to serve me. They insisted that I wear a mask. This was in late 2021, long after the hysteria had died down and we knew for certain that masks achieved nothing.

Plus, I could never figure out why I was expected to wear a mask when I was not sick and did not fear becoming sick. It was a pure political symbol at some point, an obsequious signal of compliance, and I did not want to participate. It wasn’t only about me: by not wearing one, I was hoping to inspire others to join me.

At this late date, the local town had on and off mandates. They would apply and then be relaxed and then applied again. How anyone was expected to keep up was beyond me, and I had long ago decided to be a full refusenik.

They told me to leave the store. I was extremely bitter about this and boycotted. I have been seething about this for years, putting that little store in the enemy camp.

Finally I decided just to confront the issue. I went into this bustling busy store and found someone who seemed to be in charge. Sure enough, she was the manager. Very politely, I told her what happened and why I’ve boycotted for so long.

She was instantly mortified. The conversation alone seemed to open old wounds. She deeply apologized and explained that the health department was hounding them hard. Whatever edict came down that day was enforced. At some point, they could only have 10 people in the store at one time.

Making matters worse, customers were taking pictures in the store and posting to Facebook, tagging the mayor. They daily faced shutdowns. They actually worried for a time that anyone without a mask might be part of a sting operation.

In other words, they had suspected I was working for the government and testing their compliance.

Can you even believe that we lived through this reality?

In any case, despite all my knowledge, the possibility that the store itself faced deep threats that forced the rudeness that led to my having been tossed out actually never occurred to me.

Despite having written hundreds of articles and two books on the topic, and published thousands of others, somehow I had failed to apply the lessons I had learned from this crazy period in this one particular case.

Everyone was forced to do something. The government itself was the major player but this also roped in many among citizens who participated. They became willing executioners of liberty and free speech. They became afflicted with what philosopher Matthias Desmet calls “mass formation;” that is, being swept up with some collective movement of irrationality in the search for meaning in life.

This is why people were ratting out neighbors for noncompliance. When that starts, there really is no choice remaining for any institution that wants to survive.

You could say that the store should have resisted but consider the stakes. This store has been in the family for generations and they hope to keep it that way. The owners are custodians of a tradition. If they risked it all for only symbolic protest, they might have been shut down for good. Then the many employees would have gone without a job.

Many elderly customers that rely on the store for food because it is within walking distance would have panicked. The community would have lost an institution. The manager or owner making such a decision would never be celebrated as a hero but just the opposite. People would have said that they deserved to go out of business because they were threatening public health.

Given all these conditions, I can see now why it only made sense to push me out for not wearing a mask. They would otherwise never have turned away willing buyers. But these were extraordinary times.

I’m particularly intrigued at the role of public pressure in this drama. I learned from this period that totalitarian regimes can indeed count on recruiting zealots for enforcement from among the population. The history of the Cultural Revolution in China shows this. The so-called Red Guard was more ferocious than the regime itself in its enforcement of the new ways, the bad science, the demographic pushes, and the destruction of all things Western.

It was so bad at one point that Mao Tse-tung himself is said to have been alarmed at what he had unleashed. This is likely true of people at the top in public-health positions in the United States. Once people in the grassroots begin to imagine the unthinkable, there will always be those among them who are ready to try it out.

A good example was the closing of churches for Easter and Christmas in 2020. You can say that the pastors should have stayed open. Yes, they should have. That said, people were flying drones and ferreting out non-compliers and turning them in to the media which ran front-page stories that were shaming the worshipers. A small community in Texas that held services made national news when some people caught the virus and got sick.

It was this way with school and otherwise.

Yes, I know that everyone has an excuse and many of them are phony. No reason to accept all of them. There are people who are culpable of doing terrible evil to their fellow man. That said, not everyone who complied is guilty. Some made the best decision they could at the time.

What can be said about vaccine mandates? Here I’m a bit less willing to forgive. Any business that forced an experimental injection on their employees deserves genuine scorn. I’m not sure there is any good excuse for that. Such a dilemma seems genuinely to require heroic resistance.

Masking and forced “distancing” is another matter. I can see why some establishments enforced those as the least bad choice, not that they achieved anything for public health but complying with the mandates meant that the enterprise lived to see another day.

I was touched about the manager’s own apologies. I will return to this nice store, no question.

How long will it take this nation to heal from such ghastliness? How many relationships shattered? How much suffering has ensued? It’s awesome to contemplate.

Time for Understanding and Forgiveness