Nearly everybody now seems ready to admit that the whole masking hysteria during COVID was wrong, that masks do nothing, they are worthless and they always were, and there was never any point to wearing them. The Cochrane review from last month seems to have dealt a near-fatal blow to the mask thing. Of course there is are sizable number of holdouts who are continuing to insist that masks are great, effective, lifesaving and completely necessary, but they are dwindling. Fewer and fewer people care anymore.
That’s great. It’s been three years since this whole thing started and it’s three years past due that it was over. As someone who put on a COVID facemask probably only a dozen times over the course of the pandemic, I can’t say the end of the mask zeitgeist has a hugely practical effect on me and my family, at least not in an immediate sense. But at the very least it’s meant we don’t have to worry about it anymore one way or the other, and that’s great.
What was it like to never wear a mask? It was fantastic. As I wrote last year, masks are awful to wear: They’re hot, itchy, sweaty, damp, gross, uncomfortable, and they’re also embarrassing, infantilizing, humiliating, depressing. Nothing good ever came about from wearing them like this. I felt deeply sorry for the people who hated them but were required to wear them as part of their employment; in some ways I felt sorrier still for the people who seemed to eagerly put them on every day, who wore them happily, who boasted of wearing them and talked happily of wearing them, who wore them while walking alone in the fresh air and sunshine.
We never did any of that. My family never wore them; my wife and I put them on a scant number of times and none of our children ever wore them. Here’s what that was like for the roughly 18 months or so when you couldn’t really get around society without a mask:
Shopping. This was probably the most practically limiting part of our refusal to wear masks. We couldn’t really go into most retail outlets that required them. For grocery shopping we switched to online ordering and delivery; that actually worked better than I thought it would (though we returned to in-store shopping the minute we could do so without masks). For household goods and incidentals we would go to Walmart. Here’s a secret about Walmart: Nobody really cares about stuff there. Remember how as a teenager you’d go to Walmart with your friends at like 11:30 pm and wander around the aisles drinking Mountain Dew and nobody in the store cared? That’s still how Walmart is now. Oftentimes we would be the only ones unmasked in there but nobody cared. A few older white women would give us funny looks and wide berths but that was it. If we needed home improvement stuff we went to Lowe’s; again, nobody cared if you didn’t wear a mask there. This was how we got by. Local stores—forget about it. No business demographic was more slavishly beholden to masking than local stores. They were the state’s Germanic SS of masking enforcement, just relentless and uncompromising and pure hostile ideology. Walk into a local boutique or a pet store without a mask on and you’d be hit with six different screeches from six different directions, and some lady with purple hair would come running up to you waving a flimsy paper surgical mask at you while barking at you to “put your mask on.” This was especially true with local restaurants and coffee shops. I know a favorite local coffee shop where still to this day—on the cusp of spring in 2023—most of the employees are masked up.
Worship. We are Catholic and like virtually every Catholic diocese in the world, our diocese in the spring of 2020 made masking a requirement of attending Mass. We did not want to do that, because masking is awful; we especially did not want our children to do it, and even if they were not required to do it we did not want to set the example of mask-wearing for them. But we were in luck: Mrs. Morris the Elder learned of a Catholic parish far out in one of the counties—far past the north 40, halfway to the back o’ beyond—that did not require masks. I am not sure how they were able to get away with that, I think His Excellency may have just looked the other way for the whole time. But that’s where we went. We were sad to leave our home parish, we missed it, but we found a sweet little community out there for the time we went there. We returned to our home parish the first week they lifted the mask mandate. The little country parish that welcomed us for all those months will always have a special place in our heart.
Social engagements. Minimal disruption. Much of our friend groups and family were fairly relaxed about masking, at least after the first few months. We were once again having cookouts and family dinners after a relatively brief interruption in early 2020. The great geo-demographic shifts of 2020 and 2021, meanwhile, brought a massive influx of new young families to our parish and our city, most all of whom were relaxed about masks—a double bonus for us.
Medical care. As you might expect, this was the one place where masking was unavoidable for us. We don’t go to the doctor but so often, the hospital even less, but we had to go a few times to both over the course of 2020 and 2021 and so we were forced to wear little cotton strips over our mouths when we did. This was stupid and embarrassing, but it was also profoundly clarifying: It gave us a taste of how the other 99% lived. Every time we’d emerge from the doc’s office and rip the little strip of cotton off our faces, breathing in great cool gulps of bright fresh air, we’d say to ourselves: “People do that every day, all the time?” And you have people who say things like: “I like masking!” “I don’t mind wearing a mask!” These people are lying; they feel embarrassed about wearing masks and want to justify it. But wearing a mask is awful, and there’s nothing like taking a mask off. It’s blissful, heavenly, incomparable.
Education. Our kids are homeschooled and they always will be. We never had to worry about forcing them to wear a moist, damp, dehumanizing piece of old sock for eight hours a day while being taught LGBTQ sexology and quack critical race historical revisionism.
Philosophy. The mask thing radicalized me. Never before had I seen such a fulsome and incomparable demonstration of the essential malleability of people. It turns out people will do nearly anything you tell them to do. They will not only obey a government’s ridiculous, pseudoscientific, embarrassing, physically awful mandates, they will take it upon themselves to viciously enforce those mandates upon everyone around them. Countless outwardly decent men and women became snarling, hateful jackboots in service to an insane, panicked, nonsense fake medical ideology. And even the ones who were more sanguine about it were still no help: “Look, I get it, but you just gotta wear the mask, it’s what you have to do.” Jesse Kelly has called COVID “the great sorting” where “much was revealed.” This is true. One of the things it revealed was people’s willingness to capitulate entirely, at the slightest and easiest provocation, to truly terrible things. We all learned a lot during the pandemic.
You still see more than a few people with masks out and about. I even saw someone the other day wearing a big cotton mask while walking alone across a windy overpass bridge. And even now there are a few truly pathetic institutions still requiring them. All in all, though, the mask thing seems to have largely receded. If it ever arises again I will unhesitatingly do exactly the things I did the first time around. Masks are truly awful and I will never put one on unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. And what I learned is that, for me, in nearly every case, it is not necessary to do so.