The Long Good-Bye

Winter has gone and summer has come, and people are still walking around with masks on their faces.

In stores where masks are no longer required. On the street, where they were always absurd. And most of all on the grounds of my university, which prides itself on its major role in The Science.

Science, as I understand it, is not the reason why these people are still — to use the cloying, semi-military, semi-BDSM locution — all masked up. God knows why they are, except as advertisements for some religious endeavor, like knights who had the cross emblazoned on their clothes during their filth-ridden voyages to the Holy Land.

How long will it take them, ever so reluctantly, to remove their “face coverings”? What excuses will they find never to do so?

I leave the maskers’ motives to the psychiatrists. My concern is with their future. How long will it take them, ever so reluctantly, to remove their “face coverings”? What excuses will they find never to do so? How will they adjust to lives in which they can no longer be vindictive toward neighbors who didn’t obey authority and now turn out to be right? Will there be nightmares? Will there be five-thousand-dollar self-help seminars? Will there be divorces and heavy drinking?

I suppose that most of these people have other causes lined up. Warming. Pronouns. Reparations. But none of those things has a mask. None of those things has a sign for all to see, and marvel, and be ashamed, and bend, and bow, and grovel. Perhaps the true believers will devote themselves to discovering such a Sign.

I hope they do. You usually don’t learn much about people from the clothes they wear, but masks, and that self-righteous sidestep people make when they see you coming without a mask — those are different. One of the few gifts of the “pandemic” hysteria has been the data it has afforded about how many of our fellow citizens are politically insane.