In a way, the face mask is a most fitting symbol of our time. Truth today is, after all, increasingly masked, with “cancel culture” compelling people to lie about more and more matters and a Deep State that operates in secret. Now we’re concealing a physical truth distinguishing ourselves from each other, our countenance, and covering up muzzle-like what we use to utter Truth. Not only that, we shouldn’t expect face-covering mandates to be lifted, either — not so long as the Left is in charge.
So warned Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) this week. As WND.com reports:
Paul, a medical doctor by profession, made an unnerving prediction about masks on Wednesday, saying mandates to wear facial coverings are never going away as long as the political left is in charge.
“They will never relent. These people are never gonna let you not wear a mask,” the Kentucky Republican told Todd Herman, the fill-in host on Rush Limbaugh’s national broadcast.
“I promise you, you will never get out from the mask because they’re saying that even after all are vaccinated, we don’t know, you still might catch it a little bit, you still might transmit it, even after everybody’s vaccinated. So don’t listen to these people.”
“The mask mandates have not worked, none of the mandates have worked,” Paul added, referring to government strategies during the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s study after study after study that show that when you put in place these mandates, guess what, the incidents of the infection kept rising. Even [President] Biden admitted this the other day. The trajectory of the virus has been unaffected by anything we’ve done so far. Our only hope of changing the trajectory is a vaccine, but it should be voluntary.”
An incredulous Herman noted, “The masks ain’t going away…. The technocrats don’t want to give up control.”
In fact, they’re doubling down, literally. Just two days before Paul’s comments, our Dr. Anthony Fauci — who at one time said average people shouldn’t wear masks, as their effectiveness is limited — recommended wearing two of them. For him this makes perfect sense since he has two faces (at least. Click here).
Said Fauci on the Today show on Monday, “If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.”
I’m sure. Three masks would be more effective still. And how about five? Or maybe just Darth Vader’s helmet?
Dr. Martin Cohen, of the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, might agree. “Obviously, the more layers you have of fibers between one person’s mouth and the other’s, there is less risk of spreading infection,” he told the New York Post.
The same is true of social distancing, mind you. Living in New York, I’ve never gotten a cold from someone in the Yukon.
The serious point here is that you risk your life just by living and, as Fauci said when justifying his statement that it was okay to have sex with a stranger you meet via a dating app, “Everybody has their own tolerance for risks.”
Moreover, trying too hard to avoid risks often involves assuming other sometimes greater risks. For example, our lockdowns, pandemic regulations in general, and COVID Ritual have not only destroyed businesses, but have led to a host of negative health outcomes.
Among these are increased suicide, alcohol and drug use, child abuse, domestic violence, and people failing to get their usual health screenings and treatments (e.g., for heart disease, cancer). Then there are the “COVID Kids,” a generation raised in isolation and fear.
As to this, consider that human connection and association are important. Hillary Clinton herself co-opted the African saying that bespeaks of this, “It takes a village…,” using it as a metaphor for big government. But far from having a true village, and beginning perhaps with the Industrial Revolution, moderns’ transiency has diminished societal cohesion.
Our increasing mobility exacerbated this problem during the 20th century. Television, Internet, and other distractions also are factors, further “atomizing” society. After all, where there once might have been a tribe sitting around a fire and listening to oral history related by the resident raconteur, and where later families would eat dinner together, now people often are on different schedules and might dine alone in front of the TV or computer.
Portable electronic devices have exacerbated this all the more, with people often wedded to them when walking down the street and checking their phones incessantly during social affairs when, in earlier times, they’d be interacting more meaningfully with other humans. And now…
We have the Mask Empire, as writer Jack Kerwick put it. Robbers would wear masks to avoid identification, and now so many of us walk around looking like criminals, faceless beings with muffled voices, countenance hidden from neighbor. How much more does this eliminate human connection? And what effect will this have on children, being raised viewing every stranger as a threat to their very lives, being atomized and perhaps instilled with this new norm?
It should be further emphasized that masking’s effects go beyond the psychological and to the spiritual as well. As the aforementioned Kerwick wrote last August:
Masks, by virtue of concealing our faces, deny the expression of just those features that reveal to a greater extent than all others our humanity. The face, in its entirety, discloses the spark of the divine that resides within the human being and which makes him…a person. Nor need one be a conscious believer in God in order to concede that the facial countenance, more so than any other aspect of the body, affirms the person’s standing as a moral agent, a being with an inviolable dignity, possessing rights and duties.
The Mask, in veiling the face, then, dehumanizes the human being who wears it. It divests the Masquerader of his…humanity. As such, it undercuts the inherent dignity that belongs to human beings as human beings, i.e. bearers of the image of the God in whose likeness they were made. Consequently, Masqueraders are Corona Walkers, zombies not as dissimilar as we’d like think they’d be from the zombies on The Walking Dead.
A masked society is decidedly less human, and, we can assume, will end up being less humane.
