Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
I was surprised to learn recently through a New York Times story that protective face masks were required during the great flu epidemic of 1918.
I also learned that a very small contingent refused to wear masks for essentially the same reasons that today’s virus-deniers won’t wear them. They thought the masks violated their rights and actually caused wearers to get sick.
The anti-maskers of the early 20th Century were ridiculed and called the same name as those who dodged the draft in World War I — “slackers.”
The earlier anti-maskers didn’t have well-oiled, monied-to-the-hilt propaganda networks to spread and reinforce their anti-science, misguided ideological views, so there were not as many anti-maskers then as there are now.
“Slacker” has now come to mean a lazy person. I think both the WWI and the current definitions apply to today’s anti-maskers.
A person who refuses to wear a mask either because they think COVID-19 is a made-up anti-Trump plot, or because their Constitutional rights make them immune, missed a few lessons in science and basic civics somewhere along the line, probably by slacking, either in school or by failing to keep up since then.
If you rely on the “telephone” game of social media for “truth,” I think you’ve earned the “slacker” label.
“Telephone” is a game in which one person whispers a statement to another, who passes it on to someone else, who passes it on to ... You get the idea. The game is hearing how drastically the message changes before the 20th person receives it.
For fictional example, a message that a Russian has acquired an antique, slightly radioactive radium-dial alarm clock for $1,000 can get bounced around in a social media echo chamber until it becomes “a Russian agent spent $1 billion to acquire nuclear secrets through one of Joe Biden’s relatives.”
Then you hear it on Hannity, then Carlson, then Limbaugh, and on and on.
If you don’t believe the mainstream media in the U.S., look further. For months COVID-19 has dominated news all over the world, in Paris’ “Le Monde,” in Russia’s “Moscow Times,” in Tokyo’s “Japan Times” in Qatar’s “Aljazeera,” and on England’s “BBC,” among many, many others.
An anti-mask slacker also equates being wrong with being a liar. People can be wrong for all the right reasons (and vice versa, of course), but the wise occasionally question their own assumptions and vary their information sources.
But what most makes an anti-mask zealot a slacker is that he or she potentially commits assault through stubborn intellectual laziness.
The mask mostly protects others, not you. At any given time, none of us, even the healthiest, can be fully confident we’re not spreading the coronavirus.
A slacker by this definition is someone who won’t do what the law and decency require of him or her. Someone who won’t wear a mask due to reliance on misinformation and thus endangers the rest of us, I think, earns the label of “slacker.”
Steve Hansen writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: