Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Last week, a New York City restaurant hostess was physically assaulted by guests when she informed them that masks were required to enter the restaurant. On a recent weekend flight from Philadelphia to Miami, a Frontier Airlines passenger had to be taped to his seat after assaulting one flight attendant and groping two others. After asking a passenger to keep her seatbelt fastened, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant was brutally assaulted, resulting in the loss of two of her teeth. A young gas station clerk was shot and killed in Germany after asking a customer to wear a mask. In Milwaukee over the weekend, three people were shot and killed over a fight about a parking space.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. According to a CBS news report, over 477 incidents of passenger misconduct were reported between April 8th and May 15th on Southwest Airlines. That’s only one airline over a five-week period. According to NPR, According to an NPR report, over 2500 incidents—including 1,900 refusals to wear masks—were reported on all airlines nationwide between January 1st and May 24th.
Violent attacks are on the increase everywhere. Store clerks, waiters, hostesses, and school board members across the country have been threatened or assaulted by customers unwilling to wear masks or comply with social distancing requirements. Major cities have also seen major spikes in gun crimes and homicides. According to a BBC report, According to a BBC report, incidents of gun violence in Chicago have doubled over the past two years; in New York City, murder rates have risen 18% over the past year.
What are the reasons for this seemingly sudden increase in violence? While root causes of spikes of violence are notoriously hard to pin down, experts have speculated that frustrations over economic hardships, chronic isolation, and COVID restrictions are probable sources of the problem. These experts also think that the pandemic and resulting quarantine have exacerbated previously existing stressors like poverty, hunger, and lack of adequate housing in urban populations. Coupled with tensions rising from strained police community relations, these stressors have contributed to the rise in shootings and deaths.
The politicization of the COVID pandemic probably hasn’t helped either. Many of the recent violent incidents cited above were sparked by citizens—usually service employees—asking customers to mask up or socially distance themselves. These simple requests, mandated by company rules, public health policy, or law, have thrown some people into uncontrollable fits of anger. Or acts of violence. In an already overly polarized society, political identity has become inexplicably—and perversely—wrapped up in the public health policy.
To some hardcore Trump supporters, wearing a mask is not a simple way to prevent disease, it is a stigma, a mark of subjugation to—what? Common sense? Public welfare? No. Those are only innocent bystanders to the anti-maskers love of their “freedom” which, to them—and every two-year-old in the world—is synonymous with getting what they want right now.
The radicalization of health care policy, including vaccinations, has become so intense that health-care workers administering vaccines have been threatened, harassed, and bullied by individuals as well as organized protest groups. While these instances of harassment are not emblematic of the spontaneous outbursts of anger aimed at service employees, they are symptomatic of a deeply irrational and perverted manifestation of patriotic fervor.
The idea that wearing a mask to quell a deadly disease is a threat to personal freedom is simply ludicrous. It only makes sense if freedom means doing whatever one wants whenever he wants without being concerned for others. In other words—in this type of idiotic reasoning—freedom means a citizen’s right to act out like a two-year-old. Not getting what you want—right now!—typically brings on a temper tantrum. And, as in the life a toddler, these sudden instances of anger serve no purpose except to aggravate those in charge.
Getting angry at—and violent toward—flight attendants will never result in them letting you take off your mask. Beating up a restaurant hostess will not affect the New York City pandemic mandates one way or another. Screaming at a health-care worker for vaccinating citizens against a deadly disease is not only completely pointless and absurd, it is also just plain stupid.
Anger is probably no more commonplace than it ever was. What has become more acceptable, and excusable, is the expression of anger as both a personal—although selfish—expression of self, and as a political tool. Social media have created a toxic atmosphere in which anger is not only accepted but is condoned, and, in some cases, creates a bubble in which shared anger becomes a social norm—an “everybody is doing it” sort of mentality.
Toddlers use tantrums as emotional blackmail. Some adults have begun to see this as a viable social strategy. It’s not simply a matter of releasing an uncontrollable emotion; it’s more often a case of allowing oneself the satisfaction of a primal—and juvenile—expression. They are not patriotic acts of courage and defiance. They are not part of some abstract struggle against tyranny. They are nothing more selfish acts of a schoolyard bully.